I have a smart shunt acting as a DC energy monitor connected to the consumer side of a 24v LiFePO battery bank. Is is possible to utilise the second battery bank voltage monitoring capability?
(I'd like to be able to get a reading of my start battery V so I can trigger a solar powered trickle charger using node red + cerbo relays)
Thanks!
I have honestly never tried. So just trying to reason it through here.
The connection diagram for connecting it shows a shared negative with the shunt. Are your batteries connected like that or totally separate? If not then No.
There is no way to connect a negative and positive to read the battery separately with the push in terminal. It just has a +ve lead connection.
So I am hazarding the guess and saying no if there is no shared negative.
I just configured it as a DC meter using the demo library in Victron connect. Aux input can still be set as starter battery etc. So as not greyed out/disabled, it looks like it will work as long as there's a common neutral as @Alexandra said.
Thanks for your responses. Makes sense, I did wonder about the common neutral.
I don't have a common neutral from the LiFPo bus bar to the starter/ chassis negative.
But I do have an earth from a multiplus connected to the chassis. Wonder if this would suffice? Guess some testing is in order!
I had exactly that case in my 48V system. I use a DC energy monitoring using smart shunt. This measures the usage of 48DC from the multiplus supplying battery. And indeed the - of 48V Battery I conected to - of the 12V System and this one is conected via the engine to GND of the chassi.
Now: if the second battery monitoring is activated in fact it will measure the 48V system current I * R of the shunt plus the Voltage on the Starter Battery Voltage input. As I*R will only give some mV to my opinion its OK. At least in my case it doesnt matter and works.
