Royal Mail’s road distribution hub on the DIRFT complex near Daventry features Hawker batteries and chargers to ensure the lift truck fleet there works round-the-clock. The 38-acre facility handles some 45 million letters and packets a day from all over the country for onward delivery to 60-plus regional mail centres.
EnerSys Motive Power has supplied the high-performance Hawker Perfect flooded-cell batteries for the Daventry centre’s fleet of more than 60 lift trucks, comprising counterbalance machines, powered pallet transporters and specially-adapted low level order pickers for handling Royal Mail’s special “York” cages. The pallet transporters and “York” handlers use Perfect 24V batteries while the counterbalance trucks use 48V units. Two batteries have been supplied per truck to ensure 24-hour availability.
The battery changing/charging station features 64 Hawker Powertech high frequency chargers which, says EnerSys, offer “outstanding energy efficiency” – as much as 20% higher that 50Hz chargers.
Andy Verrion, Royal Mail’s national distribution centre manager, says: “The national road hub handles 45 million items of mail each day and sustaining throughput is essential to the operation. The reliability and performance of the Hawker batteries and chargers ensures we have a constantly available bank of motive power to keep our materials handling fleet fully operational.”
