I have a boat with two independent 120V 30 amp shore power inlets, two independent 120v load panels, and a generator with two 120V 3.6Kw outputs. The entire boat is single phase, no 240V.
I’ve installed two Quattro 48/5000 inverters, a 48V Epoch Elite bank with internal V2 victron coms/bms along with a small Epoch pro 12V “house/starter” bank, a group of 12V solar chargers, a group of 48v/12v DC-DC converter chargers, and a single cergo GX. All of it is Victron stuff.
Should I run the quattros independently or do they get configured as parallel even if each has it’s own independent shore, generator, and load panel?
How do I properly connect the VE bus and configure the inverters / Cerbo so that they are aware of each other as they are sharing a battery bank and Cerbo GX?
Or do I need a second Cerbo and basically have two systems sharing one battery bank, both using dvcc but not talking to one another?
If you run the systems independently, then you need 2x monitoring set up. i.e. 2 Cerbo GX.
I think that you would be best to run these as a bi-phase system - 120-0-120V.
You can then either continue to use your load panels as-is, or rewire them for 120-0-120.
On the shore power side, I would rewire this to include a 120-0-120 isolation transformer. This will give you best flexibility in hooking up to various shore power configurations.
This will also give better system flexibility, visibility and control.
How do I get these two independent inverters to share the same DVCC signal? My battery bank has an internal BMS with Victron V2 coms (five EPOCH V2 Elite 48V 100AH). When I run the BMS to Victron cable to one cerbo it sees it fine but how do I get that signal to the second cerbo?
Is this what you have for connecting the BMS to one inverter?
Seems to me that the VE-Bus (Multiplus/Quatro port) could be connected to both inverters using UTP cables, Cerbo’s not needed - in fact this V2 bms coms standard does not seem to be compatible with the Cerbo -though I’m open to correction on this issue…
No, the batterie’s BMS have a “victron out” cable that connects directly into the cerbo, it’s a cat5e with a different internal wire pattern. The only thing I needed to do was change the port speed of the cerbo to 500kb/s and it sees the BMS and activates dvcc. The problem is, how do I connect that signal to the second cerbo? Is there a mechanism by which multiple cerbos can “share” a dvcc signal from a single battery bank?
OK, so simpler then. You need a cerbo for each system, and the BMS -CAN data can be shared by connecting a standard UTP cable between the CERBO’s, or you can just connect the VE-BUS cable from one multi to the other.
Both Cerbo’s the re3ceive the same CAN data from the BMS, so should give the same DVCC data.
If you connect the VE-bus cable, then both Quatro’s will get the same DVCC data from one source, but I’m not sure how the GUI will react in this situation.
It may be necessary to configure the 2 Quatro’s as an ‘out of Phase’ pair. Then the GUI will react ok, but if one Quatro goes off, the other will too.
Ah, ok, great. When I connect on the VE-Bus, either by connecting the inverters or connecting the cerbos the two quattros lights flash, they beep, and the cerbos throw an “out of time” error. Does this mean that I need to change them to a pair out of phase? If so, where is that setting?
ok, to configure this, you generally need a lap top, a Mk3 and the VE system configurator software. I think that it can possibly also be done from a tablet, but never done it that way.
The software is a free download from the Victron site - VE bus configuration tools, but the Mk3 you may have?
ok, so the basic program is the VE-Configure, but for 2 inverters you need the “System configuration” program - which is different. This comes bundled with the VE configure program and some other stuff in a zip file from Victron. If you have the configure program, the you should also have the system configuration program.
