I have a 24volt victron setup I purchased for my tow behind trailer. Components are roughly as follows:
SOK 24v 150ah battery.
Victron Multiplus II 24/3000 120Vx2
600 watts of solar connected to 150/35 SmartSolar MPPT
Orion DC-DC 24/12-70
XS 1400 (for charging 24Volt SOK from vehicle)
Ekrano
GX LTE modem
Starlink
Lynx Class-T power in
Lynx M10 Distributor
This trailer will almost never see shore power. So I will be running off mainly solar with occasional charge from vehicle. Winter climate as well so solar power generation won’t always be the best. The multiplus II will always be doing inverting as well to keep items like victron comms, starlink, router, network switch (which powers cameras) active. This is my first setup to this level of equipment so it will be interesting to see how well solar can keep this system up and running 24/7.
Now that I have that covered, here is my actual question:
I want to add a setup to maintain batteries on my powersports vehicles that I will have in trailer. I total of 4 12volt batteries between snowmobiles and ATVs. I want 4 independent charging banks and ideally want it to be Victron so I can have the charging data and setup integrated into the Ekrano and Victron Connect. So I guess this forces me to a charger with ve.direct so it can report info to ekrano so I can remotely view it?
Unfortunately costs skyrocket once you get into a ve direct charger. So I might have to limit to just one charger versus 4 and just charge each vehicles battery one at a time.
Since I need ve.direct to view remotely…this basically this narrows me down to XS1400’s or go the 120v route and use IP43’s. But when I step up to IP43 all the cost savings of going with 120v charger vs dc-dc charger goes out the window. Essentially zero cost savings for the most part going with IP43’s plus i’d also be wasting battery energy converting 24v to 120v then back to 12v. So why bother. )
Another problem however in finding a solution is the IP43 lowest current in bulk mode that I can set looks be around 7.5amp I think which is pretty steep for ATV batteries which are only 5ah. IP22 and IP65 can go lower but no ve.direct to view remotely.
So this basically leaves me with just the XS1400. It for sure would be more efficient vs AC charger and also can go as low as 1amp output current. However, it is not isolated. I believe I need isolated charger in this application being that vehicle batteries are grounded to vehicle frames and will not be grounded to the trailer frame that the 24volt trailer battery is grounded to.
So now what do I do?
Really wanted to be able to connect all 4 vehicles batteries independently over the winter to victron and be able to monitor them remotely without spending $1400 on chargers to have 4 ve.direct units.
Is there a way to pull this off with ip22 or ip65s or another dc-to-dc charger that can somehow be made to let me view charging and battery info remotely and on ekrano panel? My assumption is VE smart charger like the IP22 can’t communicate directly with the Ekrano, which means I can’t view the IP22 remotely?