Victron is Over-priced Eurotrash. Why would anybody buy Victron over an AiO?

Makes more sense to preserve old drive and start with a fresh one.

A colleague configured his PC so all temporary internet files went to RAM "disk".
Microsoft updates pushed virtually every day, I understand is the biggest thrasher and fragmenter of disk.

The browsers stopped getting updated for XP. Pages took minutes to load (not talking video, unless that was in force-fed advertisements.)
If I disabled Java, it was much more usable. But for some reason web pages now require Java to have drop-down menus, so they didn't function.

I do have XP on an old Precision workstation, handy for some inverter support.
The 4k screen on my primary Win 10 Precision laptop was a problem, because Sunny Explorer (and some name brand CAD) end up with menus small enough to fit on a pin head. But Win 10 shoehorned on another 20 year old Precision is usable.

GOO5E said:

That’s an excellent point at the end.
When I need to replace my MacBook, I have to replace the whole thing.
My boys gaming PC we will just upgrade the CPU and GPU.
But the nuances such as background applications or “using it right” simply don’t exist in the apple world.
To be fair, most of gaming doesn’t either lol. But for my needs in video editing it’s been great

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Yes is like everything else. For example i bought 3 jakiper batteries. they cost me 5400 eur for 15kwh in total. Now i bought eve cells and built the same capacity with better components for less than half the money, but i had to learn a lot and go through it.

"Victron is Over-priced Eurotrash. Why would anybody buy Victron over an..."

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Oh good, I was about to buy some Victron inverters. I though I might start a post and ask you guys to talk me out of it. Luck this title just popped up and saved me time. I just knew it was "Over-priced Eurotrash".

Ok Alibaba, Here I come!!!

Hedges said:

I think the way to upgrade a PC is reformat the hard drive and do a fresh install of OS.
It will be much faster then.

I was happy with XP, until it couldn't browse web pages anymore.

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My wife had a laptop that got so bugged (bogged?)down it wouldn't even connect to Wi-Fi any longer. Don't even ask my how. I formatted it, installed Ubuntu and it worked better and faster than when it was new.

I bought a desktop computer from the thrift store for $7. Installed Ubuntu. Good as new.

Ok, tell me how awful of a person I am.

Brucey said:

It's been 5 hours since my last Victron delivery....baby steps. Hooked up a smart battery sense to the Redodo and networked it with the IP22 charger.

View attachment 165081

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Just an update on this, needed to top off an AGM vehicle battery. Hooked up IP22, set it to high. Was watching what it was doing from house. After a bit I realized it was still connected via smart net to my Redodos smart battery sense which was 30 ft away. Disconnected from that and it started charging normally.

Not sure what would have happened if I didn't realize my mistake and it kept trying to feed 14.7 to the battery, as it was "seeing" a voltage of 13.6V on the Redodo.

Brucey said:

Not sure what would have happened if I didn't realize my mistake and it kept trying to feed 14.7 to the battery, as it was "seeing" a voltage of 13.6V on the Redodo.

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That's a good question.. an AGM might like it more than the BMS on the Redodo would have.

@ksmithaz1
Are you still rocking Magnepan? If not, did you replace it with something as spacious?

Victron is like putting a grass lawn in your backyard. Easy to install, don't abuse it, and everybody will soon take it for granted like it's always been there, quietly performing in the background.

Minimal system so far for 3 season off grid camp. Max load projected will be hair drier lights and maybe a TV, future future will be adding a 12k mini split.

100/15 SCC
smart shunt

Future plans
100/30 SCC
3k Multiplus w/Bluetooth dongle
Possibly adding “power in” for bus bars

Future future plans
Second 3k multiplus for only 120v system.

I have to say Victron communications is the one thing they need to streamline, If I were to get stupid with my money and get a cerbo, it should just need one comms system.

Blue koolaid is tasty.

GOO5E said:

That’s an excellent point at the end.
When I need to replace my MacBook, I have to replace the whole thing.
My boys gaming PC we will just upgrade the CPU and GPU.
But the nuances such as background applications or “using it right” simply don’t exist in the apple world.
To be fair, most of gaming doesn’t either lol. But for my needs in video editing it’s been great

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The question becomes: By the time I need to upgrade my gaming PC, am I going to throw a different GPU / CPU in it? Or am I going to want the improved faster pcie bus, the latest NVRAM drives, and the cpu chip with a different socket to support the new GPU? Yea my CPU cooler need to be replaced too, and this cabinet drives me nuts, I never use the stupid blu-ray, and I want a 10G or maybe a 2.5G interface, and maybe built-in Wifi6. If there is no bottom in the checkbook you can play around all you want. Apple has always excelled in the video / transcoding / editing space.

