“Lithium or lead-acid?” is the wrong first question for a forklift fleet; the right first question is what your building and your shifts can support. We build lead-acid traction batteries, and we publish where lithium is better, because a fleet manager sold the wrong chemistry stops listening to everyone. Here are six questions, in the … Read more
A charged battery has no off switch, and the only things that limit the current it will push into a fault are its own internal resistance and the wire you have connected to it. Linden’s Handbook of Batteries defines short-circuit current as the initial current a battery delivers into a circuit of negligible resistance. For … Read more
Every few years a utility or railway specification asks why the battery bank is not nickel-cadmium, and sometimes the honest answer is that it should be. We build lead-acid, in OPzS flooded and OPzV gel form, so this guide is written by the party with the most to lose, which is the reason to read … Read more
A station charger has two jobs, and the cheap ones are usually sized for only the first. The first job is easy to see: carry the continuous DC load of relays, indication, SCADA and lamps, so that the battery never has to. The second is easy to forget: after a discharge, put back the ampere-hours … Read more
Fleet managers size the trucks carefully and then treat the battery as whatever came in the box with it — and for anything busier than a single shift, that is the wrong way round. A battery fleet has its own capacity-planning problem, separate from the truck count: how many packs you need, how big the … Read more
The plates and the grid alloy get all the engineering attention; the strip of metal joining one cell to the next rarely gets any. Yet an intercell connector is just as capable of costing you the string as a weak plate is — it can throttle the current a healthy bank is trying to deliver, … Read more
A battery bank is only as strong as its weakest cell, and that is not a proverb — it is exactly how a series string behaves electrically. Every cell in a series-connected bank carries the same current, whether it is charging or discharging, whatever its own individual health. A cell with slightly less capacity, or … Read more
Almost no industrial lead-acid battery dies of a single dramatic event. It dies of something happening quietly to its positive grid every day of its working life, whether the battery is cycled hard, floated gently, or left half-forgotten in a substation basement. David Linden’s Handbook of Batteries lists the normal failure mode against every major … Read more
The most dangerous minutes in an industrial battery’s life are the ones it spends in the air. On the floor it is a heavy, patient object that hurts nobody who leaves it alone. Hanging from a hoist over a forklift compartment, or crossing a battery room on a strap, it is a tonne of lead … Read more
A battery warranty is a promise about manufacturing defects, not a promise about how long the battery will last — and almost every warranty dispute we have seen began with a buyer who believed it was the second. The document is usually two pages, arrives after the purchase order, and is read for the first … Read more