SHIPMATE will help you get ten+ years of service from your batteries.
Marine batteries are an important and expensive asset in your vessel. The average cost of a single 8D AGM battery is in excess of $700.00. Most vessels have at least 5 or 6 (often many more) of these. The importance of reliability can't be overstated both from a safety standpoint as well as personal comfort.
The battery manufactures are more than happy to sell you new batteries every 3-5 years ($3500.00-$7000.00) and generally do not want you to know how to make them last. For years the Telephone companies (Telco) and Data centers (Data) have used batteries that were warranted 10, 12 and 20 years. It wasn’t until the advent of the IEEE battery standards starting in the 80s that Telco and Data achieved repeatable results often outliving these warranties
A very good example of “best practice” for maintaining marine batteries today is AMPLE TECHNOLOGY and their treatise called AMPLE POWER PRIMER. It is very good and many mariners have enjoyed greater than ten years service from their batteries closely following all the protocols. It requires great diligence and, with AGM and Gel batteries, has no way of determining actual cell condition. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the Telco and major Data centers in the world started switching from flooded lead acid to VRLA (AGM and Gel) batteries. They had tens of thousands of dollars invested per site in batteries that they could no longer measure with traditional tools like refractometers and hydrometers.
They started monitoring the batteries in various ways (some good, others not so much) but their losses were mounting. Research indicated that measuring the impedance of the battery started to tell its health in a fashion they could correlate.
Other research indicated that many other parameters influenced impedance and compounded the problem of reliable data. I.E.E.E. formed a committee to address these issues in 1995. The 1491-2005 Standard was released after 10 years of committee and industry research. It recommended 17 major parameters to monitor.
“IEEE 1491 MEASUREMENT PARAMETERS
Clause 7 contains battery measurement parameters subject to continuous monitoring. At present there are 17 defined
Each parameter has a description, purpose of monitoring, and an indications and interpretation analysis. A list
of the present measurement parameters is shown below:
1. Float Voltage
2. Equalizing Voltage
3. Recharge Voltage
4. Open Circuit Voltage
5. Discharge Voltage
6. Midpoint or Partial String Voltage
7. Cell/Battery DC Current
8. Ripple Voltage
9. Ripple Current
10. Cell/Unit Temperatures
11. Ambient Temperature
12. Cycles
13. Cell/Battery Ohmic Values
14. Specific Gravity
15. Electrolyte Level
16. Connection Resistance
17. Ground Fault Detection”
Several manufactures provide monitoring and analysis systems that monitor most if not all the above parameters.
Ripple is becoming increasingly more understood in the early death of VRLA batteries. If you use flooded batteries, it has not proved to be as significant. Our research has led us to qualify 3 manufactures (LEM, MIDTRONICS, and DPMC) that have proven themselves in this area and we are pleased to offer their monitoring systems integrated into SHIPMATE. Because SHIPMATE is Whitebox, we can let you choose which system best fits your battery needs. The basic system from any of the manufactures includes a comprehensive, intelligent battery transducer for each battery (not bank) all of these transducers individually test either impedance or conductance, as well as voltage and temperature. Two of the manufactures also test for ripple. They all measure current in and out of the bank as well as ambient temperature where the batteries are mounted. With this data SHIPMATE can trend each batteries daily health and the charging system health. SHIPMATE can predict early failure modes so that they can be corrected before irreversible damage occurs. SHIPMATE also provides the historical trending to support your warranty claim if you should have a defective battery. SHIPMATE will help you break in new batteries as well as recondition older ones. Most batteries that are installed are never taken through their break in cycle. When installing new batteries SHIPMATE will guide you through this process. If your older batteries have not been conditioned or equalized correctly SHIPMATE will guide you through and help prevent catastrophic failure. These monitoring systems have proven themselves for years in the no failures allowed, “5 –9’s” world of Data and Telco. TTA Marine Inc thinks it’s about time the mariner benefits from this technology This is why it is incorporated in project SHIPMATE.