Electric Forklift Case Study: Bottling Plant Retires LPG

A bottling plant ran fourteen LPG trucks across three shifts, and the filling hall sat directly above the battery charging area of an earlier trial. Management wanted the internal combustion fleet gone before the next audit, but the line could not stop. We supplied six electric counterbalance forklifts and eight electric pallet trucks with a charging plan built around the shift pattern. The LPG fleet left the site in twelve days.

Project Snapshot

The Problem: Clean Air Indoors, No Room to Stop

The plant filled and palletised around the clock, so any change had to happen inside the production calendar. Two constraints shaped the brief. First, air quality: LPG exhaust inside the filling hall was the audit finding, and the fix had to remove the tailpipe rather than move it. Second, the ramp between the warehouse and the dock. Loaded trucks climb it hundreds of times a shift, and a truck that hesitates there becomes a bottleneck.

An earlier trial with lead-acid trucks had already failed. Charging took a full shift, batteries needed a cooling period before they could be topped up, and the ventilation requirements for the charging room pushed the project cost past the original budget.

Why We Chose Lithium Electric Over LPG, Diesel and Lead-Acid

LPG. Excluded. The emissions problem stays, and the plant would keep paying for fuel deliveries and cylinder handling inside a food production area.

Diesel. Excluded. Fumes and particulates rule it out indoors, and noise would have carried across the filling hall floor.

Lead-acid electric. Excluded. The charging and battery-room demands were the reason the first trial stalled, and three-shift work leaves no eight-hour window for a charge cycle.

Lithium electric with opportunity charging. Selected. The packs accept short top-ups, so charging fits into breaks instead of replacing a shift.

The Electric Forklifts We Supplied

The counterbalance units are built around a full AC drive train, which removes the brushes and contactors that are usually the first parts to fail on this class of truck. Each one carries a lithium iron phosphate pack, a sealed controller compartment and a mast rated for the plant's existing racking.

Wet, washed floors and an open dock door meant splash protection mattered as much as capacity. We specified sealed connectors and a chassis finish that survives daily washdown, since a food plant cleans its equipment far more often than a general warehouse.

The pallet trucks covered the short hops between the line and the stretch wrapper. Sending a counterbalance truck on a forty-metre trip is expensive, and dedicating the smaller units to those movements is what made a fleet of fourteen work instead of fifteen.

Installation and Charging: How the Switch Ran

We phased the swap so the plant never lost a shift's worth of capacity. Two LPG trucks left the site as two electric units arrived, and the operators moved onto the new trucks during the handover.

Charging was the part that needed planning. Instead of a battery room, we placed compact chargers at the dock and at the end of the filling line, so a truck can take a top-up while its driver takes a break. Our battery charging guide covers the same principles in more detail. Ramp behaviour was set during commissioning, with the plant's own loaded stillages used as the test load.

Testing and Quality Control

Each truck was load tested before shipment to its rated capacity, with mast, drive and brake checks recorded against the serial number. On arrival we repeated the lift test on site with the plant's heaviest pallet, then measured current draw on the ramp to confirm that a loaded truck could hold and climb it without excessive drain.

Operators were trained on the difference that matters most in practice: how the truck behaves when the battery is at half charge rather than full. Every unit went through a final inspection with the plant's maintenance team present.

Results: What the Numbers Show

Fourteen electric trucks replaced fourteen LPG trucks with no increase in headcount and no lost shifts. The filling hall has no tailpipe emissions at all now, and the audit finding closed without a ventilation upgrade.

Charging was absorbed into breaks, so no truck waits on a battery during production. Fuel deliveries, cylinder handling and the battery room all disappeared from the site's operating cost, and the plant reports the fleet costs less per pallet moved than the LPG line it replaced. Service parts come from the same platform, which keeps our range consistent as the plant grows.

What This Case Means for Your Project

Replacing LPG is a schedule problem before it is a truck problem. Work out where the charging fits into the working day, and the rest of the decision usually makes itself. We build every truck on the same AC platform, so a plant can start with the units it needs today and keep the same spares and training across the fleet.

If your plant runs multiple shifts and the exhaust is the constraint, send us the duty cycle, the ramp and the rack heights. Our team will size the fleet, the packs and the charge points, then quote and ship. You can also discuss your fleet plan with our engineers before you commit.