By William & Patti Feldman

Starting with one of its earliest products, a digital micro-ohmmeter developed as a way to test power circuit breakers for a large breaker manufacturer, Alber, a Florida based electrical test equipment manufacturer founded in 1973, has designed and developed testers and procedures that have raised the bar and helped set standards for storage battery-reliant industries.

Founded on a solid engineering background and always atop of the latest innovations, Alber (www.alber.com) has long had a clear focus – devising and refining methods of quality testing and educating users on the best ways to conduct tests and interpret results.

Recognizing that there was a need within power companies to periodically test the big power circuit breakers, Alber quickly expanded its marketing to include end users. At about that time, utilities were expanding into nuclear generation.

In fact, just the year before, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee had informed the IEEE that within three years, by 1975, nuclear power plants around the country needed to set a standard for automatically testing their critical batteries or the NRC would provide its own testing standard. Until that time, there had been virtually no testing of batteries anywhere in the country. (Current NRC requirements call for testing of critical batteries every 18 months or with every refueling outage, whichever comes first.)

So, already active in providing testing equipment to power plants, Alber got involved with the IEEE in formulating the document that delineated how to test the batteries.

Up until that time, most people at companies relying on batteries for critical applications did not know much about how to test batteries or interpret the results.

“Because we have always been an engineering-oriented company with an emphasis on doing things right, we decided to pursue all the different battery test applications that were available and during this process learned a great deal about how batteries work and how they fail,” notes Glenn Alb ér, the company co-founder and president. And what they learned, the company engineers soon realized, could be of value to telephone companies, data centers, and other facilities and industries that also rely on uninterruptible power supplies (storage batteries) for critical applications, and therefore developed products based on that knowledge.

Today, the company, fully centered on the care and monitoring of batteries, offers a full line of battery monitors and test equipment, battery diagnostic systems, capacity test systems, resistance testers, hydrometers, load banks and micro-ohmmeters.

Alber holds patents on several battery testing systems and methods that provide battery failure prediction. These include a very effective, commonly used method for checking the condition or state of health of a battery: the innovative DC test method that measures internal resistance of a battery; and the “fool-proof” capacity test system.

Developed for the NRC and relied upon by all nuclear power plants around the country for automatic periodic testing, the DC capacity test method involves a controlled discharge on the battery to measure how much energy is being stored and compares that result to the manufacturer’s published rating. The internal resistance test method is less intrusive than capacity testing, but does not provide an exact measure of a battery’s capacity; it is a reliable indicator of a battery’s state of health and can be used to determine whether the battery will be capable of performing its intended mission.

Most of the other systems currently testing battery state of health use an AC test signal, which is not nearly as reliable as the DC resistance measurement. The resistance measurements can be performed with a portable resistance tester with the battery connected to the load and to the charger. The resistance tester assesses and indicates the battery’s state of health and enables replacement of a battery before there is a risk for a catastrophic failure. The capacity or load test is performed with the battery offline, thus requiring a redundant battery onsite that can take care of the load if something happens to the power.

There is a tremendous advantage in testing batteries on-line using either the portable Cellcorder tester or the fixed installed BDS monitor system. The condition of the batteries is assessed in a cost effective manner and the battery owner can trust that the batteries will function properly when called upon.

The results from internal conduction tests and capacity tests have to tell the same tale about the batteries. Alber is the only manufacturer to provide equipment for both of these test methods. This should tell a story to anyone looking for reliable test equipment as capacity and condition test results are compared every day.

For the past 25 years, Alber has held frequent scheduled public and client-sponsored educational seminars around the country for battery manufacturers, power companies, telephone companies, large data centers, and other storage battery-reliant users, on battery maintenance and testing to prevent battery failure and ensure performance of the battery system.

Alber extends its open-arms devotion and commitment to education as host of the annual Battery Conference (www.battcon.com), the largest battery conference in the world, being held in Miami Beach in early May. The three-day non-commercial technical symposium offers educational programs and discussions on current and upcoming technologies on stationary batteries and the equipment that goes into their operation.

For more information, please call 561-997-2299 or visit: www.alber.com.