DEMO — fictional range. Local brief only, NOT SENT. No personal data is collected or transmitted.
STORAGE
A battery is a thermal problem with an electrical output.
Storage is sized electrically and fails thermally. The four questions below are about where the heat goes rather than how much energy is stored.
- Where is it installed
- A plant room, a garage or outside, because each is a different ambient
- What is the ambient in summer
- Not the annual average, because capacity loss follows the peak
- How is the heat removed
- Passive vents, forced air or air conditioning, and who maintains it
- What is the duty cycle
- Because a battery cycled hard produces more heat than one cycled gently
Where each decision comes from
| Condition | What it decides | What it costs to get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| High summer ambient | Vent area or active cooling | Capacity loss that is invisible until year three |
| Dusty location | Whether vents are filtered and serviceable | Dust on terminals and a shortened service life |
| Coastal location | Enclosure coating and fixings | Corrosion at the fixings before the steel |
| Conditioned space | Whether vents are needed at all | Paying for cooling the room already provides |
The expensive mistake.
Sizing on capacity alone. A system that meets its energy target and runs hot loses that capacity over a few years, and the loss is attributed to the cells rather than to the enclosure.
And the one that looks harmless.
Vents without filters. They cool well and admit dust, and an enclosure with dust on live terminals is a maintenance problem that appears as an electrical fault.