If your company uses industrial power, it's time to ask yourself whether you have a capable battery monitoring system, one you can rely on and trust. This is an important question whether your use of batteries is to power a fleet of forklifts or to maintain critical power in telecommunications, a data center or any other industrial setting.
As power technology becomes more advanced, with lithium ion and battery usage on the rise, the need for battery monitoring is becoming increasingly urgent. Monitoring batteries and having an effective way to analyze the resulting flood of data is important for ensuring safety, boosting efficiency, optimizing total cost of ownership and more.
At its best, battery monitoring is part of an overall power management system that will use the resulting data as a natural part of workflows. A comprehensive set of tools and processes suited to your company's power needs is a worthy goal, and battery monitoring plays a central role in such a solution.
The actual data points recorded by battery monitoring sensors cover numerous variables. These include:
With access to such information, automated algorithms can point the way to ideal strategies for charging, proactive maintenance and more. Inspecting batteries can become a more precise, efficient process. Despite consuming fewer employee hours, such a highly automated approach to battery monitoring is primed to deliver better results.
Whether you're implementing automated battery monitoring for the first time or considering a refresh of your current system, you can get started by reviewing why these solutions are so important today.
Having an automated battery monitoring system, with real-time data coming in from your powered vehicles' or critical power system batteries, is a way to replace inefficient, heavily manual workflows with a consistent flow of potentially useful information.
The precise uses of that data will differ depending on what you're powering with your batteries, but the concept remains very simple: The more you know about the status of power systems, the more proactively you can manage them.
Battery monitoring is so important in forklift power management solutions because it enables a more active, efficient approach to servicing batteries, lowering the risk of downtime and enabling the fleet to operate at peak levels.
Combining battery monitoring equipment — which is easy to deploy and set up — with an overarching management framework can let your company unlock advantages such as:
The larger your forklift fleet, the more value a monitoring system can help you gain Total Control over your power system.
In critical power settings, battery monitoring as part of an overall battery management system can save employee time and effort while ensuring the batteries are capable of delivering the promised uptime, reliably and safely.
Whether your organization has opted to adopt a lithium-ion battery solution or is working with lead acid batteries, a battery monitoring system can produce the actionable data necessary to keep your critical power infrastructure operating at peak effectiveness. Capabilities that come with such a system include:
Many organizations have invested significantly in battery monitoring or forklift telematics systems only to have them be worthless two years later due to a variety of issues including change in leadership, mismanagement, etc.
But working with a battery monitoring system doesn't have to be complicated or difficult! Especially when the monitoring technology is used as part of an overall power management system and thought process.
The processes involved in deploying sensors, integrating them into automated workflows and acting on the data will differ somewhat between industries and use cases, but both the underlying theories and the hands-on practices are easy to understand.
Common pitfalls to avoid include:
One way to address the above is to spend time with your supplier partner upfront that is familiar with these tools to help you set them up right and develop your management cadence. Better yet--outsource the management and service of your battery system! More details below.
Deploying a modern, comprehensive battery monitoring system to oversee forklift operations often occurs in tandem with a more comprehensive forklift power management system that includes chargers as well as batteries. However it happens, it's important to remember that the initial implementation is the easy part. There must also be a plan to use the data generated.
Critical power deployments may vary widely based on your company's layout. Providing a lithium-ion battery backup for a single data center is naturally very different from overseeing lead acid battery backups attached to telecommunications infrastructure across an entire region. With that said, the processes behind setting up and using a battery monitoring sensor network follow familiar patterns.
While you may not immediately consider battery management the type of service that can be outsourced, there are plenty of benefits to taking such an overarching approach to your power needs.
The reasons to opt for power management as a service are largely the same forces that have driven companies to entrust ever more aspects of their day-to-day operations to third party partners. Namely, these systems can give you:
Treating power as a service and creating the whole battery management system in tandem with an expert is a way to maximize this aspect of your business. Battery monitoring systems fit neatly into this power management ecosystem, providing the raw real-time data that drives decision-making and strategy, both day-to-day and in the long term.
Power management lets your employees keep up with their value-adding work while keeping your batteries maintained to industry-leading standards. Such a program is based on your needs, and power management offerings from Concentric will look different in a forklift power or critical power context.
Power management for your forklift fleet will use the data from battery monitoring systems to ensure every battery is charged for maximum usable life and performance, and ready on time to keep operations moving. Costs remain low because the system is optimized to work with a minimal number of batteries and chargers.
Every environment that uses powered forklift assets has its own unique requirements based on the size and purpose of the facility, as well as the number of vehicles in the fleet. A GuaranteedPOWER® strategy created with Concentric will deliver the exact number and type of batteries to deliver optimal effectiveness, with watering, charging and proactive maintenance plans based on hard data analysis.
Whether you need battery power backup for a data center, communications network, a health care facility, a financial business, a utility provider or any other application, battery monitoring systems are a cornerstone technology. With the data provided by these sensors, the highly automated PerpetualPOWER™ solutions developed by Concentric can meet all your needs for a predictable monthly fee.
Each step in your strategy is taken care of professionally and tuned to meet your needs, from the procurement of new assets to the decommissioning of equipment that has reached its end of life and everything in between. Crafting a right-sized strategy for your exact use case builds peace of mind for your most important powered assets.
Ready to investigate battery monitoring systems as part of a power management strategy or as an independent technology deployment? Get in touch today and a Concentric representative will contact you shortly.