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Reserve Your Seat TodayToday, I want to talk to you about a small monitoring device that's designed to do one thing very well: Monitor your individual battery cell voltages for the best possible visibility over your battery plant. It monitors up to 24 of your battery cells and reports threshold alarms via SNMP to you SNMP manager - so you can correct battery problems before you suffer expensive battery damage or your sites go dark. It's called the Battery Voltage Monitor 48 (or BVM for short). Let's take a look at it now.
The back panel of the BVM is dominated by 24 analog inputs. This is designed with the 24 battery cells of a -48 vdc battery plant in mind, but many other configurations are also supported. You also get 3 temperature sensor probe inputs for monitoring battery temperature, plus 3 general-purpose analog inputs. On the right side of the analog inputs is the LAN port for reporting alarms back to your SNMP manager or a T/Mon master station. You also have a serial port and dual power inputs for extra reliability.
The front panel has a pair of GMT fuses, status LEDs, and a Craft port for initial unit configuration.
If you've got a large network, you'll want to use you SNMP manager or T/Mon master station to aggregate data from your BVM 48 units and your other monitored devices. Your SNMP manager can even issue GET requests to retrieve the voltage of a particular battery cell on demand. If you only have a handful of sites to monitor, however, you can monitor a BVM directly using its built-in web interface. Just type its IP address into your web browser and log in. Once inside the web interface, you can check for threshold alarms, view the voltage of a particular cell, or even trend voltages over time. This is a handy way to monitor, and it's also a good way to provision the unit. You can also set up email notifications directly from the unit, which can, of course, be used to send alerts directly to your cell phone.
Now, consider that, at site where you need a BVM 48, you probably have equipment that also needs to be monitored with an RTU. That's where integration with the NetGuardian 832A or 864A comes in. The BVM can be configured as a NetGuardian expansion device. The NetGuardian and BVM become a single logical unit that can be monitored via one IP address.
Speaking of alternate configurations, there's nothing that says you have to use the BVM 48 for monitoring battery cells. If you simply need a lot of general-purpose analogs for monitoring environmental, fuel, water, or other sensors, you can use the BVM as a high-density analog monitoring solution.
Could the BVM 48 protect you against expensive battery damage and network downtime? If so, contact DPS today. If you need something a little different, contact DPS and tell them what you do need. There's a reason I've been introducing you to so many new products: Perfect-fit products are business as usual at DPS. The engineering team does this all the time, which minimizes the delays, headaches, and cost you might otherwise associate with a custom solution.
Call DPS at 1-800-693-0351 or send email to sales@dpstele.com. You can also send Mac Smith a fast online message using the online form below.
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