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I have a sailboat with a Cerbo + Lynx SmartBMS + Victron batteries that is charged with high output alternators on the engines. It would be very nice to have an alarm when the batteries are fully charged so that I can turn the engines off.
I've dug through the docs and the Cerbo interface and can't find a way to have it alarm when it hits a certain SOC. It would also be great to have the display show an estimated time to full charge since the charge rate is pretty static. Anyone got any tips?
So just in case anyone else down the line has a similar issue I ended up solving it with SignalK + Grafana + Node Red (eventually for audible alarms, I hope) all on a Raspberry Pi
Its more of a boat based solution, but I use SignalK to pull in the boat data and also all the victron data through plugins. I can also then calculate the time til charged which I personally think is very useful. Then I can push it all to Grafana and generate nice graphs like the screenshot. The upside is that its on my own local network, so if I'm on limited internet in the middle of the ocean then I can still see a nice interactive control panel and not have to rely on VRM.
Hi @hoeken
If you're phone-oriented and using VRM, you could set an alarm there and have it emailed.
For something more local, have a look at the Generator Start/Stop function in the Cerbo. That can work from SOC, and output via a Cerbo relay. What you do with that signal then is up to you.
The estimated time to charge isn't calculated. Would probably be misleading for most people's systems anyway, and I don't recall that ever being requested..
Its a sailboat, so we don't have guaranteed internet so the VRM option doesn't work very well as an alert.
I think estimated time to charge would be about as useful as estimated time to discharge which also jumps around wildly as the load varies. Just a helpful estimate and not something super accurate.
Here you can use an assistant with VE Configure.
Have a look at the assistant "programmable relay (012c)".
The Settings are:
Relay: Use primary programmable relay
Action: Set relay off
Switch condition: State of Charge (internal battery monitor)
Extra drive options: when Bulk protection activated AND in case of a general system failure
Drive based on SOC: when SOC higher than 99%
What happens now:
The relay is always on (and the generator may run) unless one or more of the following conditions occur:
- The SOC reaches 100%
- The Multi switches to Bulk protection
- A system error occurs
In any of the three cases, the generator does not need to run, as the Multi will not charge anyway.
However, it makes more sense not to run the generator all the time and only stop it when the SOC is too high, but to only start the generator when the SOC is too low.
Here you use the assistant "generator start and stop (o15e)".
Relay: Use primary programmable relay to start generator
Relay polarity: Close relay to start generator
Options: start on state of charge
State of charge start: Start generator when the state of charge is lower than 30 %
Battery stop condition: state of charge higher than a certain level
stop condition (battery): Stop generator when state of charge is higher than 99%
Stop when AC available: The generator is stopped when AC1 is available
