Victron Multiplus II 48/5000
Cerbo GX
GX Touch 50
2 x Victron Smartsolar MPPT 250/100
2 x Pylontech US 5000 LiFePo4 batteries
16 x 405 W sola panels at 20° angle (along the roof).
I have read this VE.Direct
and looks to be this is not possible?
According to this VE.Can
I can get this info from the CAN bus?
My aim is to be able to monitor the SOC and charge current over the winter and I suspect I do now have enough solar energy to keep a GSM router running 24/7 (plus there is the monthly SIM card charge) but I do have couple Blues Notecard Cellural IoT boards laying unused which have built in eSIM for ten years and which run on minimal current so I could trivially hook one to the serial port and with little more effort to a CAN bus.
All the Cerbo needs is internet access, then you can use the VRM portal. You can use the victron GSM modems, a generic usb modem/network adapter or provide internet access over the network port.
If your IoT cards provide either USB or network, then no further special work is required
The thing is that I have found no way to provide proper continuous internet access at the energy levels I expect will be available around Dec/Jan.
Given my latitude I theoretically can get about 800 Wh/day from my installation, not allowing for cloudy days or snow on the solar panels. Looking at solar statistics there can be as little as 24 hours of cloud free skies. In my experience a cloudy day produces only about 20% of the power I get an a bright day. And that is summer time when the sun is high up, in winter the sun is always very low.
The best GSM router I’ve found is around 8 Watts add a high efficiency inverter loss of 10 % and and call it 10W so we have 240 Wh of consumption not including Cerbo and friends.
Add to that the temps as almost always below freezing so no or very little charging of the LiFePo4 batteries takes place.
The Blues Notecard does have GSM functionality but that has limited data rate and does not allow for full internet access. This board idles at tens of micro watts level and only occasionally uses watt level power for a few milliseconds at time to talk to the cell tower.
The cerbo saves the statistics to its internal memory if theres no connection available, so you could activate the GSM modem once a day, or once a week to upload