I have a new system with 3 Orion Chargers 2 running off of a 1030 ah agm bank and 1 running off a single agm start battery, these agm batteries are charged by 2 separate alternators.
They are all outputting to a 1840 ah lithium bank which powers all AC loads on the boat through 2 Magnum inverter chargers.
The Orions are connected to the recipient battery via a Lynx distribution bus bar approximately 4’ away using max size cable for the Orions.
When underway using engines and a light load on the inverters, all Orions are putting out a steady 50amps and voltage on the input side is 13.8-14 volts. Voltage on the receiving bank is obviously dependent on state of charge but during my tests it’s been at 13.5, these numbers are what is being reported by the Orions. When we load the inverters up beyond about 1600 watts total the Orions start to fluctuate the charge output radically jumping around from almost nothing to full rated and back over the period of a few seconds. The voltage on the input side does go up slightly to 14.1-14.2 when the output drops as I would expect but the output side remains at 13.5. All 3 Orion chargers exhibit the same fluctuations although not necessarily at the same time.
I have tried disabling engine shutdown detection, and input voltage lockout, I have also tried enabling DVCC and shared voltage sense with the BMS of the can bus battery controlling the chargers. Have also supplied ignition switched voltage to the H pin on the manual on off pins. None of these helped.
It’s fairly obvious that it something trigging it on the output / receiving battery bank. Someone on another forum suggested it could be ripple voltage caused by the inverters but I’m unsure how to test for or fix that and not sure why the Orions would care.
The runs from the Lynx to the inverters is fairly short and cabling is ample to keep the voltage at the inverters within .5 of battery voltage even at max load. As mentioned above the Orions are tied in to the Lynx distribution system which is mounted directly above the bank of 4 batteries so you could not get the Orions any closer.
Hi @lyle1223 I’m running into the exact same issue with a very similar setup - though I’m using 2 XS 1400’s along with a Quattro-II. Did you have any luck resolving this? Here’s my post.
Interesting. In my case, I’m already running parallel 2/0’s to the inverter and the distance is about 5’. Given that this exceeds victron’s recommendation and this is happening when the inverter is only partially loaded, I’m struggling to see how inverter cable size could cause the issue with the dc dc chargers, but thanks for the feedback. Will keep you posted if I figure this out.
Good to know I was suspect that it would make a difference, my inverter is very close but only single cable.
I have 3 Orions coming off two separate lead banks and they all do it. If I put a larger load on the inverter they shut down completely but at partial load, just under 50% they fluctuate like crazy.
Re-read your post again. Dang, you’re seeing this with an 1800ah lithium house bank. My theory was it is related to voltage stability on my smaller agm bank under load…shoot. Also not reassuring that you didn’t get a response from the community either or from Victron. Lame
I have tried that in charger mode and it did not help. I do have them throttled back currently as we are on a very long passage and I don’t want them in power supply mode constantly with full batteries and they are fairly stable.
One thread I was on said that it’s caused by ripple voltage on the inverter when it’s under load and that the Orion sees this momentary drop and shuts down to prevent discharging the supply side battery, given that the ripple voltage drops are obviously coming from the recipient batteries it doesn’t make sense to me that the Orion would care as long as the supply battery voltage is high enough to be charging. Unless these ripples are causing it to think the batteries are fully charged or something. It is definitely caused by the amount of load on the inverter, because at 0-30% load on my 3000 watt inverter I have zero issues, it’s stable at full 50 amps. At approximately 50% it starts wildly fluctuating and at anything over 75% the Orions shut down completely. I have tested this with multiple kinds of loads from water heaters to microwave to AC even a hair dryer at different heat settings.
Hopefully if enough of us complain about it maybe there will be a fix.
This is almost certainly DC bus transient instability under inverter load, not an Orion setting issue. When you step the inverter load up, the lithium bus is seeing fast voltage dips/ripple at the Lynx node. The Orions interpret this as input undervoltage unstable supply and throttle back, then recover hence the rapid cycling.
Because all three Orions share the same DC bus reference, they all react to the same event, just not in sync, which amplifies the hunting effect.
DVCC, ignition pin, and voltage lockouts won’t fix this because the problem is not charge control it’s input-side voltage stability under dynamic load.
Typical fix is improving DC bus stiffness (local capacitance / layout / reduced per-Orion load / sensing point accuracy) so the Orions don’t see transient dips during inverter step loads.
If I read it right it is similar to what I had read about ripple voltage from the inverters. The only part I don’t understand is that you say “The Orions interpret this as input undervoltage unstable supply and throttle back, then recover hence the rapid cycling” but I am using the Orions to charge the lithium bank from a lead bank that is being charged via alternators so the supply side, the AGM batteries, is not in any way connected to the bus bar that would see these unstable voltage fluctuations. These fluctuations would be seen on the output side of the Orions not the input/supply side.
I just finished installing 2 Epoch V2-T batteries charging under BMS DVCC control by the cerbo gx fed by two Orion XS 50a 12v chargers from the AGM engine start battery.
Under heavy inverter load from microwave (~1500w) the Orions immediately turn off. As soon as the microwave turns off and inverter draw drops, the Orions come on and provide a full 1000w+ of charging. During this behavior the input (start batt.) voltage is 14.5v and the house voltage drops to 13.2v (with target float voltage 13.5v).
I have installed 4/0 cable throughout with a 600a main bus bar. Otherwise the installation is working very well, but it’s obviously frustrating to be pulling the batteries down while running a heavy load with the engine running.
The instant shutdown under the microwave load really points at DC bus sag/ripple tripping the Orion’s input protections rather than a charger setting — Alf’s explanation above about bus transients covers the mechanism well. Even with 4/0 cable, try measuring the Orion input terminals right when the microwave kicks in; if it dips toward the lockout voltage, shortening the run from the bus or adding local capacitance near the charger usually calms it down. Worth a test before rebuilding the cable layout.
I made the video above requesting help on this topic. Providing some amount of offset between input and output current helped as long as inverter load was not too large. But it still persisted. The complete fix for me was I simply added a second 460AH battery to my test set up. This seems to indicate that it is likely DC ripple feedback. Adding a second battery smooths out that ripple effect even more. Wiring may cause it if the wiring is deficient IMO. But going to something like dual 2/0 to dual 4/0 will do little to fix this issue. If the wiring is sufficient in general, making it more sufficient is not going to be the answer. I am hoping Victron can simply add some better filtering for the Orion XS. I have had dozens of people contact me with the same issue and they have the battery bank they have and the wiring is sufficient.
Thanks so much Allen. I will back off the output current to 40 or 45a and see if that helps. I will also examine all the wiring with a thermal camera and make sure there isn’t a bad crimp or connection somewhere. Fingers crossed that victron can fix this with a future firmware update. Sounds like this is a common problem, and it really will have an impact on how we are able to use our system if it persists.