I think the same idea generally holds true for all this solar gear. Something newer and better and more efficient and more integrated for less money is always coming down the pipeline. By the time you can justify replacing it, you will want a system that integrates optimally. Solar systems have three major parts: The solar collectors (panels), the batteries (storage), and the control system (aio's, inverters, mppts, bms, blah blah). As some of the control system components become inexpensive commodity items sometimes they bleed over (built in BMS, I expect to see more electronics on solar panels that work like the TIGO stuff) . Integration makes sense when it makes things smaller, easier and less expensive to mass produce.

Back in the day your computer would have an mfm/rll disk contoller board, a sound board, a memory board, a serial interface board, a parallel interface board, etc etc. This was great because if you sound card died or your serial port blew, you could just replace that one card for $40 and keep going. Anybody still think this is a great idea? Why or why not? How does this relate to the current solar component systems?

I've been upgrading the same PC since the early 90s. Of course no single component of the original remains, but I haven't bought a whole PC since the initial build.

KITROBASKIN said:

@ksmithaz1
Are you still rocking Magnepan? If not, did you replace it with something as spacious?

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Long gone, memory is sketchy I bought them in the 70's. The MG-II's were roughly 5ft x 2-1/2ft x 1.5in. They really needed a BIG room and they needed to be at least 3-5ft off the back wall, better if you could center them in the room 1/2 way so you were between the thin sides and they projected in front and behind you. I had a Yamaha 200W amp driving them. Put an equalizer on it, took a white/pink noise generator and tuned it to the room. Shure cartridge/nude stylus on the turntable. Put on some Bach ("Deutche Grammophone) , or maybe some Steely Dan. They did sound beautiful. Then wives and children happened. Now I sport a couple of Bookshelves, a sub-woofer and two smaller speakers in the ceiling behind. An 18x24 room would be perfect with a single chair in the middle. I dunno why the Wifee at the time was not onboard with it. I think I got $300 for them at the time.

Any need for new features in solar equipment (other than talking to lithium BMS) is primarily due to code changes and grid interconnect requirements.

When it just comes to cranking out watts for your off-grid system, 50 year old technology would be fine. Like a Pelton wheel spinning a generator. If you've got a 30 or how ever many year old sine-wave Trace still running, you don't need updates. US model Sunny Island has been around something like 20 years, and that's all I need (unless I want to game utility tariffs.)

This ain't like PCs, where data format on the web keeps changing.
More like my car's ECU, which I'm fine with unless I install VTEC heads.

sunshine_eggo said:

I've been upgrading the same PC since the early 90s. Of course no single component of the original remains, but I haven't bought a whole PC since the initial build.

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I did this for the longest time. I'm not a gamer, last game I got good at was Jazz Jackrabbit. Now I buy the tiny fully integrated PC's for desktop use, and custom build small server/NAS units with an 8-bay Synology for mass storage. I picked up this M715q/Ryzen 3200G for < $200, stuck Debian on it. Small, quiet, fast. I have a couple of laptops my favorite is a super thin fanless N5100 based 11" yoga style chinese unit with 8G/256G. <$400 brand new. If all you are doing is surfing the web, email, some light office/spreadsheet stuff and Solitaire spending more money is purely for bragging rights. Doesn't take a ton of CPU/GPU to remote into a server to fix something or play with writing control software.

I leveraged the latest OrangePi 5 as a control PC for my Solar/Home/Power setup. It was like $100 and ridiculously fast, 8G / 128G NVRAM. I put an LXQT desktop and an rdp server on it but I generally connect remotely to the thing with SSH not a gui, or I access the postgres database remotely with dBeaver or a CLI. I grok RS-485/modbus, but I want to spend a little more time with CAN bus. I really don't understand why they just don't put a simple ethernet interface on these things and have an API. The cost of a small RISC-V or ARM SOC with a realtek GBE interface is a joke, and I'd bet most of these units already have one embedded anyway they didn't bother to pin-out. It's not like you need a super powerful SOC to run an inverter and some MPPT's with a few relays.

Hedges said:

This ain't like PCs, where data format on the web keeps changing.
More like my car's ECU, which I'm fine with unless I install VTEC heads.

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Uh huh. ECU's haven't changed much, we have ODB 1, GM's infamous 1.5, 2.0 ... ECU's were are all custom, now it's an ASIC where before it used to be discreet components with a PROM.

Even compared to just 5-10 years ago, todays ICE engines have no less than 30 sensors and relays controlling every aspect of the operation from the transmission to airflow to knock to fuel flow to ... Todays cars are vastly superior to the ones from 10 years ago they pollute less and take you much farther on a gallon of fuel, not to mention EV's. Improved technology creeps in everywhere. In the solar arena it's going to be more solar panel output, and hopefully eventually better batteries, as well as less expensive and more highly integrated and easier to use control systems.

