I’m in the process of putting together my system this week which comprises of
Multi RS 2 tracker 450/100
Cebro Gx
Pylontech Us5000 48v 15 cell
Canadian p455w panels 7 for now on one tracker
Mains Grid Supply to topup /charge / assisted load only .
Been lurking here reading up on lots of threads , Manuals etc which is an amazing source of information.
Two questions have cropped up initially which I would be grateful for any guidance.
The location of the sytsem is/will be located in a remote building 60 meters away shielded from the house via concrete structure. No chave of the Cerbo picking up the house wifi . No chance of ethernet cable being installed. So was thinking along the lines of a directional external antenna located on the outside of the remote building directed at the house to pick up the house wifi , plug a USB dongle into the Cerbo Gx. Unscrew the detachable antenna from the USB dongle and plug in the replacement directional antenna .Anyone done this or got another solution ??? , The 3 dongles victron suggest in the online manual don’t have a removable antenna I think
Regarding the Cerbo Gx Mark 2 ( arrived today) firmware and the Pylontech battery BMS i’ve read tons of the threads regarding the latest firm ware release , think it is 3.52 from memory and the floating Battery settings. Whats the latest advise is it firmware setting or an override setting within the Cerbo.
Hope that makes sense and look forward to many weeks of confusion
Then your cerbo would be (from its perspective) connected to a wired network, which IMHO is more stable than using USB dongles and extension cables for the antenna.
I attach a pic and of your suggestion and how it would work … mount ariel outside outbuilding and run an ethernet cable for their little adaptor to the cerbro…
Are you able to receive a wifi signal from the house to your phone if you’re standing outside of the concrete building?
If you are (might be a stretch depending on how good your house wifi is) then a simple extender like above should work just fine for you. If the house wifi doesn’t reach out that far, you will have to either try moving/upgrading the house router to reach as far as the building or go to a P2P (bridge) directional antenna to shoot it over to the outbuilding.
At the Cerbo end, run a Ubiquiti nanostation - about $80, really good product and we’ve deployed probably 100 of them. You can power it from an AC POE adapter, but if you want reliability, run it from the battery (with a 48->24v DCDC, or you might find a 48v version of the Nano). That way when you do firmware updates on the inverter that drop the AC, you won’t lose connectivity. Mount the nano on anything, we often use 40mm PVC pipe, nothing fancy as the angle doesn’t matter and literally anything will work, even hanging it in a tree or taping it to a window.
Pair that up with another nano at the house end, powered by POE over the same cable that provides the nano with data (so you only have one cable to deal with). The nano has a wide beam, so it can be aimed by eye. They go a few km, so 60m is no problem.
We have set up this solution in remote locations over hundreds of meters, sometimes kms, and its very stable. Its really nice when the solar system is a 24v - then you don’t need the DCDC, you can run straight from battery.
I’m familiar with Ubiquiti, so i use it, but almost all the players have easy-to-pair radios for this kind of hop.
You won’t get much joy from wifi extenders - some work, most are frustratingly unreliable. When i was in IT, we replaced a lot of them with structured cabling or dedicated pairs of radios like i’ve described.
