My Orion XS is not charging my AGM engine battery. See the screenshots below, and note that it’s in Float with 0A and 0w, at 12.7v (in fact the battery is at 12.65v). I have Absorption set to 14.7, float to 13.8, and storage at 13.2. So it should never be 0A at 12.7?
Meanwhile the engine battery is too low to successfully start the engine, and I can’t get the charger to charge it.
Engine Shutdown Detection is disabled. I tried power cycling the Orion. The VE.Direct cable is not hooked up.
When I turn power off and back on again, it will briefly go into Bulk mode for ~15 seconds (bringing voltage to 14.3 or so) and then straight to Float as shown.
Update: I believe this is due to a bug in the firmware. Here is what I noticed. When I reset the Orion XS to factory defaults, then re-applied the identical settings, it immediately went into bulk as expected and began charging correctly. It has been working fine since.
Here is what I think: the issue started after I plugged in the VE.Direct cable to my Cerbo. As soon as I did this I encountered the 16.2V bug others have reported, so I disconnected the cable.
I believe that when the Orion XS was connected to the Cerbo, it changed some behind-the-scenes settings in a way that broke charging. Since these settings are not user accessible, the only solution is a factory reset.
This is a pretty major concern. Frankly with this and the other issues (showing up in VRM as alternator, 16.2v bug, etc) this charger should not be recommend to anyone charging from the House bank to Engine battery. It seems the Orion XS was designed to work strictly in the opposite direction (Engine to House).
From a thread on the main Community forum, we think we’ve identified the source of the issue. From the manual:
Error 67 - BMS Connection lost
This error shows when the charger is configured to be controlled by a BMS but does not receive any BMS control messages.
In that situation; the charger stops charging by reducing its output voltage to the battery base voltage (12 V). This is a safety mechanism, and the reason for still enabling the output is to allow a system to self-recover from a low battery voltage situation.
This error is only shown when the device is ready to initiate charging, not during “off” state. In case there is a permanent problem, the error will appear when willing to charge and clear when in “off” state, and so forth.
If the connection is lost, the charger will lower the output voltage to the base level15 secondsafter the loss. However, the error is displayed after 3 minutes to give the BMS time to reconnect and to avoid excessive error notifications.
In the VictronConnect app, the change to base voltage manifests as a transition from bulk directly to float mode. Once communication is re-established, the charger will return to bulk mode.
The bolded portion matches what I have observed, except that I never saw any errors or alarms raised.
There should be an Orion XS setting that exposes the “Use BMS” flag so the user can disable it.
I wanted to check and can confirm the behavior in regards to the settings. Let’s say you have a working configuration and decide to connect the VE.Direct cable for a brief moment and pull the VE.Direct cable again. The Orion XS will make the appearance as if everything is back to normal but in actuality some behind the scenes configuration applies of which you have no control. Only a factory reset and re-applying ones’ settings fixes it (and don’t plug in that VE.Direct cable again).
Great – thanks for sharing Matthias! This is helpful and gets us about halfway to what I would consider a “proper” fix.
I think the missing piece that would help is to expose the “Use BMS/DVCC” setting so that the user doesn’t need to perform a factory reset. And this might solve some of the other issues users are encountering like the 16.2v bug such that they could connect the VE.Direct cable to enable remote connection via VRM/Cerbo, but keep the Use BMS/DVCC setting OFF, thus avoid having the Cerbo control the charging behavior (which is where the odd behavior starts from).
Then the only issue left would be how the Orion XS shows up as an Alternator on Cerbo, and we would have 100% ideal functionality.
The reason is that there is no capability to specify which battery the Orion is charging. It just assumes (with no ability to override), that it’s charging the same battery that the Cerbo is monitoring.
For example, on my boat I have Lynx BMS with Cerbo monitoring my 600Ah house bank. And the Orion goes FROM house bank TO engine battery.
So if I connect Orion to Cerbo/DVCC, it automatically assumes the opposite — that I am charging FROM engine TO house. And this is where the reported “16.2v bug” comes into play, since it gets confused about voltages thinking the house is engine and engine is house. So it tries to raise voltage up to a maximum of 2v over the acceptance charge (14.2), and then stops charging.
It’s just a Charger. It has no clue what it’s charging. Whether the VE.Direct cable is plugged in is IMHO not a good enough signal to assume it’s charging the battery bank under GX control.
Case in point. It was suggested not to plug in the VE.Direct cable (old community) if the Orion XS is charging some other bank. But further up in this Thread (before the VictronConnect 6.08 release) it was suggested to try out the new 1.04 firmware that was only available over VRM. But this update path requires it to be plugged in. So there are clear benefits of having everything connected to the GX but it doesn’t imply everything is implicitly participating the “battery bank cluster”.
From my perspective the ideal solution to this would be for Victron to allow reverse charging through the Orion XS, such as Sterling Power do with their B2B chargers. This way you could connect the XS between your starter and house batteries as you have already and have it maintain your starter, and still operate to charge your house batteries when you have the engine running. If they get the firmware correct, the voltage/current/battery type parameters would be configurable in both directions.
I get that you may not be interested in charging your house batteries from the alternator (you didn’t say either way) but again, if they get the firmware correct, you would expect to be able to deal with that too.
Interestingly, I read a Victron post elsewhere saying that the hardware is capable of doing this, but the firmware just doesn’t support it. For the cost of the Orion XS (which is similar to the Serling Power products) you’d expect it to. Fingers crossed.
I have a non-standard charging configuration but want the ability to remote monitor the charger voltages/operations through VRM. I’d like to use the charger as if it was standalone, but monitor via VE.direct
