In my old Brinks panel that I replace with a GE Concord Ultra, the old Brinks battery is a 12v 4.5Ah battery. But I think my Concord Ultra calls for a 12v 7 Ah battery. But anyhow, I hooked up the Brinks 4.5Ah battery I had to the Ultra system and nothing got fried or anything, I just don't know if it will provide enough power in a power outage..

so a couple questions..

1.) Is it okay to use a different Ah rated battery in my system?

2.) What does the Ah figure mean and how does that affect the battery perfomance, panel run time on battery power only?

3.) Am I doing any damage by having this 4.5Ah battery hooked up to my system when my system is calling for a 7Ah battery? will it still provide adequate power during a power outage?

Thanks

 

1: In general, the different AH is ok. There is an upper limit on the AH rating a panel will charge, which varies by panel, but lower AH just affects available runtime.

2: AH is Amp/Hours. It's how many amps that battery is rated to supply for 1 hour. To figure the right battery size for a panel, add up the standing current draws for the panel (base panel current + keypads + motions + smoke detectors + glassbreaks + anything else that draws on the panel constantly). Multiply that by the number of hours that you want the system maintained in standby.

Divide the number of minutes in alarm that the panel needs to support by 60. Multiply that by the combined current draw of all the sirens and other indicating devices. Add that number to the standby current. This is the AH you want for your backup battery.

3: See above

 

LOL..... SAY WHAT??????

sorry you totally lost me there,,, I need a more simplistic answer, like, do you know what the minimum aH rating the Concord Ultra needs?

 

The panel will run on a 1 ah battery; it just won't run very long.

How big an AH rating you should use depends on how much power the system is drawing by all it's attached devices.

There is no flat answer. In general 4-7ah batteries are standard with 7ah being most common for larger panels.

 

squale,

MrRonFL provided you with a terrific answer. As I recall, you asked what the AH figure meant and MrRonFL provided you with a gracious and informative answer.

To make things simple, you should stick with the 7 AH battery because the 4 AH battery will not last as long.

pizzazz

 

okay thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't hurting my system by using the 4.5aH battery, when I do a system status check, it says the battery is okay..

 

It's not a big deal. I posted the long form answer, because a lot of people don't realize that a bit of calculation should into selecting that battery.

A _lot_ of people here in Florida learned that when alarm system batteries run down with the system powered down, you can get some _very_ strange side effects. Check out some of the posts from last Sept. and Oct.

The reason I mentioned 1Ah was because one major brand used to ship their alarm "kits" with 1.5AH batteries.