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Truck and Track Winter 2018 36
BATTERY MANAGEMENT
Winter time should be more about Ho! Ho! Ho! than Oh! Oh!
Oh! But it can be hard to feel the seasonal cheer when vehicles
are stuck at the side of a cold, wet or snowy roadside with an
exasperated driver and furious customer. Battery failure can
certainly induce considerable frustration amongst workshop
teams when commercial fleets fall foul of the increased risk of
roadside breakdowns and battery related non-starts. We know
that the temperature will dip and there is a fair chance of snow
and ice. The inevitable fall in temperature at this time of year
will significantly affect a battery’s performance and, in extreme
temperatures, this canmean as much as a 50%dip.
Charging is vital and a comprehensive battery management
programme within workshops should be standard to side-step
some hefty and avoidable costs. The vehicles on the road will have
increased power demands due to the darker nights and these put
an excessive drain on the vehicle’s battery.
Expensive and avoidable non-starts should no longer be an
accepted feature in workshop budgets. Workshops can be
supported by first-class battery testing and charging technology.
The best of all new year’s resolutions should be to end the flow of
large sums of money that are wasted because of a lack of battery
maintenance. Battery problems remain top of the league of reasons
for roadside non-starts and Truck and Track has teamed up with
Rotronics, the UK partner for CTEK and Midtronics, to help readers
make improvements, to reduce the financial impact of roadside
non-starts and improve customer service.
Rotronics surveyed over 40 visitors to the Mechanex Sandown Park
Show in November 2018, to understand how much importance
workshops place on battery testing and charging and look at how
active their battery management practices are in the run up to the
Winter period. The Survey participants were a mix of commercial
vehicle workshops with some independent workshops and the
results provided staggering responses, in that 95% of those
surveyed admitted that they do not have any proactive battery
management programme in place at all. 100% of those surveyed
told us that they would generally only charge a vehicle when they
were unable to get a vehicle started.
Ken Clark, managing director of Rotronics, says: “There is a weighty
cost of lost miles and customer dissatisfaction. With some quick
maths, we know that a typical operator might have up to 300 non-
Don’t make a pantomime out of winter