You buy a telematics unit for your tank container. It works great. Then, five years later, it stops. The battery is dead. Now what? You need to find the tank. Remove the old unit. Install a new one. Update your systems. And hope the tank isn’t halfway across Europe when this happens.

Most telematics providers call a five year battery standard. But it’s a design choice, not a technical limit. In this blog, you’ll learn why IMT units run for 12 years without maintenance, and what that means for the total cost of keeping your fleet connected.

The real cost of a five year battery

When a battery dies, you can replace it. But it has to be done by an ATEX certified company to maintain the unit’s certification. The logistics and coordination involved are significant. You need to locate the tank, arrange transport to a certified facility, schedule the work, and get the unit back on the container. In most cases, swapping the entire unit is simpler and ultimately cheaper.

So you pay for a new unit. You pay someone to remove the old one and install the new one. You pay for the downtime while the tank sits without tracking. And you pay for the logistics of finding the tank in the first place.

Each replacement also creates operational risk. An incorrectly installed unit, a tank that leaves the depot without working monitoring, or lost paperwork. These aren’t just costs, they’re potential issues that affect your operation.

Do this every five years, and those costs add up fast.

How a 12 year battery changes the math

A tank container typically stays in service for 20 years or more. With a standard five year battery, that means four replacement cycles over the asset’s lifetime. With a 12 year battery, you need just one. That’s 75% fewer replacements.

The difference isn’t marginal. Take a fleet of 200 containers over a 20 year period. With five year batteries, you need four replacement cycles. That’s 800 swaps. With 12 year batteries, you need one cycle. That’s 200 swaps.

When you swap a unit, there’s no tracking gap and no compliance risk. You remove the old unit and install a working one immediately. But every swap still costs time and money: hardware, labor, coordination. The fewer swaps you need, the lower your total cost of ownership.

What makes a 12 year battery possible

Three things keep our units running for over a decade.

First, the battery capacity. We use a larger cell than most competitors, which allows us to send near real time data, up to every 10 minutes, while still lasting 12 years. More capacity means more runtime without sacrificing data frequency.

Second, the solar panel. Every unit has a rugged monocrystalline panel that recharges the battery whenever there’s daylight. Even on overcast days, it captures enough energy to stay operational.

Third, smart power management. The unit only transmits when it needs to. If a tank sits idle, the unit sleeps. When the tank moves, it wakes up and reports. This adaptive behavior saves power without sacrificing data quality.

Why 80% capacity after 12 years matters

Batteries degrade over time. That’s physics. But not all degradation is equal.

After 12 years, our battery still holds 80% of its original capacity. That means even at the end of its rated life, the unit keeps working reliably. You’re not racing against time, hoping the battery lasts until you can schedule a replacement.

Compare that to a five year battery that starts failing after four. You end up replacing units early just to avoid gaps in your data. With ours, you get the full lifespan, every time.

What this means for your operation

Fewer replacements mean lower replacement costs, lower logistics costs, and lower operational costs. It’s that simple.

The result: fewer replacement cycles, lower long term costs for finance, and more consistent data for everyone who depends on knowing where your tanks are and what’s inside them.

That operational simplicity has real value.

One decision, 12 years of data

When you choose telematics, you’re making a decision that makes your operations more efficient instantly. Battery life might seem like a technical detail, but it’s one of the most important factors in total cost of ownership.

A 12 year battery means significantly fewer replacements over your fleet’s lifetime. Fewer follow up costs. Fewer maintenance windows. Fewer surprises.

That’s what a unit that works for you looks like.

Want to see what this means for your fleet?

Share your fleet size and typical tank age profile with Bart or Bernard. We’ll show you what you save by reducing replacement cycles, including hardware, labor, and operational costs.

– Anhalt Logistics –

Transports become more and more complex due to rising requirements from the customers. To make the right decisions and planning the transport equipment not only just in time but also with the maximum efficiency, it is important to have as many information and data as possible. The full-fledged telematics solutions of IMT help our organization to make better decisions and improve every day.

‘Our core activities are liquid transports. Since many of them are temperature sensitive, a frequent surveillance of these temperatures is mandatory. Especially in international and intermodal transports, it is not always possible to check the temperatures by our staff. Therefore, we searched for a telematic solution to track temperatures and positions.

We searched for a reliable working system, that can not only track positions, but also temperatures of both tank and heating system for the tank. Furthermore, thanks to the integrated IMT Heating and Cooling Terminal (HCT) we can now track and change remotely the settings for the Loebbe heating systems on our tank containers.

Since we transport more and more containers intermodal, we do not always know the exact position of the container. With the telematics solution offered by IMT, we are always able to track the container without being dependent on others. This changes the way of working with intermodal transports and makes them more efficient. Furthermore, we can track and monitor the heating of our tank containers much better. How much temperature is a tank container loosing during a transport, how much time did the container spent on a heating station. All these questions can now be answered and with that heating costs can be reduced.

Our tank trailers and tank containers were not equipped with a telematic system to track their position. This is now possible. Another added value is the possibility to change settings of the heating systems, which are attached to our tank containers.

With the IMT HCT-module, we are able to change heating settings of our Loebbe heating system from the office. The IMT Platform is self-explaining and easy to use. The platform offers several settings, so that every user can adjust the platform to their needs. Temperature warnings can be set and containers divided into several groups. Every department has their own group of containers in their asset group.  Telematic solutions become more and more important for us.

IMT’s telematics help us to get as much data as possible which we need to control, analyze and with that, making the right decisions for the future.’

Robin Anhalt, Fleet Manager

Wabtec (NYSE: WAB) announced today its entrance into the railcar telematics market using IMT technology; the solution will be offered exclusively by Wabtec in North America and certain additional countries. Wabtec’s new railcar telematics platform will deliver real-time information to railcar and tank container owners and operators, allowing them to turn rail cargo into smart, connected assets.

ERR European Rail Rent GmbH, a European freight wagon rental company, has added a major milestone in its digitalisation journey. ERR has entered into a long-term partnership with Intermodal Telematics (IMT), one of the world’s leading telematics companies in tank container and rail car telematics based in the Netherlands. By working with IMT, ERR is now further incorporating advanced rail telematics and sensor technology into its offering: the CLT20-Ex solar-powered communication and tracking terminal and the WT22-Ex temperature sensor.

In the last week of September, the EPCA annual meeting takes place with the theme “Collaboration for Impact”. This theme truly inspires us. We also see the crucial importance of stimulating positive impact to address market spread issues. Think about creating safe transport, preventing incidents, and thereby protecting the environment and ecosystems. By engaging in open discussions and forging partnerships with our customers, we recognize the shared responsibility in ensuring the safe transportation of liquid bulk goods while addressing sustainability concerns. We will be present at EPCA, and look forward to exchanging views with you on this.