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jmustac avatar image
jmustac asked

How to record battery consumption?

I have an mppt solar charge controller which gives me lots of info regarding soar cell performance, and I have the bmv-712 battery monitor but that doesn't seem to give me any recorded daily data. I am trying to investigate why my solar panels don't appear to be keeping up with the load, and over time the batteries are running low. I was hoping to be able to analyse the daily drain on the batteries. Any advice on how to treacle this would be great. Warning I'm new to this whole solar world...

Thanks

monitoringbattery capacity
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3 Answers
Paul B avatar image
Paul B answered ·

Have a look at the solar history on the connect app this gives you the last 30 days of high battery voltage and low battery voltage

so you can then see a trend of the voltages going lower as days go by and or when it last was fully charged this is the Absorbtion voltage being reached. as a high voltage reading

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markus avatar image
markus answered ·

Hi @Jmustac,

have you heard of VRM?

https://vrm.victronenergy.com/landingpage

You could use it with a Venus Device or even for free, with VenusOS installed on a RaspberryPi.


Regards,

Markus


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jmustac avatar image jmustac commented ·

Thanks Markus, i do like the idea of this item; will check it out further.

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jmustac avatar image
jmustac answered ·

Thanks Paul,

I have looked at the solar history details, but perhaps you can help me understand the data points? The yield, P max and V max appear to be the output of the solar panels. The battery min & max probably relates to the connected battery. There is a Consumption (Wh) figure which i am guessing is the load on the connected battery, which is my fridge and other bits operating during the day. The confusing thing for me is that is see the minimum battery figure drop on some days to 10.5v however those days don't show a corresponding consumption, its has zero.

I am trying to determine why my battery is running down with only the fridge connected during the week when i am not using the boat. I thought i had plenty of panel capacity even to cover the coming winter months. So trying to understand the collected data and not sure i am reading it correctly.

In the last 30 days the batteries have only reached absorption 3 times, the rest it stays in bulk, which i think is a worrying sign.

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