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Reserve Your Seat TodayWhen managing remote sites - such as dispatch centers or telecom towers - maintaining reliable power is obviously fundamental. You can't run any of your revenue-generating and life-saving equipment without electricity.
Monitoring backup batteries is especially important in public infrastructure situations, like at a public safety company. A loss of power can disrupt operations at critical moments. This leads to delays in emergency response and puts lives at risk.
Recently, DPS Telecom engineer Ron had a discussion with a client about the challenges of keeping remote sites powered and monitored effectively. The web meeting was a good reminder that many public safety organizations face the same challenges. This makes it increasingly important to adopt a complete approach to battery monitoring.
As we explore this issue today, we'll also discuss the best strategies for tackling battery monitoring at your remote facilities.
For remote sites that rely on backup batteries, traditional methods like manual checks or basic voltage monitoring simply aren't enough. This focuses on a narrow range of metrics, such as voltage, and ignore other critical indicators like internal resistance and temperature.
This lack of visibility into battery health can be a major problem. While a battery may appear healthy based solely on its voltage, rising internal resistance or abnormal temperature changes can serve as early warning signs that the battery is deteriorating.
Unfortunately, you may not be monitoring these additional metrics. This leaves you vulnerable to sudden and unexpected failures.
As Ron explained during the meeting, it's not just about voltage anymore. Voltage monitoring alone won't tell you the full story about your batteries. Internal resistance, temperature, and other metrics need to be monitored to prevent sudden failures.
When these factors aren't properly monitored, you risk being caught off-guard. A battery failure could occur at the worst possible time, such as during a critical emergency response.
This leaves you with network outages, equipment malfunctions, and costly last-minute repairs. For emergency service organizations, this is not just a financial issue but also a clear safety concern. What happens when people can't call for help? What happens when first responders can't communicate?
When people first encounter battery monitoring challenges (and many others), they often attempt to solve the problem by cobbling together piecemeal solutions. Some rely on manual checks, while others deploy simple sensors that monitor individual metrics like voltage.
Still others may invest in standalone systems that are limited to monitoring batteries but fail to integrate with other critical network elements. Although I'm focusing on battery & power alarms here, those are hardly the only things your monitoring system should be covering.
There are several reasons why the above methods don't work. Manual checks take time and are always subject to human error, with the added downside of requiring frequent cost site visits. Limited sensors, while they provide valuable data, often create information silos that prevent you from seeing the whole picture of your power system health. Standalone systems can't keep pace as the number of remote sites grows. They also fail to offer comprehensive monitoring across all power systems.
As your organization grows, managing multiple remote sites becomes more complex. When your monitoring tools don't communicate, it gets harder to manage them effectively.
During the meeting, the client shared their frustration with their current system, which struggles to scale and integrate data from multiple locations. They explained that these disconnected systems make it almost impossible to get a clear view of their power system's health.
Without a centralized solution, data gets spread across various tools, making it hard to spot emerging issues before they escalate. Eventually, you'll realize that these fragmented solutions often create more problems than they solve, leading you to seek a more complete system.
To truly solve the challenges of battery monitoring, you need a system that goes beyond the basics. A reliable and effective solution should provide continuous visibility into all the critical aspects of battery health - not just voltage but also internal resistance, temperature, and more.
During the meeting, Ron stressed that monitoring multiple metrics in real-time is crucial for predicting and preventing battery failures. This detailed approach helps you fully understand battery performance. By keeping an eye on various metrics at once, you can quickly spot early warning signs of failure, like temperature spikes or rising resistance, and take action before problems escalate.
But don't stop at battery monitoring. It's also important to keep an eye on other critical systems at your remote sites, such as generators and environmental conditions. Monitoring factors like temperature and humidity is vital, as these can affect your equipment's performance and lifespan.
To keep everything organized and avoid missing important alerts, your system should bring all this data together in a single interface. This "one pane of glass" approach allows your team to manage everything from one place, reducing information silos and making it easier to tackle issues as they come up.
Make sure your system supports real-time alerts for any exceeded thresholds. The faster you know about an issue, the quicker you can fix it. Remote control functionality is also key. That enables you to reboot equipment or switch power systems without needing to send technicians on-site.
In the meeting, Ron showed the NetGuardian 864A G6. This RTU is designed to meet all of the client's requirements. The demonstration highlighted the device's ability to provide continuous, detailed monitoring of multiple battery health metrics. Unlike older systems that only track voltage, the NetGuardian 864A G6 gives real-time visibility into temperature, internal resistance, and voltage. This allows for more proactive maintenance and reduces the risk of sudden failures.
One of the client's concerns was managing data from multiple sites. This was where the T/Mon LNX system came into play. Ron demonstrated how T/Mon collects and consolidates data from all the remote sites, providing a clear, centralized view of the entire network. This gives the client the ability to manage alarms, analyze trends, and respond to events from a single interface. By doing so, they can reduce complexity and respond to issues faster across their entire operation.
Another important point raised during the demo was generator monitoring. Ron explained how DPS solutions, like the NetGuardian 864 G6, support Modbus integration for generator monitoring. This gives you visibility into fuel levels, operational status, and other important metrics, all alongside your battery health data. The NetGuardian's built-in control relays also enable remote control over equipment, so you can reboot systems or switch power sources without needing to send technicians to the site.
If you're tired of struggling with scattered, incomplete battery monitoring solutions, it's time to upgrade to a comprehensive system that can handle all your remote site needs. DPS Telecom offers the tools you need to centralize your monitoring, stay ahead of potential issues, and keep your critical infrastructure running smoothly.
Talk to DPS Telecom today to find out how we can help you manage your remote sites more effectively. Call 1-800-622-3314 or email sales@dpstele.com for an answer to your questions or a custom proposal tailored to your monitoring challenges.
Andrew Erickson
Andrew Erickson is an Application Engineer at DPS Telecom, a manufacturer of semi-custom remote alarm monitoring systems based in Fresno, California. Andrew brings more than 17 years of experience building site monitoring solutions, developing intuitive user interfaces and documentation, and opt...
