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  • Author Author: mlease
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The 10 year battery life – myth or reality?

mlease

Myths and legends are usually the subject of incredible beauty, unsurpassed strength or attempting what mere mortals assume is an unobtainable goal. It is often difficult to separate myth from reality or even know where one ends and the other begins. The same can be said for much of what you read these days about products with a 10 year battery life. When you see advertisements for wireless devices claiming 10 year battery life from a coin-cell battery it is easy to think that is the stuff of myths and legends. Yet, given the right hardware/firmware design and the appropriate battery technology and capacity for a certain application, 10 year battery life is certainly a doable thing.

 

Read the complete post at http://cmicrotek.com/wordpress_159256135/?p=239

  • I used to design products for a utility meter manufacturer.  Their standard battery life warranty was for twenty years.  However, anything over ten years was pro-rated based on the service life after the ten year mark.  The installation cost outweighs the cost of the more expensive battery technology, so the utility company didn't want to have to replace the battery before the meter was past it's useful lifetime.

  • in reply to sarunaszx

    It does seem strange but in an industrial/manufacturing environment battery powered wireless sensors should be much cheaper to install (and maintain) than wired sensors when you consider the cost of wiring, connectors and installing what can end up being miles of cables.

  • in reply to mlease

    You have a point. I probably lack experience/examples, but to me having many battery powered devices for indoors facilities that perform crutial tasks seems weird.

  • in reply to sarunaszx

    That's a fair question, particularly for consumer products that would likely be replaced within several years. Industrial products tend to have much long service lives and 10 years isn't necessarily an unreasonable expectation.

     

    I think the more important part of this isn't the 10 year number, it is what you have to do to maximize your battery life and to confidently know what that time span will be. I worked on a device a few years ago that would be mounted on high voltage distribution lines in remote areas. The target was a 5 year battery life but it was critical that we meet that number. There are only a handful of people qualified to work around these high voltage lines so it could literally take several months to get a crew to the site and cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace the batteries.Imagine hundreds or even thousands of wireless sensors in a large manufacturing plant, replacing those batteries could cost days of down-time for that facility which would cost the company way more than just the cost of replacing the batteries. In situations like these, if a product's actual battery life falls well short of the advertised/specified battery life the product manufacturer could be held liable for the battery replacement cost. These are obviously extreme cases but even for consumer products, grossly missing the advertised battery life or being significantly worse than competitors can significantly impact product sales for several generations of products.

  • But do you really need such a lifetime? To me it seems that this 10 years is just a shiny number representing that you will not have to think about replacing the battery of your device at all. After 3-5 years you will probably not need the device anymore anyway.