Field guides
The VFD Field Guides
Every stage of a drive's life, and what the panel is telling you at each one.
A variable frequency drive (VFD) fails in the order it was built. Most of what shows up as a fault at 2 a.m. was decided months earlier, during sizing, during the install, or during a commissioning step that got skipped because production was waiting.
So these guides run in that order. Read the one that matches where you are, or start at the beginning if you are specifying a drive that does not exist yet. All of it is open, no email required.
The sequence
When the panel shows a code
The fault number means the same thing every time, but what to do about it depends on the drive in front of you. These are the brand guides, written against the manufacturers' own published documentation.
Field notes
The guides cover a whole stage of a drive's life. The field notes go after one problem at a time, as it comes up in a plant. These are the newest; every field note is on its own page.
Take it to the panel
The guides explain the reasoning. These are the things you carry with you.
The commissioning checklist is 3 fillable field forms covering pre-energization, the commissioning sequence, and the operating baseline. The VFD Mentor app runs the same sequence on a phone, with a photo against each item and a printable report at the end.
The field notes go deeper on single problems as they come up, and Before the First Fault is the long-form version of all of it.
The State of the VFD 2026 is the annual report behind the guides: 19 drive brands assessed and 13 scored on what each manufacturer will put on the public record. Both editions download free, no email.
If your crew needs this taught rather than read, that is on-site VFD training, and you can ask for a quote.
Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.
Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.
The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer™, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.
The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.
Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.