Third party integration

Modifications
1

Hi,

is there a way to integrate a third party ev-charger (in my case a fronius wattpilot) to the victron system?
I am currently using the dynamic ees, but in combinatin with a thrid party ev-charger it is not working very good.

BR
Michael

2

Officially, the answer is no.

If you want to do some tinkering, there are 2 ways:

  1. Directly Venus→EVCS GitHub - vikt0rm/dbus-goecharger: Integrate go-eCharger into Victron Energies Venus OS as a acload (Wattpilot is just a rebranded go-e Charger)
  2. Indirectly via EVCC: GitHub - SamuelBrucksch/dbus-evcc: Integrate EVCC connected charger into Victron Ecosystem

I run EVCC everywhere, if you don’t know this brilliant piece of software, take a look at it.

BR,
Olli

3

But this does not support control of charging, only reading, if I understand correctly? So in my opinion, that does not make it very useful for victron.

I would like to have third party charger control in DESS, but victron does not seem interested in adding support for it.

4

Yes, you are absolutely right. None of the community scripts will enable PV charging control from the Victron side.
The simple reason for this is that there is no control mechanism for PV surplus within Venus OS. The Victron own EV charger product does all the calculations on the EV charger itself and it just pulls all the values via modbus from the Venus OS.

This is one of the reasons I recommend EVCC. It behaves just like the Victron EV Charger (pulling values from VenusOS) and then controls your third-party EV Charger. Sorry, but as long as Victron does not implement any of that logic themselves you will be stuck with external solutions.
In fact there used to an effort to run EVCC on the Cerbo itself, but it seems this project has been discontiued.

5

Yes, this can also be sub-optimal depending on how you define surplus.

If the battery is prioritized over the EV charger, then that can lead to extra charging and discharging. From solar to Victron and then from Victron to EVCS. While if the EV is available, you could have charged it directly.

In a recent video is saw some footage of the closed beta: EVCS and (D)ESS - summary of problems/improvement suggestions - #14 by langestefan

It seems that EV charging is coming to DESS this year.

That still leaves one more problem, namely third party charger support. The most promising way forward here to me seems support for OCPP in victron. Which Victron should add themselves, but they aren’t interested it seems.

Personally I am not a fan of EVCC because of their licensing, i do not want a subscription. On top of that it seems overkill to run with victron, when all we really need is OCPP support. (but yes, EVCC is awesome software nonetheless)