Earthday Factoid?

Wiscomm recycled over 4,000 pounds of two-way radio batteries through our "WISCOMM GREEN" program in 2009!

Contact us how we can roll out our battery recycling program for your company or agency.

Question: How often should Two-Way batteries be replaced?

We have recently been asked the question by several of our clients asking how often they should budget for two-way battery replacement.

While Motorola has all kinds of slick marketing sheets giving you all kinds of formulas on how often you need to retire batteries. Here is our straight shooter breakdown:

Public Safety Applications (Full-time Fire and Police Radios):

• LiIon - 12 months
• NiMH - 18 months
• NiCd - 24 months
• IMPRES (all Chemistry) - 24 months

Commercial & Non-Mission Critical Applications:

• LiIon - 18 months
• NiMH - 24 months
• NiCd - 30 months
• IMPRES (all Chemistry) - 30 months

After the above time frames, these batteries should be pulled and marked from frontline service, they should no be thrown out but should be put in a reserve fleet of batteries that can be used in case of a disaster or shared with other departments in your organization. The reserve fleet of batteries can usually be keep for double the time frames listed above.

As with everything, the above times are simply guidelines and can change based and environmental conditions and care and maintenance of batteries. See our blog post for some battery care & tips to ensure proper maintenance of your equipment.

As always, Wiscomm would be happy to develop a battery management program for your organization. Wiscomm offers some of the best pricing on Motorola OEM batteries in the world!

Sneak Preview - Wiscomm GREEN - Our environmental initiative ...

On April 22nd Wiscomm will be unveiling our new Wiscomm GREEN environmental initiative. Part of this initative will be our membership to the Call2Recycle program. Call2Recycle is an industry consortium that responsibly recycles all rechargeable batteries (including two-way radio). Wiscomm will be a collection point for used batteries, we will combine the batteries and forward them to the recycling center for processing. The batteries are recycled using a thermal recovery process that reclaims the metals (nickel, iron, cadmium, lead, and cobalt) from the batteries and prepares them for use in new products such as new batteries and stainless steel.

If you have any questions about recycling your two-way batteries, drop us a note over at Wiscomm.