We are encountering a critical issue in one of our projects involving a Victron system, and we would

Q&A and troubleshooting
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Dear Victron Support Team,

We are encountering a critical issue in one of our projects involving a Victron system, and we would greatly appreciate your support in identifying and resolving the root cause.

  • Project: Wicpower Project

  • Inverter: Victron 5 kW inverter

  • System Components: MPPT, CBox, and a battery cluster (all battery packs connected in parallel)

  • Monitoring Platform: Victron Remote Monitoring (VRM)

Customer feedback indicates a major issue with BMS data reporting on the VRM platform. As shown in the attached screenshot, the system at one online site (PG0257) reported abnormally high daily energy consumption, such as 486 kWh on June 10th. This implies a continuous 24-hour load of ~20 kW, which is clearly inaccurate — the actual site load is approximately 1 kW.

To investigate further, we downloaded the historical kWh data from the Advanced tab on the VRM platform into Excel for analysis. The data clearly shows that the error originates from the battery data provided by the BMS. For instance, as shown in the attachment, the “Battery to Consumer” value suddenly jumps from a typical 0.1–0.2 kWh to 33 kWh in just 15 minutes, which is impossible given that the site load never exceeds 1 kW.

We have also observed similar anomalies in the “Grid/Solar to Battery” values in some cases. These errors significantly impact all related energy metrics.

Accurate energy reporting is mission-critical for this project, as our customer must generate daily and monthly performance reports for submission to the end users.

For the first five sites, we were forced to manually correct the errors in Excel for every 15-minute interval, which is already extremely time-consuming for a single month’s worth of data.

Scaling this to 70 sites on a regular basis would be unsustainable.

Based on our observations, it appears the issue may originate from the BMS system, as Victron’s system relies on BMS data for energy reporting and consumption calculations.

We kindly request your help to:

  • Investigate this issue thoroughly

  • Confirm whether this is a known bug or fault in the BMS firmware

  • Advise if there is a local firmware or configuration update we can apply to resolve it

We have attached the relevant Excel file exported from the VRM platform for your reference.

Thank you very much for your assistance. Please feel free to contact me should you require any additional information or diagnostic data.

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Hi, Are you using a bms thats supported by the victron system?

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@jeking Please note

Welcome, please read the Victron Community Guidelines here first!

This Community is predominantly volunteers, and the vast majority of the answers are provided by enthusiasts. It is not an Official Ask Victron site, for that please use the normal line of support.

Have you considered approaching your Victron regional sales manager given the scale of the acticipated project to help where possible with such incidents?

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It’s my understanding that in general, BMS current monitoring is notoriously bad. Also it’s unclear how you are aggregating BMS data from multiple batteries. Have you considered a Shunt? If you were aggregating, with so many batteries, that’s a lot of points of failure. A shunt means a single point of truth.

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Jumping the battery voltage from 55 to 54 Volt and some minutes later back to 56 Volt within one minute is highly suspicious. What chemistry and what BMS do you use? How is the SOC calculated?

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This is not a supported battery and as per the guidance on unsupported batteries, will require support from the battery’s dealer or manufacturer.

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If you have only AC consumers, powered by the inverter, try to do the plotting/analysis based on the power or current reported by the victron inverter and not the battery’s BMS and see if it’s the same.

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Thank you for your reply. Our system has DC loads directly connected to the DC_BUS. We really hope we are not the first ones encountering this situation!

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Do you have a BMV-712 or SmartShunt set to Energy meter and type DC System directly measuring the DC loads rather than relying on the GX device calculations.