Failure to start is the most significant avoidable cause of diesel generator malfunction. Over 80% of failures to start are caused by battery problems.

Today most gensets do not include any means to detect that the starting battery has deteriorated, and may not be fit to start the engine. End-users have tolerated this situation because there has been no practical, cost-effective battery failure detection system. The low-cost, practical battery failure detection proposal made in this paper would significantly reduce the number of genset start failures and associated business risk.