Globe Theatre installs Exide batteries

As part of a routine maintenance survey of the emergency lighting in the exhibition area at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, the maintenance company Carter Planned Maintenance detected faulty batteries.

"Faulty batteries in the exhibition came as a complete surprise and we had to replace them because we would have failed Health & Safety Regulations, commented Mark Barker, Facilities Manager, Shakespeare’s Globe.

Prior to the 1980s lead acid standby batteries were maintained by topping up with water. Today, this is not possible with the introduction of sealed batteries. Organisations purchase their batteries, read the instructions that they have a certain "life", believe they are maintenance free and then forget about them. A battery design life can vary from 5-20 years. There is a huge difference between design and service life - the main contributing factor to this variance is temperature. In the case of the Globe batteries, the temperature was around 30ºC.

"Now that we know that the temperature was reducing the life of our standby batteries, we will keep the room at a steady 20ºC, thus ensuring the full life of 10 years is easily achieved", explains Mark Barker, Facilities Manager, Shakespeare’s Globe.

Exide has recently launched several battery-testing methods for VRLA (Valve Regulated Lead Acid) batteries.
For more information, see replacement batteries for ups.

Author Notes:

Sandra Ade contributes and publishes news editorial to http://www.1st-in-batteries.com. A great resource for all kinds of batteries to be used for camcorders, laptops, cell phones and more.