Application challenge
- Remote instruments may spend long periods away from mains power, so every coil milliwatt affects battery life.
- A conventional monostable relay consumes coil power whenever it remains energized.
- The instrument still may require galvanic isolation and low leakage that solid-state switches cannot provide.
Design approach
- Use latching reed relays where the circuit state must be retained without continuous coil power.
- Drive the set and reset coils with controlled pulses and verify behavior at battery end-of-life voltage.
- Add firmware state tracking or position confirmation if the instrument safety case requires it.
- Choose contact rating for the actual load; battery operation does not automatically mean low contact stress.
Engineering caution: catalog ratings are component-level references. For high-voltage, medical, EV, PV or ATE systems, verify creepage, clearance, leakage, thermal rise, EMC and lifetime in the finished equipment.
Related MiRelay series
Bistable reed relays and high coil-resistance variants are appropriate for instruments where the relay state changes infrequently but must be retained with minimal energy.
Series mentioned: Bistable / latching reed relays, high coil resistance reed relays