question

Hi, when stuck at 20%, the phone is trying to (or fails to) connect to the victron device. Once succeeded to connect, it will immediately jump to 40%. There is no other percentage number in between for bluetooth connections.

Do you have iOS or Android?

These are the possible reasons for the connection not to progress beyond 20%:

1) Too low signal strength. To rule this out, move closer. And be aware that not all our products have the same quality bluetooth signal, which means that for some you’ll need to be closer than for others.

2) the victron device is no longer bonded with the phone. This happens when you change the pin code of the victron device. The victron device then removes all pairing/bonding information for all phones, to make sure they all reauthenticate by typing in the new pin code. Solution: remove the pairing from your phone. Our manual explains how to do that. If this is the cause, then Android will try three times (progress bar going to 20%, back to 1%, back to 20% etc) and then show below popup. On iOS, if this is the cause, then it will remain stuck at 20%.

3) Another phone is already connected. Only one phone at a time can be connected. If indeed another phone is already connected, then both iOS & Android phones will remain stuck at 20% - without timeout. You’ll have to press the back button to get out of this situation. Note that its not so easy to get into this situation: when searching for devices in VictronConnect, all that are already connected to a phone will show up grey. And show a Popup that they are already connected to a phone and thus can’t accept another connection. So, the only way to get here, is by taking two phones. Search aka scan (the orange button on lower left) on both. And then first connect with the first phone. And thereafter to the same on the second without first rescanning.

4) Bluetooth code stack in the phone in a bad state. Solve by enabling and then disabling air plane mode. Or reboot the phone (note that I really mean powering it off by pressing and holding the button on your phone and then selecting power off). We have seen this (bluetooth stack messed up) only on Android, never on iOS. Airplane mode then resets the stack and bluetooth chipset, and after that the connection works again.

5) Force close VictronConnect and re-open it. Note that there were some cases where this used to help. But in VictronConnect v5.21, already a while ago we solved them. Therefore: if only this steps solves it for you, we’d like to hear it!

6) Power cycle the Victron device, note that for MPPTs this means disconnecting both the battery & panels.

above list is in order of likelyhood.

As mentioned above, there are some differences beween Android & iOS when unable to connect.

On Android, when unable to connect (unable to progress beyond 20%) for above reasons, it will try three times and then show below guide:

iOS, when unable to progress beyond 20% for bonding issues, or too low signal strength or already connected, it will currently get stuck and not show the guide.

I hope this helps! It works well for many many users, but still there are too many issues which is why we’re currently working hard to improve this.

But that is quite a challenge - it has proven to be very hard to reproduce the problems.

Ps. At 80%, the phone & the device are pairing. Which on iOS always works well. But in some Android brands (Huawei for example) the pin popup is often not shown but instead hidden in the notification bar. So: when stuck at 80%, check your notification area!