IMNSHO it is exactly the same as PC's. While the core ideas behind a process may not have changed technology is constantly improving it. Think Heat pumps/air conditioners, cars, boats, motors (electric and ice), materials in general used to make things steel, plastics, carbon fibers, graphene, the lists are endless. A wagon wheel can pretty much accomplish the same thing as a modern low profile tire and rim, but at some point... Paper and ink was a vast improvement over stone tablets and painting walls. The printing press, The typewritier, ... The interesting thing about PC's was the speed at which the technology improved being much more disruptive. I see Solar more like the auto industry moving incrementally forward rather than exponentially like PC's did for so long. None-the-less I think the increments will be pretty large for the near future.

Excluding hybrids, how many cars have better gas mileage or lower emissions than my 2000 Civic CX?

New features and sensors would need a new ECU, but I'm fine with what its got.

My point was you have to keep updating PC to browse the web or share documents. Same for cell phones.
Driving a car or powering your home, if it ain't broke it don't need replacing.

Hedges said:

Excluding hybrids, how many cars have better gas mileage or lower emissions than my 2000 Civic CX?

New features and sensors would need a new ECU, but I'm fine with what its got.

My point was you have to keep updating PC to browse the web or share documents. Same for cell phones.
Driving a car or powering your home, if it ain't broke it don't need replacing.

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Well, a hybrid system is improved technology for cars. Pure ICE? I will bet the emissions are lower, probably not extreme, and on the economy front, somewhat better for sure. Equivilent car is probably slightly larger, they like to do that, cars like to grow. You can't hardly buy a standard transmission anymore, because you have to have a DCT/CVT/AT that is controlled by the computer to optimize shifting and such.

PC's have slowed. A 5yro laptop with updated software will generally run fine for most people. The phone front OTOH bears examination from the start of the smart phone. There are NO hardware standards in the smart phone industry beyond the cpu core itself (exclusively ARM). Everything else is proprietary, and built with planned obsolescence in mind. No two SOC's used for phones boot/startup in the same manner. None of the auxillary components talk the same way (screens, ports, bluetooth, blah, blah). This is true across the same manufactures product line, each succeeding generation handles it in a different way requiring new custom low-level code. None of them have a consistent API to handle communication the built in modem chip. Apple is one of the few companies that have exerted control over their SOC supply, hence apple products in general have a much longer lifetime than their android counterparts, because the older parts do work / boot the same way and can all run identical software. This issue is slowly changing with the advent of the Raspberry Pi and it's clones, creating standardizations, which will eventually enable people to upgrade the software on their old phones and tablets to keep up with software improvements without replacing the hardware every two years. This has also created an explosion of "Pi" style products, orangepi, pine64, beagleboard, bannana pi, ... and we are starting to see form-factor compatibility at the board level on these products. The software compatibility is starting to leak into the custom board designs. Not there yet but moving.

You must admit, a universal solar AIO design template with defined specs and connector sizes and ... would be attractive.

sunshine_eggo said:

I've been upgrading the same PC since the early 90s. Of course no single component of the original remains, but I haven't bought a whole PC since the initial build.

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The same is true for me (well not since the early 90's, but the first PC I built as a teenager, is the PC I am using today).

Every component has been replaced at some point in time, with the exception of the case, which is a nice all aluminum design that could last pretty much indefinitely. I think at this point most components have been upgrade 2-3 times. This is the great benefit of the more modular and flexible form factor of a desktop PC over (most) laptops, mobile devices, or Apple stuff (all of which have their own upsides as well).

Hedges said:

Excluding hybrids, how many cars have better gas mileage or lower emissions than my 2000 Civic CX?

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An unusual distribution of fuel consumption reported by 15 drivers of that model. I guess it depends a lot on how and where you drive.

My 2007 VW 2 litre TDI Golf does 4.9 l/100km = 57.6 mpg
My 2018 Mercedes GLC 250d does 6.0 l/100km = 47.1 mpg

Currently considering getting rid of the Merc and getting an MG4. The Golf can stay for now - an amazing utility vehicle and still pulls like a train with 135 kW / 400 Nm.

wattmatters said:

An unusual distribution of fuel consumption reported by 15 drivers of that model. I guess it depends a lot on how and where you drive.

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Not unusual. You're looking at city vs. highway distributions.

wattmatters said:

My 2007 VW 2 litre TDI Golf does 4.9 l/100km = 57.6 mpg
My 2018 Mercedes GLC 250d does 6.0 l/100km = 47.1 mpg

Currently considering getting rid of the Merc and getting an MG4. The Golf can stay for now - an amazing utility vehicle and still pulls like a train with 135 kW / 400 Nm.

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Really? This in response to this?

Hedges said:

Excluding hybrids, how many cars have better gas mileage or lower emissions than my 2000 Civic CX?

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Context of the question matters. That's a U.S. model car operated in the U.S. on petrol.

First, you're comparing diesel to petrol. Fuel with a 15% higher energy density and a higher compression ratio are well positioned to outperform any comparable petrol car.

Second, you're comparing mpg(imperial) to mpg(us gallons). It's not accurate to use 20% more fuel and then compare the two.

Correcting for the gallon error:

4.9L/100km = 48mpg
6.0L/100km = 39mpg