Hi all (and especially Victron staff on the forum who may be aware of future Venus OS or VRM updates),
I have 2 non-paralleled Multiplus-II that are connected to a Cerbo GX (one through the VE.Bus port, the other through an MK3-USB interface). Everything works really well and it’s awesome to be able to control both multis from the Cerbo GX’s GUI and VRM.
The only thing that I would like, though, is the energy measurement in the VRM portal to only integrate power on one of the Multis rather than sum both inputs and outputs.
In an ideal world (my ideal world ), it would be possible to select either in VRM or in the Cerbo GX GUI which multis should be included in the energy computation measurement. For example a page with check boxes next to each multi of the installation. They would be ticked by default but any unticked multi would be ignored in the power integration.
Is it something that may be implemented in the near future, or even very near future? I am not sure if it is a Venus OS or VRM thing (my money is on VRM …).
Note: I know I could achieve that by adding a Cerbo or a Pi Zero on the 2nd Multi but not only that means additional hardware and complexity, but more importantly this removes the convenience to control the 2nd Multi from the same dashboard and same VRM install.
Thanks in advance for your insights !
guystewart
(Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager))
2
Sorry if this is disappointing news, but the configuration you have there with two VE.Bus multiplus connected via different interfaces is already quite on the edge of what is supported.
There are many limitations with that configuration, and as far as I know there are no plans to improve support for it.
I know it doesn’t help you in any way, but the VE.Can based Multi RS have a better solution for this that enable more features for independent Inverters on the same GX device.
I know this type of configuration was indeed not really supported but in the end I found that the support was really good, allowing to control and monitor the 2nd multi and seeing all its data in VRM. Yes there are a couple of limitations on control but they are easy to work around with assistants.
Given the support largely exceeded my expectations, I thought it would make sense to ask if a small improvement on the post-processing side could be made …
I won’t hold my breath then, but in case the idea can be floated around to Victron software engineers and it sees the light of day at some stage I would be very happy to be able to select which multis should be included in the power computation (and total input current limit) displayed on VRM.
In the meantime I’ll probably just do the integration of power over time myself locally as in the future I am going to need to retrieve data from the Cerbo via modbus.
The Multi RS looks awesome, I didn’t know about that device. This one would not work on my application (not using 48V, and less than 80V DC on solar) but if in the future the Multi RS range is extended I think would be glad to have lighter and quieter tech onboard.