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rasmus-christensen avatar image
rasmus-christensen asked

Blue Smart IP22 Charger bad design? Can't detect missing battery.

Hi

We have a boat with 3 batteries installed and are using a Blue smart ip 22, 3 outputs 30 amp for charging the batteries. A few weeks back one of our batteries were dead and could not be fixed. I bought a new and after a while another batteri failed. We then startet looking af batteri draining to understand why the batteries suddently dies. We found out that there was no draing and charger showed all good and did complete steps bulk, abs, flot and storage with no problems and stood in floating mode. Inspecting the charger a bit more i saw that the voltage did change when charging state changes from one to another but amp said 0. I measured this with the Victron app and also with an multimeter. I then tested with another charger which said instantly 25 % battery capacity and started to charge with a lot of amps. So why shows the Victron charger all good despite batteries are nearly dead?. I found out! A fuse near the terminals were blown. After replacing fuse, the charger started to work properly.

My question is therfore, why do the charger show that all is good when i fact its not working?
The problem is when you are on a boat, its very important to be able to trust you charger and batteries or else you could get in serious problems!


Is this really just a bad design or bad luck?

Regards

Rasmus


ip22
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2 Answers
Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image
Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) answered ·

It is the design of our chargers that if they do not detect a DC voltage (e.g. due to a blown fuse, or no battery connected at all) then they will create a DC voltage as a power supply.

This can be very useful, but can also lead to the issues you had here.

I would suggest that you get the Smart Battery Sense, and connect it to each of the battery terminals directly. This unit is intended to do what you want, monitor each battery specifically and individually.

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rasmus-christensen avatar image rasmus-christensen commented ·

Hi Guy

Thank you for answering my thread :-).

I believe that if there where some sort of error light "red", either in the app or on the charger it self.

A lot op people would not be confused and would be able to find this fault a lot sooner.

So for customers bying the ip22 solutions its also mandatory to buy the Smart Battery Sense to get a more trusted charging system?

I have 3 batteries should i then buy 3 Smart Battery Sense and would it work using 3 Smart Battery Sensors at the same time?

Best regards

Rasmus

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ rasmus-christensen commented ·

The Smart Battery Sense is to communicate an accurate battery voltage to you conveniently on your phone via bluetooth.

You would need one per battery in your system.

It is not mandatory, but an additional useful feature that the IP22 charger alone does not have.

In this case the Smart Battery Sense would not be used to communicate between the charger and the battery sense, but just to you on your phone to provide more data about your batteries to help prevent the situation that occurred.

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rasmus-christensen avatar image
rasmus-christensen answered ·

Hi Guy

Thank you :-).

I guess that only one of the smart sensors can be used by the charger and the others is just for monitoring the batteri through the app right?

I can see that you have changed the subject to:

Blue Smart IP22 Charger bad design? Can't detect missing battery.

There where always 3 batteries connected to the charger, its was a fuse blown that was giving misinformation in the charger and app.

Regards

Rasmus


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