Off-grid 48V Telecom setup without an inverter - is it possible?

DIY
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Hi Victron Community,

I am designing a 48V off-grid system for a remote telecom tower. Because the telecom equipment accepts 48V DC directly, I want to completely omit the inverter to maximize efficiency and keep the system simple.

My planned equipment:

  • SmartSolar MPPT

  • 48V Battery Bank

  • Cerbo GX

My Questions:

  1. Is it possible and reliable to run this as a pure DC system without an inverter using only these components?

  2. My customer wants to be billed for their energy consumption in kWh (similar to a standard AC utility bill). Since this is a pure DC system, how can I accurately measure, track, and export the energy consumed in kWh using the Cerbo GX/VRM for billing purposes?

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Add a Smart Shunt as a Load monitor to the 48V loads. You might not need this if your battery is a Lithium one with CAN bus BMS, the BMS and solar monitoring will make a reasonable calculation of what is going to the load - you need to enable “Display DC Loads” in Settings/System Setup.

The Dashboard may still show an inactive inverter box, but that doesn’t matter.

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