Purchased and installed about 8 months ago. It seems to work just fine… Yesterday we got 41° and again no problem…
This morning at 7am the air temperature was around 27° according to my other thermometers around the house, but the Victron Smart battery Sense says it is 35° since 3am and it hasn’t moved since… Now the temperature is 32° but victron still says 35°… It is broken?
Not sure what to do as there are no settings to check other than the two LED… Should I disconnect it as it giving the wrong information to the MTTP now by more than 8° ?
My understanding is that the battery sense is connected to the battery terminals . The temperature there can be different from the air temperature, depending on what the batteries are doing.
If that’s the case this would be the first time in 8 months that there are such differences between the reading of the Victron and all the other thermometer…
The Victron was always around 1° to 2° less than the others, never 8° higher…
Even now the temp is around the 28° and the Victron is still on 37°
Is the Victron the only brand we can use to bluetooth to the MPPT? I wouldn’t mind to pay even a bit more to get something a bit more accurate. I bought it to protect the batteries, and I guess at 9° higher that the real temperature, it is doing a great job. I’m just afraid it may start to go in the other direction..
Question. If it fails completely, does the MTTP temperature sensor takes over and still adjust itself to compensate?
No, the bluetooth can’t affect the sensor. What I ment, that maybe the bt was stuck…
But to get back to your problem - you use the sensor to monitor the outside temperature?
If yes, why do you want to know the outside/ambient temperature to steer the MPPT?
The only reason is to monitor the battery temperature is to either adapt the temp coefficient for lead batteries or to stop charging for LFP batteries.
So if you measure the battery temperature, why do you compare it to the ambient temperature then?
Two more questions. Is the sensor connected and powered by the battery and how and where is is mounted? Does is have a “good” (plane) contact to the battery?
The Victron Battery sense is installed correctly, and I’m not using it to monitor outside… (not sure what you mean by this?!??)
It has been working fine until yesterday. If there is no way to reset it, I could easily get a replacement, but as I previously mentioned I was wondering if there is a better option on the market. I don’t care if it cost more as long as it is a quality product…
As the MPPT is in the same location, it is not really imperative that I have a battery temperature sensor attach to the batteries, but I’m a sucker for gadget, so I got one to see if there was much difference in temperature reading..
Now that the little fella seems to have failed, it seems a good time to find out if there are better options for another gadget, as I wouldn’t really trust again the same little thing even if replaced under warranty…
The SBS can only be reset by a hard reset, so remove energy supply for a moment and then reconnect it. You can chek for updates and install one if there is something available. But that’s all.
If it still behaves strange (mean it shows a different temperature then your other “reference” sensor), then I would say it is defective. As far as I know there is no other sensor in the market to controll the MPPTs from victron directly. If you would use a GX device (Cerbo, RasPi,…) then there are other possibilities.
Thanks Jetlag, today I will try to disconnect it and see if resetting it will make a difference…
In the meantime, this is what I find out… If you remove the Victron Smart Battery Sense from the VE. Smart network, it automatically goes down about 3° ( not instantly but within a few seconds). If you then turn off the option in the setting (Instant readout via Bluetooth) it goes down another 2° or 3°…
So it seems that the Bluetooth when connected does add several degrees to the actual real temperature of the batteries
Not sure if this has anything to do with the latest firmware update, or is still a faulty unit, but perhaps someone at Victron could/should check this out…
Are you saying your SBS device is not mounted on the battery attached by its sticky pad? If not that would be the problem as it’s supposed to be measuring the temp of the actual battery, not the ambient air around it. That critical bit of information is then sent to your MPPT controller via VE Smart Networking so it can, if need be, adjust the charging voltage. A change in ambient air can change much quicker than that of a battery.
No, no one is saying that here… Also it is not that critical as the MTTP already has a built-in temperature sensor, so as long as the MTTP and the batteries are in the same location, you don’t really need the SBS. Pity there is no way of having a reading of the MTTP temperature in real time, like with the SBS installed…
That does bring me to ask again the same question..
Does anybody here know if, in the event of the SBS failing, the MTTP automatically switches again to the sensor onboard?? I presume it does, but it would be nice to know for sure..
