I’ve had my MultiPlus working fine for the past two years. I’ve had it configured in “solar mode” since last summer, where the charger sits idle until the battery gets to a low point or I hit “Charge to 100%” on the cerbo.
Last night I hit charge to 100% and it started charging like normal. This morning, I happened to look at the VRM and realized that it was running the inverter and acting like there was no power from shore.
I disconnected the shore power input via the breaker in my boat, then reconnected. The charger would start up, start to ramp up, then declare no shore power again.
To get to the current state, I configured the device to be in charger only mode in the cerbo, made sure it was not in charge to 100% mode, shut everything down, including flipping the hardware switch on the front of the multiplus to off mode and then back to on mode. Then I added the DC loads back to the system one by one.
I’ve got a Lynx Smart BMS 500A between the Multiplus and the batteries. None of my devices produced any errors in the Cerbo or VRM.
What should I be investigating as to why the charger is not working?
The Multiplus has been running in “sustain” mode for the past day, with the refrigerator being the largest power draw. The BMS reported low state of charge early this morning and appears to have stopped the draw from the batteries at the current level. The Multiplus has been supplying the power for the DC system and passing through AC for various devices I have running in the boat.
The display saying that the battery is Discharging seems like it’s primarily because of the current solar power yield since the Lynx BMS reports the battery as Idle. It’s good to know that in this condition, I’m taking advantage of the solar panels and reducing the output from the Multiplus.
My next step is going to be hitting the button to “charge batteries to 100%” and see what happens.
The Charger high temperature alarm needs to be sorted first… This will stop all charging and leave the inverter in pass through mode.
If the ambient temperature is cool, then this may indicate an internal fault - possibly a fan failure. Try an external cooling fan to see if the fault clears.
The charger issue should be dealt with at some point, but it’s an entirely different device and not part of the current problem. It’s a dc-dc charger that takes input from the alternator and charges the lithium house batteries when the diesel is running.
It is important to be clear about your issue when posting. Very little in your post discusses an Orion charger, it is multi focused. You will confuse people if you don’t document your issue correctly.
When I got back to my boat I could recognize that the refrigerator was starting and stopping and the cerbo screen was getting rebooted. I turned off most of the dc loads, disconnected the AC input on the multiplus. Made sure the multiplus was in sustain mode, connected the ac input, looked at the screen for a while. It was sitting and looking normal except for the low battery warnings. I then went to the screen to tell it to charge to 100%, then quickly went back to the overview page. I saw the shore power start to ramp from the idle power of 27 watts to 97 watts, then I heard a relay click at the multiplus and the screen says shore power disconnected.
I’ve taken the front cover off the multiplus and there’s no obvious blown fuses or melted devices, but it’s sitting with the error light on now.
Id check for loose/bad connections on the AC input. Its possible that you get 120V without load, but when applying a load/charging with the MP, the input voltage drops below the minimum threshold, letting the MP disconnect
