My system (MultiPlus II 48V 5KVA + Venus GX ) recently stopped reporting stats and was no longer reachable which meant I had to restart it.
In my setup the Venus is plugged directly to the batteries (as seems to be recommended) which makes power cycling it a bit tricky. The easiest way for me to do this was to disconnect the the M8 eyelet connector from the MultiPlus DC input where it is installed. This lead to fairly heavy sparking on reconnection.
As far as I am concerned, the Venus does not have a huge power draw and I cant imagine there is a large inrush current when connecting it. During installation I actually connected the power by plugging the green terminal block connector into the Venus. This caused a spark at the terminal block and a very significant spot weld. The practical upshot is that the block connector is no longer removable due to the spot weld which is why I have to disconnect on the MultiPlus side.
Is this kind of sparking to be expected? The fuse is not blown and the Venus seems to be working fine after the restart. If the sparking is expected can someone explain why this is the case?
The Venus is essentially an off the shelf consumer grade RPI thingamajig (beaglebone I think) that has been hardened and extended. As far as I can tell it has its own power supply to convert the wide range input voltage down to something the board can use, and has an add-on board for all the Victron communications busses. Finally the whole thing is conformally coated to protect it (nice!). I mention all of this because similar consumer grade product generally do not spark like this and I was pretty disappointed by the spot welded terminal.
I am just trying to understand if I am possibly doing something wrong or if there is some technical explanation that explains what I am observing.
Thank you.
