I have been studying the system for over six months. I have noticed some kinks detailed below which, however, do not affect the performance of my system in any way.
Of course, the list is not complete. And some things might have perfectly valid explanations.
The writeup aims to achieve two things:
a. Ideally, Victron can iron out the kinks;
b. Other users can avoid these pitfalls.
As background, I have the following equipment:
a. 12kW panels divided into three arrays
b. A 250/100 MPPT running 3.16 and two 250/70 MPPTs running 1.64
c. A Cerbo GX running 3.41 large
d. 800Ah of BSL batteries
e. A Quattro 10kva running 510
I have mains power connected but I largely run off-grid. I don’t use ESS.
1. Remote Console
1.1 Navigation arrows - My interpretation is that the arrows (they are not strictly “arrows” but we shall call them that for simplicity) point down when there are more items hidden below, up when there are hidden items towards the top, both ways when there are hidden items in both directions and none when all items are visible (see screenshots).
The problem is that this is not consistent. Sometimes, the direction of arrows signals something else. In the screenshots below, the arrows (or lack thereof) are misleading. There are extra menu items below but no arrow, and there are items both up and down but an arrow only pointing up. I have learnt to simply ignore the arrows.
1.2 Menu structure
Some menu items disappear under certain circumstances (see screenshots for the Bluetooth example).
This is confusing. I would suggest that the menu item remains but is greyed out if it can’t be used. A tooltip of why the item is greyed out would even be better.
2. Node Red
2.1 Number of nodes
The figure seems wrong. In my case, the number is always 84 whether I have one flow or 50 flows (see screenshot). There have been several restarts of Node Red and the Cerbo in between.
2.2 Safe mode
My system randomly enters safe mode and halts my flows. Making any superficial change to be able to “deploy changes” cures the system until another episode. Wash, rinse, repeat. Interestingly, the remote console continues to show “safe mode” even after multiple GX restarts but everything works normally.
2.3 Notifications - For some unknown reason, I and some other people don’t have the full notifications menu. See screenshot of what we should see.
I and other people tried the firmware the poster was using (3.50 beta) but that didn’t work.
4. VRM
4.1 Missing units - Some items are missing some units for no obvious reason. For example, on the VE bus summary widget, DC power has volts and amps but no watts. All other power items have volts, amps and watts (see screenshot).
You can’t get consumed Ah figure on the battery summary widget or the relevant custom widget (see screenshots and this thread for example: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/104914/consumed-amphours-not-showing-in-vrm.html).
Some people claim that you need a shunt to see Ah but that remains unclear. If you have loads and feed-in in watts, why can’t you get consumed Ah unless you calculate it?
4.2 Custom widgets - Some items have no data eg gateway load (I suspect this means computing resources in use as opposed to power load), Venus internal temperature and CPU temperature
5. Grafana
5.1 Queries - the order of some query parts matters when in theory it should make no difference. Dealing with multiple chargers, “instanceNumber” before “name” didn’t work but “instanceNumber” after “name” worked.
6. Assistants
6.1 Programming the relay using assistants is weird. Apparently, you can control the relay using “State of Charge (internal battery monitor)” (See screenshot).
It seems this doesn’t work unless you are using the charger/inverter to monitor SOC. Some say that the assistant uses your selected battery monitor. This didn’t work for me. Others claim that the vebus synchronizes its SOC with your battery monitor. This didn’t work for me either. Victron says to use the SOC from a different battery monitor, you must have the SOC option also activated in your charger/inverter. I didn’t try this as I learnt of it too late. (See screenshots and this thread for the debate: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/225401/pylontech-soc-based-ac-ignore.html and this: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/33253/soc-source-for-assistants.html and this: https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/65651/does-the-soc-assistant-condition-on-the-programmab.html ).
Note that your VE bus synchronization option might be elsewhere (see screenshot for example).
To avoid all this, simply control the relay using DC voltage. See screenshot for the right lithium values (thanks Paul B).
7. General
7.1 Make a consistent difference between no data, NaN, etc. Using Grafana, I get “no data” on the path “platform/Notifications/NumberOfNotifications” but using MQTT Explorer, I see “null” on the same path. I was expecting “zero”, “NaN” or something similar. Also compare the battery summary and system consumed Ah widgets above. One has “0.00 Ah” and the other “no data to display” when they are most likely referring to the same thing.
- I “stole” some screenshots from @M_Lange, @guystewart and @nickdb.
Fideri