question

Wire the switch contacts on the Orion so it switches on and off with your ignition.

I just installed an Orion Tr Smart 12/12-30 (non-isolated) in my 2016 Tundra/camper. This vehicle does have a smart(ass) alternator. I experienced similar mysteries with the charging behavior. I just did a week long trip, and learned a lot. After a lot of tweaking, I found settings that seem to work really well.

First off, I have a lithium battery. This is a critical factor In setting the voltages.

I had the same experience, where the charger seemed to back off on the power way too early. What worked for me was to set the absorption voltage higher, in my case to 14.1V for the lithium battery. This is a bit below the typical lithium absorption voltage (14.2V), but way above what the vendor (Discover Battery) specified for the absorption voltage. I wonder if your Orion is going into absorption mode even though it says it is in bulk?

To get a handle on the absorption voltage setting, I watched the BMV state-of-charge and the battery voltage, to see the voltage at which the battery reached 95% SOC. This matched my absorption voltage setting pretty well.

Also, are you sure that you don’t have a “smart“ alternator? I would expect a modern vehicle like a 2016 Tritón would have one.

Somewhere on this forum someone mentioned that when the Orion sees a voltage close to the “start” voltage, it goes into a mode where it starts to ramp down the charge current. I don’t think that this is well documented in the manual. Also, its not clear if this is the voltage under load, or the measured open circuit, but I believe it is the former. Since I have a long circuit run (~50’ round trip), with 6AWG wire, I’m going to get a voltage drop of around 0.6V. I set my start voltage 12.8V, and that also helped keep the current levels high for a reasonable time.

So, for my system, bumping up the absorption voltage and lowering the start voltage made the Orion perform as I expected.

Another thing. I think it is much better to look at the power reading on the BMV, rather that amperage. This takes voltage out of the equation. The Orion is a 360W rated device, and so it was much easier to understand the Orion output as it related to changing the battery.

After all was said and done, after about half an hour the power output of the Orion still moved all over the place. I found when I first started up the vehicle after a long winter night, the BMV would report an input of 450W, way above the rating of the Orion. But this would taper down to 360W in a few minutes. I would get a good healthy output for (say) the next half hour, and then it would fluctuate between 200W and 360W. I can’t explain this, since the Orion is essentially drawing from the starter battery, which should be able to provide all of the wattage that the Orion wants.

Overall, with these tweaks. I was able to get the Orion to rapidly charge my lithium battery in dark winter conditions, which is why I installed it. But I think that there is a lot of mysterious and magical logic in the Orion firmware that is not documented.

Sorry for this long screed, but perhaps it will be helpful.

I followed this post https://community.victronenergy.com/questions/79387/remote-ignition-switch-wiring-confusion.html They had the same issue.

I tested this today and indeed it does work as expected and my tests confirmed as theirs did that the h remote wire connected to the ignition does turn charging when the engine is on and off when it is turned off.

I am curious why this isn't in any of the options in the installation manual.