To provide an equipment control apparatus for discriminating whether a failure requires repairing, or is a simple mistake that can be corrected easily on factory side by acquiring required information, such as the diagnosis result of a specific inspection point and setting information at a remote location.

Since the equipment control apparatus is constituted to grasp the connection state of an arbitrary point, diagnosis result of operation state, or setting information remotely through a telephone line after verifying an inspection mode. Therefore, each kind of information for searching for causes can be collected instantly and safely, and instructing the operation failure countermeasures of the equipment control apparatus can be made, if the equipment control apparatus fails. Additionally, since an external control section for controlling external equipment is connected to the equipment control apparatus, an inspection command signal transmitted from a remote location is received, after confirming the separation of the external control section, preventing the external equipment from operating abruptly by a command signal from a remote side and achieving an extremely safe and arbitrary diagnosis.