The Help system, manuals, and even this Victron Community system is in bad shape. A few examples:
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To enter a new topic, I have to select two tags, one of which is for the product. The Cerbo product is not even listed, so I had to choose “not-listed”.
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Victron uses separate login credentials for the Victron Community and the Victron Remote Monitoring system. C’mon, man!
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My real beef: the online manual and other online resources bear zero relationship to the screens, menus, and icons in the actual VRM website. For example, I want to set an alarm for my fuel tank level. The online manual, section 6 “Alarms and monitoring” says “The Alarm rules setting can be found under Settings → Alarm rules”. Point number 1 – how do I get to “Settings”? The VRM home page does not show a Settings menu item. It shows “Preferences”, but that choice leads to nothing about alarms. From the home page, if I click on my installation, I do see a Settings item. Lesson: the manual should give a complete path to a menu, starting from a knowable starting point.
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To continue, now that I find the place to set an alarm, I do it. This takes me to the “Alarms for [installation number]. At the bottom, it shows “Alarm notification settings per user” with an info icon next to it. The icon pops up “In your VRM User Profile, make sure to enable either email notifications, push notifications, or both.” That sounds pretty important, so I try to find “User Profile” or “VRM User Profile”. In the online manual. I use the Search tool and enter “User profile” (without the quotes). That gets me “How does the screensaver work” and “Activation”. Doing the search with quotes shows only a single result – the screensaver one. So I guess I have to read through the manual. Which I do…
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Section 6.8.2 of the manual purports to explain “How to set up web push notifications in a browser”. The steps are:
- Login to your VRM account in a web browser.
- Click on ‘BACK’ in the top left.
- Click Preferences and then click Notification.
- yadda yadda
It does NOT give the url for the “Login to your VRM account” web page. So I Google that phrase and get vrm (dot) victronenergy (dot) com/victron-connect-login (pseudo url necessary because new users can’t enter more than two links).. The page title is “Login to VRM” and it shows me as already logged in. There is no “BACK” item (of course) and using the browser’s back arrow just takes me back to the Google search page. There is, however a “Cancel” button at the top right of the Login to VRM page. When I click that, it takes me to the Dashboard for my installation. At the bottom left is an icon for Logout. So I click that, and it takes me to vrm (dot) victronenergy (dot) com/login. I click enter my credentials and click “Login”. I’m back at the dashboard for my installation. There is nothing on the screen that says or suggests “BACK”, so I try my browser (Chrome) back arrow. This, of course, takes me back to the vrm (dot) victronenergy (dot) com/login login page, on which there is no “Preferences” link. So I return to the dashboard page where I have previously noticed a “Preferences” icon. I click that, and a sub-menu appears with “Notifications” on it. At last! I slide the toggle for Web push notifications, and up pops an Error message telling me to go to my browser’s permission settings and enable notifications for this site. I go into Chrome add vrm.victronenergy.com to the list of “Allowed to send notifications” list. I return to the VRM site and try the slider again. Same Error pops up. Maybe I need to log out and back in again. This I try. No joy – same error. Maybe I have to close and re-open Chrome. Or restart my computer. Or buy a new computer. Or make a court application to change my name. Or go into the witness protection program and get a new identity. All of which I will try, but that means I will lose this posting unless I post it first. Which I will do. Hopefully I will be able to return in a few minutes to report on my success with those curative steps. But I wouldn’t count on it.