Hello,
I have a problem that I would like help with if possible. I have an EasySolar-2 GX 48/5000. It has been working fine for 2 years. Everything was cool.
I had some DC loads (2 Network switches, a NAS and 2 security cameras - 35-60w constant according to smartshunt) running direct from my battery for the past couple of months. That was fine but I wanted the unmonitored consumption to be included in the consumption data in VRM for the system. I purchased a SmartShunt 300 and installed it. I set it to Energy Meter - DC System mode and all seemed well the DC panel was showing the load in watts.
When I looked at the VRM the following day something was wrong. It registered no consumption at all during the night and the consumption during the day was an exact mirror of the solar energy yield. When I turned off “Has DC system” and looked again the system was registering AC consumption properly. Weirdly this same behaviour occurred about 6 months earlier before I had the SmartShunt at all. I just turned on “Has DC system” to experiment and the same behaviour occurred. As soon as I turned it back off everything returned to normal.
Hopefully I am not leaving out any essential information. Does anybody have any idea what is happening here? Perhaps it is something obvious that I am doing wrong.
NORMAL BEHAVIOUR BEFORE
WEIRD BEHAVIOUR AFTER
The 2 little blips of consumption at 3am-ish are when I temporarily turned off “Has DC system” and it started registering correctly again.
Thank you kindly
Do you have a main shunt that measures the battery? If not then i guess this would be the issue.
You can use your shunt to measure the battery, including what the EasySolar uses/produces. Then enable “Has DC system” to let the system calculate what the DC side uses. It will subtract/add what the EasySolar uses/produces from what the shunt reports, the rest is the DC side load.
To get that “rest” to show correctly/more precise, you can use an additional shunt as a DC meter. Looks like the main shunt is necessary for that to work though.
Hi,
Thanks for reply. The battery has it’s own shunt and BMS that feeds all that info(SOC, Voltages, Current, etc.) to the Victron over CAN bus. The SmartShunt as energy meter is only connected across the negative going to the DC loads. Have you seen or read about this same behaviour happening before? I can’t understand what it thinks it is doing; it doesn’t make sense to me but I am low on experience with Victron.
I have read around a bit since and phoned a friend of a friend who has done a few victron installs and I can’t find anything at all mentioning that a smartshunt as energy meter should be a second of 2 smartshunts. It doesn’t make sense either in my mind that the architecture should be that way. The installer said once your battery already has a shunt and BMS that is reporting properly to the GX then you should be fine. He has never seen or heard of the behaviour mine is displaying before.
Does anybody have any useful information or suggestions, I don’t fancy being the proud owner of a €75 paperweight.
This is roughly my layout (minus fusing etc.)
So thats what i meant with
Since in the Shunt manual, the DC energy meter example also shows a main battery shunt
While yes you have a smart battery with its own internal measuring, but its very well possible that the DC energy meter function only works correctly if theres a main battery shunt also.
Is the shunt configured as “DC system” in its details page? Or did you choose some other category?
Hi,
Yes as I said originally it’s set up in Energy Meter - DC system mode and the DC display panel is displaying the loads correctly.
I knew what you meant and I have seen those diagrams but I presumed that the diagrams function was to illustrate the two separate uses of the smart shunt and how they can work together in one system. It doesn’t suggest anywhere that you cannot use one as a standalone energy meter. Yes of course it is entirely possible that it is the case but it seems very unliikely that (1) it wouldn’t be mentioned anywhere in documentation and (2) that it would make sense to engineer it that way. Surely the smart shunt in the diagram as battery monitor is only necessary when you are using raw batteries without that inbuilt functionality?
In everything I have read myself in trying to understand this (victron documentation and forum posts) I have not previously seen anyone suggest this to be the case. I have asked an installer (it’s possible he is incorrect of course) and he reckons once the GX is properly receiving information over can from the battery that this setup should work fine. I appreciate your guess and I know it is possible to be correct but I have no way of testing it without dropping another €75 + €15 for VE.DIRECT cable and altering wiring (possibly unnecesarily) so I was hoping somebody would have something better than a guess if you understand where I am coming from. I imagined someone might know for a fact what is happening or have seen or read about the behaviour mine is exhibiting.
Thanks and kind regards
- For what it’s worth I have run my exact setup by ChatGPT and Gemini also just now and both stated that I do not need a second Victron smart shunt and that a single unit is capable of running as a standalone energy meter IF my battery is reporting SOC, volatage, current etc. properly over CAN to the GX (which it is). This seems to mirror what the installer advised me. I’m still confused about what is happening.
I would expect the same thing. But yes, its not clearly stated one way or the other.
My initial answer was due to not knowing that the battery itself reports data, so by not having a main shunt in the system, then the behaviour could be explained. To be fully honest i would still expect it to work bette than just counting MPPT and DC energy together.
Its possible that this is solely a VRM issue, since thats where the discrepancy shows up. On the GX it seems to work just fine
Yes maybe it is just a VRM issue but whatever it is means that the entire purpose of me buying the smartshunt is not being achieved. It’s registering the loads just fine in real time but badly messing up the graphing data completely as soon as it is activated. Also very strange that it exhibited this same behaviour even before the smart shunt was installed when “Has DC system” was turned on. At that stage I thought it was just because of the lack of smartshunt but apparently not. Very frustrating.
I can’t help but wonder is there just some setting change somewhere that could fix this glitch but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I’ll keep trying anyhow.
