New battery testing guide from Megger

A handy and very useful 29-page battery testing guide is now available free of charge from the Megger website. The guide, which is available in five languages, aims to provide electrical engineers with information and advice on monitoring the health of and maintaining these essential sources of back up power.

The guide discusses what types of batteries are available on the market, why backup batteries are needed and illustrates the best ways to maintain batteries in good working condition through good maintenance practices and practical battery testing.

The guide also goes through the most common battery standards (IEEE 450, IEEE 1188, IEEE 1106) and describes best practice for battery maintenance, which can be summarised as:

• Performing a capacity test when the battery is new as part of the acceptance test.
• Performing an impedance test at the same time to establish baseline values for the battery.
• Repeating these within 2 years for warranty purposes.
• Performing an impedance test every year on flooded cells and quarterly on VRLA cells
• Performing capacity tests at least for every 25% of expected service life.
• Performing a capacity test annually when the battery has reached 85% of expected service life or if the capacity has dropped more than 10% since the previous test or is below 90% of the manufacturers rating.
• Performing a capacity test if the impedance value has changed significantly.
• Following set practice (preferably from the IEEE standard) for all temperature, voltage, gravity measurements and recording the results as an aid to trending and fault tracing.

The guide is available for download, free of charge, from the Megger website by clicking here.