WHAT PREDICTIVE & PROACTIVE SHOULD LOOK LIKE

June 17, 2019

BY BTECH

What’s the one thing in your data center you can’t see or analyze in realtime? It’s the battery. With the advent of modern DCIMs and building management systems, facility and IT managers can now have real-time information across their entire physical plant. UPS systems, the service entrance, cooling, PDU’s, security, the elevators—everything, except batteries. And it’s not just UPS batteries, but it’s also the batteries used as spares or in switchgear, PBX systems, gensets, and the like.

Most enterprises make an assumption that manual maintenance inspections are enough to ensure battery reliability, but they aren’t… they just aren’t. Manual maintenance has its limitations and is affected by frequency, quality and analysis.

  • Frequency: How many times does the battery service technician come out to inspect the battery system? What if the voltage reading they get today looks fine…within parameters, but it’s just the beginning of a problem that will worsen before the next voltage test 3 months from now.

  • Quality: Different technicians, different attention paid to the details… one technician is thorough as he retorques connections, but another technician, not so much.

  • Analysis: A battery passes a voltage test after rapid discharge, but under further scrutiny, it would fail a 100amp/30 minute discharge test.

Battery monitoring’s job is to remove inconsistencies related to frequency, quality or data analysis by delivering regular, controlled tests of each battery and applying the proper algorithms to accurately judge each battery’s state. Monitoring eliminates unnecessary maintenance, it enables facility managers to take actions that extend battery life, it improves trending and testing, and it keeps a constant 24×7 watch.

BTECH is different from our competitors because we use a predictive, proactive approach to monitoring. With most competing systems, batteries have to cross a threshold before their systems go into alarm. Our solution tells our customers about future battery failures well before they cross the threshold that triggers a critical alarm. If you know the future, you can take corrective actions now that will make the future of your battery system brighter, stronger and resilient.

Our product line covers battery monitoring for virtually any application. Our S5 System is used in mission-critical battery operations; the CellQ 1 System is geared toward smaller battery systems. With BTECH, the batteries are all monitored under one common software umbrella, our Battery Validation Manager Suite. At BTECH, we’re obsessed with making sure batteries can deliver the standby power they were designed to deliver and that’s why we painstakingly design, engineer, and manufacture our battery monitoring solution in-house. And because our engineering team is in-house, we are able to quickly respond to industry trends, custom customer requirements and new product development needs.