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RTO — Retentive Timer On

RTO

Timer

timer

(EN)

Preset

?

(DN)

Accum

?

Retentive on-delay timer. Like TON, but the accumulator survives rung transitions. Must be cleared explicitly with RES.

Operands

NameType
timerTIMER

How It Works

Rung state.EN.TT.ACC.DN
True, .ACC < .PRE11counting up0
True, .ACC.PRE10holds at .PRE1
False00retainedretained

A RES on the timer tag clears .ACC and .DN back to 0.

Example — Maintenance Hour Counter

Accumulate run-time across many start/stop cycles. Alert the operator once the machine has run for eight hours total.

Tag setup: RunHours is a TIMER with .PRE = 28800000 (8 hours in ms).

XIC(MachineRunning)RTO(RunHours);XIC(RunHours.DN)OTE(MaintAlert);XIC(ResetMaint)RES(RunHours)

The timer keeps counting only while MachineRunning is true, but never resets on its own. Pressing ResetMaint clears it back to zero.

When to Use

  • Run-time accumulators, maintenance counters, total elapsed fault time.
  • Any situation where timing must survive power cycles or intermittent triggers.

Common Mistakes

  • Forgetting the RES — the timer will stay .DN = 1 forever after it finishes.
  • Confusing RTO with TONTON resets automatically; RTO does not.
  • Timers overview — members, units, shared behaviour
  • TON — non-retentive counterpart
  • RES — clears the accumulator
  • Counters overview — retentive accumulators for counts instead of time