Taking Great Care of My Factory

Tips For Caring For Forklift Batteries

12 April 2017

Deann Hunter

If your business relies on forklifts, you may find that you can decrease the maintenance expenses of owning these devices by properly caring for the batteries. However, business owners are usually relatively uninformed about the proper battery-care steps that they should be using for their forklifts.

Clean The Battery Terminals

Corroded battery terminals and lime deposits can be extremely problematic for your forklift. These problems can arise fairly frequently due to the forklift being exposed to the elements. Luckily, you can help to prevent these issues from hampering the flow of power by taking time to clean these terminals. Lime accumulations on the terminals can be removed by applying baking soda and scrubbing it off after several minutes. When rust is found on the terminals, you will want to replace them, as they will gradually degrade in performance, which can greatly shorten the life of the battery.

Properly Store The Batteries Until They Are Needed

If you have numerous forklifts, it may be more cost efficient to purchase the batteries in bulk. Unfortunately, if you do not store the batteries in a suitable location, you may find that the batteries have lost their charge when you need them. To protect the batteries, you should always store them in a climate-controlled facility. More precisely, you will want to keep the temperature cool and the humidity low. Also, you will want to keep them out of direct sunlight, as this can cause the batteries to become unevenly heated.

Have A Testing Schedule For The Batteries

For those that have numerous batteries in storage, it is important to test them on a periodic basis. This will be needed to verify that any batteries that lose their charges are removed from the inventory. To this end, creating a testing schedule can be an effective approach. Ideally, you should test the charges on your stored batteries every couple of months. Ideally, you should use a battery testing unit that will give a readout on the strength of the charge. While these testing devices are more expensive than more basic units, knowing whether a battery has lost a substantial amount of its charge will enable you to know whether it should be removed from storage.

Battery care is important for ensuring that your forklift functions as necessary. To help ensure you are taking care of your forklift batteries, you should make sure you are storing them in a cool and dry environment, cleaning the terminals on a regular basis, and testing your stored batteries, as this will help to mitigate the more common problems.

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