Milk board vetoes lead acid battery
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IN spite of a heavy initial cost penalty, the Milk Marketing Board has proved the overall cost-effectiveness of the alkaline battery against the lead acid type for its fleet of bulk collection tankers.
The alkaline battery is based on nickel cadmium electrochemistry rather than the traditional lead acid system and suffers from an initial cost penalty factor of 2.75.
But the Milk Marketing Board has used Lucas alkaline batteries for 17 years and many of the sets are now well over 10 years old, having outlived the tankers for which they were originally bought. Alkaline batteries were tried because of the high electrical demand on the tankers (main ly 16-ton Leyland Clydesdales) resulting from the MMB's unique method of milk collection — a vacuum is created in the tank by means of an electrically-powered pump.
The milk is then sucked into the vehicle without the need for running the vehicle's engine.
This exhauster pump consumes 80amps of current and is run for 45 minutes per day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. At the same time, however, the stop-start nature of milk collection means that the tankers rarely go on the long runs which help keep batteries fully charged.
To achieve an average working life of 12 years, the MMB reckons that three sets of lead acid batteries would have to be bought, compared with a single set of alkaline.
The costing situation is rather complex because, given 10 years, with zero inflation, the lead acid becomes cheaper. But lead acid batteries have increased in price by 50 per cent since January 1976, so the zero inflation figure seems unlikely.