The system has grown a lot since my last update. In my never ending quest to get as much data on my solar dashboard as I can I’ve made some recent changes. First was to put in a Victron Cerbo GX in place of the Raspberry Pi. I was running into the USB port limitation of the Raspberry Pi. Additionally the new gui-v2 dashboard could not run locally on the Pi so it was time to upgrade to the new version of the Cerbo GX.
I have also added 2 320Ah batteries and upgraded a number of BMSes. The system now has 4 JK Inverter BMSes feeding into one of the Cerbo CAN ports. The other 3 batteries have the smaller JK BMSes coming into the Cerbo via USB with dbus-serialbattery. For some reason I’ve had a bit of an issue with these devices disappearing. I’m running them through an isolated hub so I’m not sure what the issue is there. Will have to look into this again at some point.
The second thing was I now have 7 MPPTs. 4 are 150/85 SmartSolar VE.Can MPPTs which are all now connected via the second Cerbo CAN port. This saved me 4 USB ports and expensive VE.Direct cables. The remaining 250/70, 150/35 and 100/20 are all connected via USB.
There was also the addition of 2 Victron Multiplus 24/3000/70 120 inverters set up to provide split phase power. These connect to each other and then to the Cerbo via VE.Bus rather than with the MK3 VE.Bus to USB adapter I used with the Pi.
Another recent addition is a Mopeka tank sensor. This has been a harsh winter and we ran out of propane twice so it was time to figure out how to monitor how much gas we have without having to go out and dig a path to the tank. Because the tank is so far away I ended up buying the Mopeka PRO+ Long Range Ultrasonic Wireless Propane Tank Monitor and the additional remote mag mount antenna. I was still getting intermittent signal at the Cerbo so I also added an external long range Bluetooth antenna on that end as well. After some calibration I now have the propane level reporting perfectly.
That’s really as far as I could go with Victron’s VRM but there was more I could do in the local VenusOS dashboards. In addition to my pair of 3000VA Multipluses I have a WZRELB 3000W split phase inverter. There is no way to integrate the Victron’s and the WZRELB together. They share the same battery bank but have to service different AC loads. In the past the data for the WZRELB was lumped into the DC Loads box. That was fine but I added a Victron Orion 24/12 70A voltage converter so I can run all my ham gear off the 12V rather than powering my Astron power supply via AC and then converting back to DC. So I wanted to see these values separately. I had an extra Victron Smart Shunt and recently learned that you can use it for many more things than just as a shunt. One of the options is to use it as a DC energy meter. This sounded perfect. Unfortunately there is no inverter option so you would need to use the generic source. But the generic source will not show on the Venus dashboard. However there are a couple of other options that do such as the wind
