The engineering problem
A telecom backup system is not a battery purchase. It is an availability calculation that has to hold at the end of the service life, under the actual discharge rate, at the actual site temperature.
Three numbers decide whether a site survives a six-hour outage in year four:
| Design input |
Common mistake |
What we size against |
| Discharge rate |
Nameplate at a 10-hour rate |
The site’s real 3-hour rate |
| Capacity basis |
Beginning of life |
End of life at 80 % state of health |
| Temperature |
25 °C reference |
The hottest month inside the cabinet |
Sizing against beginning-of-life capacity at a 10-hour rate is the single most common reason a nominally adequate bank fails in service. We re-run the calculation against the operator’s own load data before quoting.
How the build goes together
The DC side is a 48 V string of BR-48100 modules on standard 19-inch rails, paralleled up to sixteen deep with current sharing negotiated by the BMS. A single module is a one-person lift, which removes the crane, the structural approval and most of the downtime from the replacement.
The AC side is a single HP-100 bidirectional converter that charges the same string from solar, from the mains in a tariff window, or from the genset. When the mains drops, the converter forms its own island and carries the backed-up circuits through a 10 ms transfer — short enough that switch-mode rectifiers in the transmission equipment do not restart.
What the operator gets to see
State of charge is the least interesting number on a healthy site. The useful ones are state of health per module, cycle count, and the per-cell temperature spread that predicts a failing module before it drags the string down.
All four are published over Modbus RTU and CAN 2.0B, mapped to registers chosen at commissioning so they land in the operator’s existing network management system rather than in yet another dashboard.
Documentation and delivery
Lithium cells cannot legally move without a UN 38.3 test summary covering the exact cell and pack configuration. Every shipment carries the UN 38.3 summary, the UL 1973 certificate, the IEC 62619 report and a declaration of conformity, prepared before the goods leave rather than after the forwarder asks.
Typical lead time for a complete site kit is 28 days for the modules and 42 days for the converter. Site acceptance test procedures and register maps are issued with the quotation, not with the invoice.