I have a MultiPlus C12/1600/70 and 200AH LiFePO4 battery system in a caravan. When not travelling, the caravan lives in a shed so solar panels provide no charge and I leave the MultiPlus running in charger mode. I have some small PV panels on the shed roof but insufficient to keep the battery charge. There are a few DC loads on the battery and nothing on the AC side of the inverter.
With the charger running the battery was sitting at 100% SoC for extended periods and I believe that is not good for lithiums. So I explored Ignore AC function in Virtual Switch and after a bit of fiddling with thresholds the battery now cycles down to about 25% then the charger kicks in and recharges it. Perfect. Exactly how I wanted it to behave - use whatever PV power is available and only use grid power when necessary.
However I realised this configuration works against us when travelling because we DO want the charger to be able to get the battery as full as possible - eg if we stop overnight on a powered site (especially in bad weather and low SoC), we want the charger to fully recharge the battery from the grid, not wait until it drops to 20-30%. In other words when travelling, we need to disable the Virtual Switch configuration (that works so well at home) and have the charger run whenever grid (or generator) power is available.
I know I can (and do) change this in VE Config but I wonder if there's another way without having to fire up my laptop and Mk3? I looked at the options within Virtual Switch but can't see anything that could be triggered manually (eg with a switch). The MultiPlusC has no aux input so that was a dead end. Can anyone suggest a solution I've missed?
Ideally it would be nice to have this available via Victron Connect and VE.Bus dongle - eg the ability top remotely enable/disable a VS configuration. Feature request??
Any suggestions or advice greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Phil