We have a system on a boat in brief consisting of a Quatro, Cerbo GX and a generator. We have set the Cerbo GX to automatically start the generator based on SOC and Voltage, all works well during the day. At night to conserve battery power we turn off the Quatro at the Cerbo GX. The problem we have is that quite often the Cerbo GX will start the generator before we have got up and switched the Quatro back on, so the generator just runs free not charging the Lifpo4 batteries.
So the question is can we make the Quatro automatically switch on at a particular time or when it sees output from the generator ?
Hi @SimonHardy ,
When turning off the quattro, you can set it on “charger only” mode, this way it will charge.
You can also download and install the large OS version that allow to use node red. With it, you can add a programmation to turn on or off, but it won’t react to your genset if you don’t set the quattro to charger only.
If you want it to react, you could use the remote directly on the quattro to turn it off and turn it on with a relay that would trigger when genset is turned on.
There are different ways to achieve what you want. I hope I was clear enough ^^
Hello, I’ll try charger only tonight.
Hello again, yes that works. Shame we can’t automate it but we routinely turn the inverter of so putting in charger only mode at night and then in the morning switching to on is a workaround. How would programming a relay work ?
Instead of starting the gen directly from the GX, you could wire it through the Quattro and have the Quattro start it (via Assistants). And it can’t start it until you turn it on.
One annoyance there is that VRM will probably report it as running when it’s not. Maybe there’s a way to stop VRM assuming this - not everybody uses that GX function to start a generator…