Yes, soft start is the way to go. Also: proper industrial breakers allow for temporary overload. I have a couple of pieces of gear that have inrush currents well over the limit of a normal breaker so I put them on a slow one and now it is fine.

https://onccy.com/how-to-choose-between-type-a-b-c-and-d-min...

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margalabargala 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Also: proper industrial breakers allow for temporary overload

Notoriously a crescent wrench makes an excellent 1000A slow blow fuse

	▲	pseudohadamard 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A 5/32" flat-blade screwdriver makes an excellent fast-blow fuse when dropped across exposed bus bars. And you can re-use the remains of the handle to stir your coffee once you've retrieved it from across the room.

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pseudohadamard 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Soft-start is in theory the way to go, but it's very dependent on the motor type, there's a whole pile of different methods required for induction motors depending on whether they're capacitor-start, permanent split capacitor, shaded-pole, etc, so you can do it in some cases by lowering the voltage, or with a VFD, or a VSD, or the old-fashioned way with a centrifugal switch but that requires very careful handling. If as the OP said it's running million-dollar equipment you probably don't want to monkey with it at that level.