Why do I need a battery monitor?

A battery monitor is a device that measures the voltage and the flow of current from your battery bank. A battery monitor allows you to quickly and easily see how full your battery is. Operating your battery bank without good monitoring is like running your car without any gauges; although possible to do, it is always better to know how much fuel is left in the tank. While Enerdrive offers a range of battery monitors that come with a variety of different features, they all share the following in common:

Accurate Monitoring
Determining the amount of energy available is an extremely complex task. The amount of energy available in a battery is determined by a wide range of factors, including battery age, temperature, rate of discharge, and more. All Enerdrive battery monitors are equipped with high performance measuring circuits and complex software algorithms that take these factors into account and provide you with an accurate measurement of how full your battery is. This provides you the information you need to know to be confident in your system's performance, manage your power consumption, and stay off grid longer.

Extend the lifespan of your battery
The overall lifespan of your battery will depend on how you treat it. The service life of batteries will be negatively affected by excessive deep discharging, under- or overcharging, excessive charge and discharge currents, and high temperatures. Enerdrive battery monitors provide you with all of the information you need to avoid subjecting your batteries to these abuses. They can also be programmed with alarms that allow immediate protective measures to be taken when certain limits are exceeded. By helping you avoid damage to your batteries, Enerdrive battery monitors can extend the lifetime of your batteries and save you money in the long term.

Lithium monitoring
Unlike traditional lead-acid batteries, the voltage of lithium batteries remains relatively constant until they are nearly depleted. A fully charged 12V lithium LiFePO4 battery has a voltage of around 13.3-13.4V, while a lead acid battery will be closer to 12.6-12.7V. At 20% capacity, a lead-acid battery will have dropped to 11.8V and a lithium battery will still be around 13V. This narrow window of voltage allows lithium batteries to excel at running power hungry devices such as inverters, but it also means that voltage cannot be relied upon as a good measure of a lithium battery's state of charge. By the time the voltage of a lithium battery has dropped by an appreciable amount, the battery has already been excessively discharged and is at risk of permanent damage. Using a battery monitor is the only safe way to measure how full your lithium battery is and to avoid over charging or discharging it.

Track Performance
Enerdrive battery monitors also provide you with the information you need to monitor your to track your battery's performance over the long term. All battery monitors log data over time and can display information such as total number of cycles, average discharge, deepest discharge, and more. This historical data can help you to track your batteries performance and provide you with insight into your power needs.