please change consumed Ah to battery voltage, on this trend graph, and see if you can make the graph take more of the screen?
Seems like the change was ~8 days ago, but if anything the battery max voltages seem to be occasionally higher. I would inspect the battery cables from the battery, to the Smart Solar charger, for corrosion, tightness and any other cable damage or hot spots. any circuit resistance is going to prematurely increase the ‘battery’ voltage that the charger sees at it’s terminals, and both reduce charge current and bulk charge time.
I cleaned the terminals and no improvement. But, I conditioned two of the 4 batteries with a generator. The next day, a huge improvement. They were accepting 17a from solar and 30a from the alternator. The following morning, they were down -53ah at 89% SOC., but after 5 hours they had only reduced the negative ah to -51 and 90% SOC. (Probably because the controller was in Float mode.)
Does anyone know how to prevent the Solar Controller and Blue Smart charger from going into Float Mode so I can charge my batteries?
I am remembering a bug in the firmware where the controllers skipped absorption and went directly into float.
And that 85% figure is pretty close to the figure used by Victron for switching from bulk to absorption.
So you may well need to check that.
Quote from changelog.
Fix bug in the VE.Can synchronized charging mechanism. In systems with two or more Solar Chargers connected in a VE.Can network, the bug could cause the chargers to skip absorption every day. It only affected systems where the Solar Charger is running its own charge algorithm. Systems with a GX device, DVCC, and either managed batteries or a VE.Bus system were not affected. This bug was introduced with v3.15, released in January 2024.
Thanks for your reply. I only have one solar controller, so I don’t think that could be the problem. I am reading about the Re-bulk feature. My re-bullk settings are 0.4. My Foat voltage is 13.03 and charging voltage is 14.4.
From the Lifeline Tech Manual Ver. G; @77F; absorption voltage is 14.3VDC and float is 13.3VDC. Peukert is 1.12.
The three parameters that control SOC determination are:
Charged voltage; usually about 0.4VDC below absorption voltage
Tail current: 4% (0.04C) is a good starting point
Charged detection time; default 3 minutes works
When the charging voltage reaches the set point and the current is <= 0.04C and these conditions hold for 3 minutes, the BMV will sync to 100%.
The excellent Victron documentation more thoroughly describes the settings.
