Our innovative battery remaining life analysis service helps utilities providers to take the guesswork out of their metering asset management decision making processes.

By drawing on real-life information gathered by Saft from batteries installed in their fleet of meters, utilities can take fully-informed decisions about whether to keep meters in service for an extended period of time or to bring forward a planned replacement programme.

We spoke to Vanelle Kokoh, who oversees this service in our Technical Department, to find out how the service works as Saft make the service available to even more customers.

“The battery is the single most critical factor in the meter and so getting that precise information on remaining battery life can play a vital role in keeping the utility metering infrastructure active.”

“We’re able to provide key information to utility network managers that can shape their metering asset management strategy – and it’s fascinating to us as experts too. We get to know our customer better by gaining a deeper understanding of how the device is used in the field, and with customers we’ve known since the product design phase it’s always interesting to see if what we have predicted at the beginning is correct.”

Saft is the leading supplier of primary lithium batteries for IoT applications and has hundreds of millions of batteries deployed in the field. Our expertise and understanding of the many factors that impact battery life inform our mathematical models that help select the right battery for each customer.

However, across a fleet of devices there is a large amount of variance in operating conditions and, particularly with smart meters having remotely upgradable software, there can be significant modification of battery consumption during its operating life. Each customer’s devices are different so there’s no substitute for tailored analysis.

“That’s where we come in,” says Ms. Kokoh. “A customer sends us a sample of their deployed fleet of meters so we can analyse their specific usage profile and determine the best strategy for them. They’ll send at least five devices, but we have had customers send us as many as 150.”

“We started offering this service in 2014, and since then we’ve updated and improved our technical analyses to provide even more in-depth insight to our customers – and to give them more choice and flexibility in what kind of tests they want us to run.”

Control the charging temperature

The Meter Life Analysis service can be adapted to best suit a customer’s needs. There are two service packs available as standard, with an additional ‘add-on’ option for even greater depth of evaluation.

The first pack is called Smart Check-up – our most comprehensive service.

This gives the customer:

• A determination of the actual state of health. We do this by measuring the passivation state.
• A determination of actual state of charge. This is achieved through evaluation of a battery’s remaining capacity, discharged capacity and self-discharge.
• A lifetime assessment. The information obtained through our analysis is correlated with life expectancy data in order to develop an accurate estimate for the remaining service life of the entire battery fleet.

Our second pack, Electrical screening, is designed for customers who want a rapid overview of their battery fleet. It is a less complete picture than our Smart Check-up provides, but a really valuable insight into battery health.

This service provides:

• A determination of the actual state of health (by measuring the passivation state).
• A determination of the charge level (by residual discharge to obtain remaining capacity).

Finally, we have our Flexibility ‘add-on’ option. This can be added to either of the two service packs to provide an electronic evaluation of the device itself – in which we will fully check the consumption profile.

Now, Saft have made the Meter Life Analysis service available across the globe, helping more customers to gain vital insight into the health of their fleet of meters.

meterlifeanalysis@saft.com