Legacy Power Ritzville was recognized in a trade publication specializing in first responders. Did you know Legacy Power performs testing on batteries such as the ones listed in this months newsletter?

“As most of us know the vast majority of communications equipment runs on DC “battery” power. The majority of my AC “wall outlets” equipment at my sites  actually runs off an AC converter off my DC plant. So for me any way you slice it the batteries are king. In the past, since it wasn’t budgeted, we wouldn’t know if our batteries were bad until we had an outage. In some cases even the generator transfer would kill power to equipment. Not really good on your gear when loses power regularly.
Over 8 years ago we upgraded our system which included new Batteries and updated DC chargers. To help with the health of our investment we added a site maintenance contract with Legacy Power. They do a ton of stuff for us at each site with the tower inspections, weed control, safety equipment and battery checks. For the batteries they Inspect terminals, voltage, Siemens level, fluid and resistance just to name a few. In doing this they can tell if a terminal is bad vs the battery or if it’s just low on fluid. The way I see it, I have two ways to tell if my Batteries are bad. I wait till the site goes offline during a power outage or test and monitor batteries on a regular basis. Legacy Power uses a high end battery tester that will know the factory SI “Siemenns” level when it was built and compare what that level is today. The SI is the power the battery has. So a specific battery could ship with a SI level of 2500, but last year it was tested at 2200 and today its 1500. It’s a great way to tell if the batteries are starting to fail or if it’s just one bad unit. Now depending on if your system is using the large 12volt flooded Car-like batteries or if you have the more expensive heaver VRLA units, which are square on the front, but are 3 feet long and 90lbs, the manufacture may estimate a 5 to 15 year life expectancy. That’s good to use that for budgetary, but if your testing them regularly you might be able to extend that with confidence knowing your batteries have juice. It’s also helpful if they are not lasting as long you can move up the replacement timeline and not have a surprise emergency purchase. So do you know how good your batteries are at your sites?”