People often ask how to choose battery that best suits their need. Its methodology and various types (Short/Long term) of power requirements is discussed.

Always Choose a Suitable Battery on the Basis of Requirements

Selection of suitable battery (AC) completely depends on your requirement. That means, before starting selection, you first have to define your requirement. Further elaborating this, the various requirements can be broadly classified in two main categories.

Types of Requirements from a Battery

The two main types of requirements from a battery are :

  • Short term power requirement
  • Long term power requirement

Short term power requirement

Most of the critical systems / equipment need an emergency power source during total power failure. This will give them some time for a graceful shutdown of the running application to avoid any data loss or loss of control in case of vital engineering processes/ medical procedures.

At places where such critical processes must be kept running to avoid failure of entire work chain, the requirement to keep such applications alive can be met with the selection of suitable battery till the time a secondary source of power ( stand-by power source) is brought online and start feeding the entire chain.

To meet such requirements, you can also provide a dedicated UPS source. Now a days, every critical system / equipment has its own dedicated UPS in addition to a alternate power supply source. They normally follow such supply chain:

Supply arrangement for a critical system

Fig. 1 – Supply Arrangement for a Critical System

* UPS – Uninterrupted Power Supply

UPS normally consists of a battery of required Ampere-hour rating. It powers the desired system / equipment which is in line for the required time.

Such critical systems need deep discharge batteries. However, they rarely comes into action and do not goes through recurring duty cycle. These Batteries are also used in load balancing application where supply is required when desired from irregular supply sources like Wind, Solar and Wave energies. Such requirements demand tough and long life batteries which should be able to bear continuous charging-discharging cycle.

AC Battery photo

Fig. 2 – An enclosed ready to use AC output Battery

Long term power requirement

Short term power requirement batteries are generally small. But what for systems/equipment which need high power for a comparatively long duration such as back up for a big power grid during total power failure or even to maintain a temporary storage  for surplus energy?

Such requirements can never be fulfilled by small batteries. At such places we need to do a proper selection of suitable battery such as huge capacity batteries that can stand for a longer duration.

There are organization who are using giant lead acid batteries having power rating of even 40 Megawatt-hours to fulfill such requirements.

Read more about AC Battery – How it Works, Features, Uses, Advantages and Disadvantages.