Using the best battery preventative maintenance practices to prevent IT system and data centre downtime

Data centre or IT system downtime is a major risk to any business

To limit the risk of data centre downtime, the best practice is to regularly perform preventative maintenance on both the UPS unit and its associated backup battery bank, along with rigid testing. In all the root cause analyses, your UPS system accounts for 29% of data center and IT failures, making it the number one reason for unplanned power outages –of which battery failure is a large component.

Although a battery is a relatively low-tech part of a UPS backup solution, it is a core component of the UPS. It should undergo regular, planned, preventative maintenance and servicing to ensure the longevity of the UPS plant and maximum load protection from power failures and uptime. Ignoring this maintenance requirement will mean a possible degradation of the battery bank to the point of failure, which can be disastrous when load shedding strikes and you need it most!

A battery bank on a UPS is made up of many individual batteries in a circuit, so if any one of the cells fail, it will render all the others useless. Therefore, a battery bank is only as good as its weakest cell.

In our experience at Standby Systems, in many instances where batteries are not maintained regularly, the batteries fail during rolling blackouts. This means that what should have been a simple battery change has now become an emergency. Emergency battery replacements are never good because:

1. After hours work comes at a higher cost.
2. The battery may land up costing you more because you have no choice; there isn’t time to shop around for more cost-effective alternatives.
3. There will be a prolonged downtime for the critical loads and infrastructure.
4. Lots of unnecessary stress that could easily have been avoided.

To learn how you can benefit from a backup power system from Standby Systems, visit our website or contact us.