As demanding workloads increased,
powering the trucks became a challenge due to charging limitations with lead
acid batteries. The customer utilized opportunity charging, or fast charging,
during operator breaks throughout the shift. Unfortunately, they were never
able to keep the lead acid batteries at the desired charging levels, and this
led to a decrease in overall productivity. With fast charging, it’s ideal to
have batteries charged between 40 to 80% full, but the customer was allowing their
batteries to go down to 25%. During a break, they provided a 10-minute fast
charge back up to 40%. Unfortunately
they were never able to get the battery charge where it needed to be for
optimal performance.
With these poor charging habits, they
were also damaging the batteries which led to them having a shorter shelf
life. This is a common occurrence with
fast or opportunity charging as every time a charge is made, either for 10
minutes or 8 hours, this counts as a cycle and there are a limited amount of
charging cycles in the life of this battery. This charging method caused the
customer to replace the batteries much sooner than originally planned.
In an effort to always have fully
powered trucks, the customer rented additional lift trucks to aid them with
their workload. This allowed the customer to charge the additional trucks
during their shifts and to swap trucks whenever a charge was needed. This
costly measure was deemed necessary to ensure they maintained operator
productivity, but increased the overall cost of operations.