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Tim Larsson avatar image
Tim Larsson asked

VM-3P75CT grid meter not active during ac load caluclations

Hello. I recently bought a Cerbo GX along with a VM-3P75CT meter which I use as the brains of our house. As of yet, there are no Multiplus II (or other inverter/chargers and batteries) installed but do have a Growatt MOD 8K 3 phase grid tie inverter and soon a fronius inverter.

The cerbo is used for monitoring and node-red to control how and where the power to things are used.


I have a shelly 3em which is integrated into venus os with a custom driver. This reports well and has functioned without issue. I have however noted a strange behaviour the last couple of days where the "calculated ac load" behaves quite strange when the house load is smaller than the pv-inverter is producing.



There are two behaviours:

1. PV-inverter power > house load.
2. PV-inverter power < house load.

For case 1, the value read by the shelly meter, e.g. 2496 W overwrites the house load such that the house load is equal to the pv-inverter. However, If you look at the AC input you can clearly see that the acutal house load is smaller as we are exporting power to the grid.

For case 2, the value read by the shelly meter does exactly as expected. That combines with the reading of the grid meter to correctly calculate the house load.

When I think about it, this was not the case a couple of days ago and as such I am starting to think this might be due to an update to either the 3.32 of the cerbo or the 1.06 of the grid meter.

Anyone else have any idea of why this behaviour is happening?

Btw, where do you find the release notes for each update? Do not seem to find it at github/releases

screenshot-2024-05-30-at-113012.png

Venus OSAC PV Couplingshelly implimentation
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Tim Larsson avatar image Tim Larsson commented ·


Found the release notes on firmware on the Victron professional site after some time. Does not look like there is anything strange in those, but cannot really see why it would behave strange with the integration either.

I have tried with some different drivers
https://github.com/Telekatz/venus.dbus-shellyPlug
and forked one for the 1pm to handle 3em instead
https://github.com/tmlarsson/dbus-shelly-3em-pvinverter

Both of these behave precisely the same. And as noticed in the original post, then house loads are larger than pv loads, everything works perfectly.

Clarification of setup:

Cerbo GX 3.32
VM-3P75CT setup as grid meter, connected via CAN
Shelly 3EM (gen 1) connected to Venus OS as a PV-inverter via above driver (currently using the second one)



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Tim Larsson avatar image Tim Larsson Tim Larsson commented ·

More strange behaviour in the VRM dashboard noticed today.

In the "Advanced" tab everything looks good. The PV yield is as expected by the Shelly meter and AC consumption also looks to be calculated correctly. However, in the dashboard it thinks no solar has been produced and almost no ac load either. Very strange.screenshot-2024-05-31-at-125021.png


screenshot-2024-05-31-at-124952.png

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Tim Larsson avatar image
Tim Larsson answered ·

Found this project which emulates a multiplus

https://github.com/mr-manuel/venus-os_dbus-multiplus-emulator

This almost solved my problem, but have to configure this emulator a bit for it to work perfectly. So I recon this was simply a case where Venus could not handle the vrm dashboard without the multiplus.

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Tim Larsson avatar image Tim Larsson commented ·

Made a fork of this project to handle 3 phase installation and a 3 phase pv-inverter on ac out. Now the numbers almost work perfectly.

https://github.com/tmlarsson/venus-os_dbus-multiplus-emulator


screenshot-2024-05-31-at-184232.png

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Tim Larsson avatar image Tim Larsson Tim Larsson commented ·
I do however have absolutely no idea of where that second pv inverter on ac in comes from. There is no such object in my setup and it is "stuck" on 652W. But it does however only seem to be in the rendering and not actually part of the calculated values.
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