Detroit Fire Commander

[Lieutenant07]

My department recently purchsed two new engines. They have the Detroit Fire Commander system. It controls the throttle and the pressure either by the discharge prssure or through the rpms of the engine, a pressure govenor. Has anyone had any problems with these if so what were they.


Thank you for your replies

[Resq14]

Yes.

We had a pressure sensor go bad, meaning that the pump could not maintain a given pressure. The engine would start to race as it would not sense an increase in pressure when we tried to increase pressure. In this case we were still able to run the pump in RPM mode, as you would an older mechanically-linked throttle. Remember there's no true relief valve when you do this though, unless you've spec'd in a manual one.

These are relatively painless to swap out. The other "common" problem is a bad circuit board. Depending on what gets "fried" you might be able to operate the pump in some limited capacity.

Luckily both of these aren't frequent occurences. Always good to understand that it can happen though.

Operationally, remember that anytime the truck is brought to idle with the "idle" button, the mode resets to RPM's. Therefore you have to switch back to "Pressure" if you start to throttle back up.

Check out this scenario from the LT. It has good information in it.

http://cms.firehouse.com/forums2/showthread.php?s=&threadid=50058