We are working on a system with two sets of parallel-connected Multiplus inverter/chargers to provide both 120V and 230V on our boat. Each set of Multis will have its own Venus device for monitoring. On the battery side, we have three 24V battery banks, each with its own BMV-712. Our question is, can we connect the three BMV-712s to both Venus devices to feed them both with the state of charge information?
The short answer is no, that is not possible.
It is possible to connect more than one BMV to a single Venus device, but only one will be designated as the system battery monitor. The others will be visible in the menus and can be referenced for information only.
I am rather confused about your setup. If you have MultiPlus' connected in parallel then they would be networked with VE.Bus and would appear to a single Venus device as one unit. You'd only need one Venus device, besides, two would confuse each other.
If you have parallel units then they should be supplied by the same battery bank, not separate ones.
How are you getting 120V and 230V from parallel connected units? Surely you'd have two 120V units in Split phase configuration?
If you have a diagram of your proposed system, that would be quite useful to us.
WKirby, thank you for your answer. Let me see if I can clear up your confusion. I will attach here a basic drawing of our electrical system, minus the monitoring devices. There are three battery banks of 6 x Firefly 4V cells which we do use as one large 24V house bank, but we made into three smaller banks for redundancy. We have already bought 3 BMVs with the hope of monitoring each smaller bank so that we would know where it was happening if there was a problem. We have a total of 5 Multiplus units, 2 for 120 and 3 for 240. We are not doing split phase. We understand that each set of inverter chargers connected in parallel will require its own Venus device. Currently we have an OctoGX and a CanVuGX, however, we are going to try to return the CanVu and exchange it for a Cerbo in order to try to monitor the 14 MPPT controllers. We went with individual controllers because we will have lots of shading issues on the boat. In the end, we want to get as much data as possible out to N2K as well, so maybe that will be our best bet for monitoring. We would certainly appreciate any help you can offer on this issue of monitoring.
