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Understanding your UPS battery’s amp-hour rating
News and PR from Kohler Uninterruptible Power - Published 14 May 2018
If you’re specifying a UPS system, then it’s absolutely essential that you truly understand its battery autonomy; for how long will it support the load if the AC supplies fail?But itÂ’s a little more complicated than that. In reality, a VRLA lead-acid batteryÂ’s Ah rating isnÂ’t fixed, but depends partially on the rate at which itÂ’s discharged. This is managed by labelling batteries with ‘CÂ’ ratings; these relate their Ah capacity to their rate of discharge. For example, if our 30 Ah system was C20 rated, this would mean that it could provide its 30 Ah capacity while being completely discharged over a 20-hour period. ‘Completely dischargedÂ’ means that every cellÂ’s output voltage is reduced to 1.75 V. Discharging cells beyond this will adversely affect their capacity and useful working life.
Testing is performed by subjecting the battery to a load size that has been calculated to completely discharge it over the 20-hour period. The total Ah output over this period is recorded, and used to specify the batteryÂ’s C20 rating.
However, you will find that if you attempt to discharge our battery at a significantly faster rate – say 10 hours instead of 20 hours – its Ah rating will be reduced. This could amount to something like a 10% reduction, to 27 Ah for example. This loss of capacity arising from faster discharge is caused by heat. The faster a battery is discharged, the heavier the current and the greater the heat produced across the battery’s internal resistance. The battery energy consumed by this heating effect is denied to the load, so its useful or available capacity is reduced accordingly.
Although the above examples have used time periods measured in hours for simplicity of explanation, the reality is that a typical UPS battery system, because of its large load size, will have an autonomy time measured in minutes rather than hours. Nevertheless, the argument informs at least one key question you should be asking when purchasing a battery, or possibly a UPS system if battery capacity in Ah is being quoted: What discharge rate applies to the Ah specification being provided?
Read full article here - http://www.upspower.co.uk/understanding-ups-batterys-amp-hour-rating/
We should also remember that this is just one aspect of a batteryÂ’s capacity to support the load.
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