Battery Management Systems For Streamlight Stingers & Kenwood NX-300K4 Batteries

I am looking for some helpful suggestions here. In my previous life, I had a take home car and Motorola XTS5000 radio. I took care of the Chevrolet and my XTS5000 radio and batteries.

Fast forward to today. I work part-time at a college public safety organization that doesn't seem to care much about either the flashlight batteries or the batteries for the Kenwood NX-300K4 portable transceivers. As near as I can tell, when/if they get some additional new batteries for either device, they don't discard the old batteries and they are still cycled through in-service equipment.

I am just curious what other organizations do, or should do, to deal with these issues? It would seem that the simplest thing is to mark them with a date they go into service and remove them from service at some point in the future. I realize that we have simple charges, by that I mean not Motorola IMPRES chargers. I realize that I will not be the most favored person by suggesting that they spend money, but flashlights and radios are the two most important pieces of equipment that we have and use here.

How would you deal with this issue? How should we be dealing with this issue?

Re: Battery Management Systems For Streamlight Stingers & Kenwood NX-300K4 Batteries

Hello JAS,

May I suggest you find a nice wall and beat your head against it... It will be more productive.

The key may be education.

Develop a "failure" plan. When the light doesn't work what do you do? When the radio doesn't work what do you do?

Next see if you can figure out a reasonable run time. If you put your battery into the light and get 5 seconds of use, the battery is toast. If you get a week of use, it may be OK. Once you figure this out you can help others understand this. When they run into reduced runtime they can recycle that particular battery and move on.

Good luck.

Tom

Battery Management Systems For Streamlight Stingers & Kenwood NX-300K4 Batteries

I was keeping track of how many times i came to work & only 2 cops were on duty. i was the senior officer & the other was a rookie. I put him on the east end where it was quiet and I took the west end where all hell usually broke loose. I would photocopy the daily roster to show how 2 cops were answering calls in a town of 55,000 residents and 65,000 calls of service a year. When i was asked why I kept taking copies of the roster I would state it's for the lawsuit i was going to make against the sgt all the way up to the mayor if anything ever happened to me or my partner. The right person heard it and they finally pulled their heads out. It's your life. I'd make them hear me loud & clear.

Re: Battery Management Systems For Streamlight Stingers & Kenwood NX-300K4 Batteries

We have about 600 expensive rechargeable batteries on our project ($7200 replacement cost). The previous manager didn't take a strong approach to managing them, so when I came on, we had over 300 dead cells, we had power losses in the field, nothing was tracked. I ended up creating an Access database to manage all the batteries. Everything is now numbered and tracked. I do testing and cull bad batteries. Batteries are scheduled for removal from rotation before we risk an in-field failure. I got a lot of good advice on here for how to think about my monitoring program, and I even chatted with a few engineers from battery manufacturers/stores on one or two technical points. Now, I think I've got a much better handle on our inventory.

I'd talk to the highers up and make them understand what the cost of a failure in the field could be (damaged property, injured person) vs the cost of just testing and monitoring batteries, and rotating out old stock as new stock goes in.