Yikes! Did Your Warehouse Skip Its Power Study?

Folk wisdom says, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but that assumes you recognize broken when you see it.

That’s a tall order when it comes to motive power. Just because your current forklift batteries and chargers get the job done doesn’t mean they aren’t holding you back. A lot of what affects your warehouse energy efficiency remains hidden until you go looking for it.

Only a power study can reveal the unseen inefficiencies draining your productivity.

Mismatched batteries, shoddy charging practices, and misunderstood fleet usage all destroy revenue. They sap your budget with costly downtime and frequent battery replacements. Yet, a free power study prevents these common pitfalls by replacing flawed estimates with real data.

Without a power study, you’re throwing away revenue.

The Price of a Best Guess

A “best guess” is essentially useless.

Most people think their estimates are fairly accurate, but science says otherwise. It’s true that humans are great at relative estimates. Most of us can confidently state that the neighbor’s house is smaller than a football field but larger than a garage. Yet we can’t consistently estimate square footage with any real accuracy. Estimating numbers is called an absolute estimate, and nearly every study proves humans are terrible at it.

Motive power decisions depend on hard numbers.

Estimating those numbers is a losing game. It’s not enough to say your forklift needs more power than one battery but less than another. You need accurate data to make decisions with any degree of confidence.

Without fleet-specific data, you’re setting yourself up for some costly mistakes.

Picking the Wrong Forklift Battery

Forklift batteries aren’t socks; you can’t pick two that look alike and call it good enough.

Each forklift draws a certain number of amps to run for a specified number of hours. This is measured in amp-hours. Conveniently, battery capacity is also measured in amp-hours, and battery labels list the rated capacity. So, you just need a battery with the same capacity, right? Not exactly.

Two batteries with the same capacity rating can deliver very different functional amp hours.

Battery chemistry, charging protocols, work environment, and many other factors contribute to a battery’s functional capacity. Just because the amp-hour ratings match doesn’t mean two batteries will perform the same. Only a power study reveals all the facility-specific factors that influence battery performance.

Skipping a power study limits you to either purchasing the exact same battery every time or risking the wrong battery.

Expensive Down Time Spikes

Battery selection aside, there’s the question of fleet size.

How many forklifts do you actually need? Unless you have hard data, you’re estimating, and you’re likely to make one of two mistakes. If you guess low, you’ll end up with an undersized fleet. At first, it looks like you’re saving money, but you’ve started the clock on disaster.

An undersized fleet can’t keep up with demand.

When you have too few forklifts, you work all of them hard. That leads to more frequent charging, wasting time during shifts and slowing productivity. Instead of hitting KPIs, your operators are swapping batteries or sitting idle while the battery charges.

Alternatively, you’re constantly buying new batteries.

Every battery has a depth of discharge (DoD) rating. The DoD states what percentage of the battery’s capacity the operator can use before the battery requires recharging. Draining a battery beyond its DoD rating dramatically shortens its lifespan.

Undersized fleets often exceed their rated DoDs to maximize runtime. Consequently, batteries that should last three years fail after one. An individual lead-acid forklift battery might be inexpensive, but the cost adds up quickly when you have to replace all your forklift batteries every year.

Power concerns alone make an undersized fleet fiscally irresponsible, even before accounting for the extra wear and tear on the forklifts themselves.

Ornamental Forklifts

If you overestimate instead of underestimate, you end up with too many forklifts.

An oversized fleet means you have idle units and several ways to waste your budget. First, the upfront cost of purchasing unnecessary forklifts is not a small expenditure. Additionally, you purchase extra batteries and chargers to support trucks that sit idle. Then, there’s the ongoing expense of insuring and maintaining forklifts that become essentially ornamental.

You could resell the excess, but that doesn’t recoup your losses.

An oversized fleet is like stocking your wine cellar with milk. Forklifts don’t gain value with age. As they approach the end of their economic life, their value plummets. By the time you determine which trucks are unnecessary, they’ve already depreciated, and you’ve lost the difference.

Only a right-sized fleet protects you from financial drain.

Our Power Studies Are a Free Solution

You can either waste money on dubious guesswork or make informed decisions for free.

Our power studies make that choice simple. A single study provides an array of benefits:

• Understand fleet usage. Power studies provide fleet usage data that would otherwise be difficult to gather. These metrics help you understand how your fleet actually performs.
• Match power to demand. Study results recommend batteries and charging strategies that align with your real-world usage.
• Make confident decisions. Accurate operational data lets you make meaningful comparisons between power options based on facility-specific usage.
• Improve charging practices. Power studies reveal the best charging strategies for your workflow, minimizing wasted time.
• Prevent downtime. An undersized fleet has more unplanned downtime. Power studies help you right-size your fleet and prevent this costly waste.
• Optimize long-term costs. Matching batteries to usage increases lifespan, reduces replacement cycles, and reduces wasted time.

Ultimately, a power study gives you the information you need to make crucial decisions.

In fact, power studies are a perfect representation of our mission.

We want to empower you to achieve your productivity goals with smart power solutions. Your unique process means you need solutions customized for your fleet. That’s why we don’t chase trends or push unnecessary upgrades. Every fleet has different power needs. We take that to heart, and that’s why we don’t charge for our power studies.

You deserve fleet-specific power data with zero risk from a partner that understands your business.

For more information or to schedule your power study, contact us online or at one of our 16 locations:

Alabama - Birmingham
Florida - Jacksonville and Lakeland
Georgia - Atlanta
Maryland - Hagerstown
North Carolina - Charlotte, Conover, Kernersville, and Wilson
South Carolina - Camden and Greer
Tennessee - Knoxville and Nashville
Virginia - Richmond and Salem
West Virginia - Nitro

Further Reading

• A Power Study Is Essential to Right-Size Your Electric Forklift Fleet
• What Happens to an Electric Forklift Battery at End of Life?
• What Motive Power System Is Most Efficient For Your Fleet?