Safety touches every layer of our product development process. In the video above our VP of Product Management Ryan Gist takes you through BioLite HQ to highlight some of the key steps we take to ensure a durable, reliable, and safe home backup battery that you can use in your home with confidence.
In addition to the video above, read on for additional detail around our commitment to quality and safety.
Quality Inputs: Rigorous Cell Selection
As Ryan says in the video, a good product starts with good components. For us, that meant identifying the best cell manufacturer out there (a cell is the individual battery component that we stack together to create our high-capacity energy storage - the blue cylinders you see in the photo). In order to make sure manufacturing quality is where it needs to be, we do a close look at the processes of potential partners. We do x-rays and CT scans of the potential cells as part of our inspection process. We’re proud to have landed with a top-tier partner who provides cells to many electronics you interact with in daily life and we’re especially excited to be working with a state of the art cell type that is heat resistant, energy dense, and has high durability which contributes to a long lifespan for Backup.
Spacing & Casing
For folks out there who are soothed by things-arranged-neatly, this one’s for you: the spacing of our high-performance cells are calculated at an optimized distance to maximize safety while maintaining a super compact footprint, one of the most differentiating elements of the finished product. The fire-resistant enclosure that houses this arrangement provides another layer of protection.
Cycle Life Testing
The cells we’re using are lithium iron phosphate, which is the most resilient in terms of safety and temperature resiliency. These are premium cells and we want to make sure that in addition to their immediate characteristics, they last for the long haul so that our customers can see years of reliable use and get real value out of Backup. So we put these cells to the test to simulate an entire 10 year lifespan of the product. Our partners do standard cycle testing, but we are replicating those tests under the charge/discharge profiles they will experience in the product. This setup has been cycling 24-7 day and night for over a year and enables us to confirm regular usage with minimal degradation of product.
Editors Note: What is a “cycle?” Imagine a battery that is completely full, gets used (ie discharged) to empty, and then refills again to full. That connotes one complete cycle. Backup by BioLite is rated at 4,000 cycles > 80% capacity, meaning you could fully discharge/charge the unit every single day for over 10 years!
Heat & Dust: Ready for In Home Use (and, specifically, behind your fridge)
We keep telling you to install Backup behind your fridge.
We know it can get warm and dusty back there. We also know that electronics generate some heat of their own. Our design takes all of this into account.
The engineers and designers at BioLite came up with an innovative solution to that problem where the heat sink, instead of sitting in the inverter inside the product, has been incorporated into the enclosure. The whole enclosure is aluminum casing and on the backside we've integrated heat sink channels and cooling fans, which is how we pull all that excess waste heat out of the system. In this testing rig we use resistance heaters that simulate thermal output from the electronic components inside the Backup unit - this enables us to closely monitor how the heat sink and fans work together to successfully dissipate heat and regulate the temperature of the unit. This allows us to simulate the standard conditions when you're running a fridge and more energy intensive conditions like if you're running a water boiler or a hair dryer. With this rig we can really go through the whole envelope and optimize the geometry of the heat sink, the settings on the fans, and make sure we're getting peak efficiency and safe operation.
You’ll also notice that the heat exchanging is happening basically externally to the unit. So you don't have much air exchange in and out which means that all of our sensitive components inside aren't getting dusted out. Think dusty environments, pet dander, etc, you don't want all of that stuff inside where it's going to hurt your efficiency and potentially damage components. So we keep it all external. The inside stays clean. It’s another way in which we’re working to create a long and safe product life.
The Battery Management System: Our 24/7 Security Guard
So we’ve got quality cell selection, careful configurations, heat-mitigating efficiencies, thermal management – all of this is backstopped by our 24-7 security guard, AKA the battery management system, AKA the BMS. It’s the circuit board at the end of the battery pack, and the wires you see throughout backup are part of the constant monitoring that feeds information back to the BMS.
A lot of products will just buy a battery management chip off the open market. We've designed this BMS from the ground up specifically for this product. And it's real-time monitoring over 60 different parameters continuously. It’s always looking for anything that's out of bounds, whether that's a voltage or a short circuit or a temperature in the pack or an imbalance between cells in the pack – it's constantly monitoring for those things. So if there's any kind of external disturbance from the grid or something from one of your appliances coming back into the system, this will catch any of those issues and make sure we're not putting current through cells in a compromised position.
It’s independent, always-on, and always watching to keep your Backup safe.
3rd Party Testing & Certifications
We’ll make this quick: UL Certification is the gold standard for safe consumer electronics and we are getting verified by independent 3rd party institutions to earn this status. That means rigorous testing in their facilities without any BioLite interference.
In addition to our certification, we work with Exponent, independent experts in battery cell safety, to ensure that our designs and components are sound, our systems are safe, and our testing is comprehensive.
When you bring Backup by BioLite into your home, we want you to plug in with confidence knowing that thousands of hours of testing and refinement have gone into making your product.
