The battery monitoring industry has made a strong case that today’s ohmic battery monitoring systems are effective at discovering battery weakness well in advance of complete failure. Such systems are employed to increase a user’s certainty that stationary batteries will deliver their rated output when needed, thus preventing application downtime. The need for uptime at a credit card processing site, for instance, suggests that near-perfect prediction of battery condition is worth the required capital investment and related qualified support staff.

Compared with downtime that can exceed six figures per minute, investments in battery monitoring are trivial – “no-brainer” added pieces of insurance.

For example, a battery monitor with capital cost of $10,000 is an insignificant 1% additional capital cost to batteries and electronics costing $1 million. This is excellent “bang for the buck”. For every “high value” site, however, there are hundreds of small battery-backed sites, supporting communications equipment, utility substations, petrochemical and pipeline operations, power generation plants, shipboard systems and industrial complexes of all types. The very presence of a battery at these sites defines them as mission-critical to someone. These small systems are subject to the same types of battery failures as large ones, so users would benefit if battery health assessment means were available. Deploying ohmic battery monitoring systems to low-cost sites might be an option, but there are formidable barriers to success:

Lack of trained personnel. It took our company’s experienced chief engineer and a capable electronics technician over 20 man-hours to connect, troubleshoot and receive useful data from an ohmic battery monitor on a 120-cell battery. One major telephone company estimated that only 10% of the full-featured battery monitors it bought were ever installed and operated correctly. These difficulties suggest that today’s products might be too complex to be useful to other than specialist users.

Organizational resistance to change. Implementing any a new method of doing things, including how battery health is assessed, requires a motivated individual to (a) justify new expenses, (b) change or develop procedures to take advantage of the new capability, (c) enlist cooperation to implement the new technology while, (d) minimizing the influence of naysayers. This is hard work! A single individual can often accomplish a lot at a small site, but even he will find change easier if a new technology is easy to use and inexpensive, rather than difficult and costly.