Charge Controllers with Ethernet

[MetricMoose]

Hello All!

I'm looking at upgrading a few solar powered wireless internet towers that have some older equipment, less efficient panels and undersized battery banks that struggle during the winter months. Everything running from the system is DC, so no inverters are involved. Most of these locations are monitored purely by battery voltage, though a few have Morningstar TS-MPPT-60 controllers with ethernet that can have all of the stats monitored and graphed, which is very handy. I need wired ethernet specifically instead of bluetooth, WiFi or cellular. SNMP support is also preferred over having to dump stuff right to a third party's service, since it lets me monitor it using a standard network monitoring and alerting system without relying on external services.

Besides the TS-MPPT-60, I've found the MidNite Classic and the Tycon Power TP-SC48-60P-MPPT. The Victron Cerbo GX doesn't seem to support SNMP, which rules out their products. Are there other good quality options that I've missed?

Thanks!

 

[sunshine_eggo]

Cerbo has a Docker and Grafana solution for local storage, charting and monitoring.

 

[krumbles]

If you just want to monitor voltage, I use a Mikrotik mAP. Wire in the dc power port into the battery side of the charge controller. The mAP will run off of 8-54v. Personally I use the dude to pull the voltage and graph over time. Attached is a snapshot of a tree that grew after the rains and shaded the solar panel. Did some major cleanup and back to full charge.

This only shows voltage. I would love to find something that would build a graph of the amps going into/out of the batteries. I know new BMS's have bluetooth to read that info from the batteries, but the location of the battery is an hour away and requires 4wd to get to. I prefer to view it from my desk at my office.

I was thinking a raspberry Pi that can query the voltage/current readings, save to memory or upload to a server. But I have enough projects on my plate at the moment.

 

[wpns]

How about Solar Assistant talking Modbus over RS485? Then it’s all there in MQTT.

 

[rin67630]

If you don't mind tinkering a bit:
ESP-Based DIY solution.

 

[Steve_S]

Midnite Solar Classic controllers are accessible via Ethernet-ModBus, their software interacts with them, the Stack is OpenSource and there are alternatives to their own software. Most of Midnites products can do so...