I,wouldn’t buy the mc4 version
Victron experts CC input needed
- Thread starter Nan_wpg
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ricardocello
Watching and Learning
Yes you can use a VE.Direct cable, or setup a bluetooth network.
featherlite
Solar Enthusiast
Both of my Victron 100/50's have flat head (i.e. single slot) terminal heads, which I do not like.
Does Victron now use philipps head terminals?
ricardocello
Watching and Learning
probably depends on the model, here is the 150/70.
Both of mine (250/100 and 250/70) are phillips.
Maybe the lower power ones are not.
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GXMnow
Solar Wizard
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I found this thread looking for Victron charge controller info. Looks like we have a few Victron users here. I am new to victron with just one charge controller now. I saw something happening today that I didn't expect.
My charge controller is the Smart Solar 150/35
The VMP of my 2,000 watt array is 80 to 90 volts and my battery bank voltage is 51 to 58 volts.
As the sun was setting, I saw the Victron app reporting 10 watts and it was flipping to 9 watts and back, so it was not a frozen display. Obviously this is minimal power and not doing much, but I expected no power as the solar array voltage was at just 20.82 volts, way under the battery bank voltage. Do these Victron controller do a boost mode? The efficiency does not look very good. The status screen shows the solar voltage at 20.82 and current at 0.5 amps. That is 10.41 watts in. The battery side shows 56.36 volts and 0.10 amps, or just 5.636 watts. SO only 54% of the power making it to the battery, but it is more than nothing.
The LEDs and the status screen on my phone also show "Bulk" mode.
Has anyone else seen a Victron controller show a voltage boost mode as the sun sets? Here is a screen shot as it was happening.
My charge controller is the Smart Solar 150/35
The VMP of my 2,000 watt array is 80 to 90 volts and my battery bank voltage is 51 to 58 volts.
As the sun was setting, I saw the Victron app reporting 10 watts and it was flipping to 9 watts and back, so it was not a frozen display. Obviously this is minimal power and not doing much, but I expected no power as the solar array voltage was at just 20.82 volts, way under the battery bank voltage. Do these Victron controller do a boost mode? The efficiency does not look very good. The status screen shows the solar voltage at 20.82 and current at 0.5 amps. That is 10.41 watts in. The battery side shows 56.36 volts and 0.10 amps, or just 5.636 watts. SO only 54% of the power making it to the battery, but it is more than nothing.
The LEDs and the status screen on my phone also show "Bulk" mode.
Has anyone else seen a Victron controller show a voltage boost mode as the sun sets? Here is a screen shot as it was happening.
ricardocello
Watching and Learning
that is very perplexing
sunshine_eggo
Happy Breffast!
IMHO, error/noise
ricardocello
Watching and Learning
Here is a sunset for me on VRM (48v battery):
The PV current drawn drops to 0 after the voltage drops too low, and the battery charging wattage drops to zero even earlier.
Any chance you see the odd behavior in VRM?
The PV current drawn drops to 0 after the voltage drops too low, and the battery charging wattage drops to zero even earlier.
Any chance you see the odd behavior in VRM?
Last edited:
sunshine_eggo
Happy Breffast!
Same:
GXMnow
Solar Wizard
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I finally got around to scrolling back in the "trends" tab. I only have the one Victron MPPT so I only have the bluetooth app on my phone. It only let's me graph 2 items at once, so here are 3 screen shots of what happened at sun down.
40.81 volts is wll below the battery voltage, yet it shows 0.2 amps of current at the solar panel. And as the voltage fell even lower, the current had a little boost before it finally quit. The full width of the screen is 2 whole hours. The wattage was basically meaningless, but it was trying to do something.
Here you can see the battery voltage was well over 56 volts. At 5 pm the current was pretty much bottomed out, but not zero yet. It was down to just 2 amps at 4:30 and fell under 1 amp by 4:50. The PV voltage fell under battery voltage at about 5:23 but the current didn't fully stop until after the 5:38 sample. That is 15 minutes.
Here is the PV voltage and the battery voltage together. I was hoping they would be on the same scale, but NOPE!
As the PV voltage fell under 62 volts, the current dropped drastically, to 0.2 amps. That does make sense, but it still seems odd it was pushing that 0.2 amps of current for another 15 minutes. That is 0.05 Amp Hours, or 2.8 watt hours. Can we call that even a drop in a swimming pool? Not really. The whole day totaled 5.99 KWHs. So 2.8 / 5,990 = 0.000467 or 0.0467% of my energy in that last 15 minutes.
If it lasted 5 minutes or less, I would say maybe it was discharging the capacitors in the charge controller, but 15 minutes is a long time, even at 0.2 amps. My other thought is that it is some form of graph smoothing, but I doubt it. If I look at it within a couple hours, it has much finer data and you can even see the MPPT search pulses. If I am here to catch it tomorrow, I will see if I can grab the high res graph. But yes, analyzing it like this, it is a meaningless amount of power. The panel power going in could be the power being drawn by the electronics within the charge controller to run the processor and bluetooth radio etc. And they just add that power to the output rather than admit you are losing those few watts to run the controller? 10 watts to run the controller seems totally fair. And a switch mode regulator running off the PV input to make 5 volts could still be running down below 12 volts, as this controller can also work in a 12 volt system.
GXMnow
Solar Wizard
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I just caught the shut down event live as it happened.
Here is a high res graph.
As the panel voltage approached the battery voltage, down to less than 2 volts above, the MPPT search did goa bit goofy trying to pull any power. Then at about 1 volt difference, it went into that linear drop. I think it actually was discharging the input capacitor(s) on the PV side. It showed the 0.2 amps of panel side current down to 40 volts. My Fluke clamp meter showed 10 ma (0.010 amps) on the PV cables, but I could not get a steady reading on the battery side. The Enphase inverters had shut down and the XW-Pro was pushing over 1,000 watts running the house. The current ripple on the battery side was more than any DC current from the Victron controller.
What I saw yesterday seems to be a smoothing/filtering error in the data. After just 1 minute, much of those hi res wiggles are gone and the graph is smoothed out so it looks like there is some current while the voltage is too low. And it also appears the PV input side power shows the energy used by the controller and coming from the capacitors as well. The controller was pulling 4 watts from the solar panels for a couple minutes after the array voltage was below battery voltage, then it seems to go into a shut down mode.
I have been running the Victron for 2 weeks now, 14 days of production, yes, it went online on Jan 1st. In those 14 days, it harvested 77 KWHs from 2 kw of panels. That is an average of 2.75 Sun Hours per day. My Enphase system produced 210 KWHs from 4,800 watts of panels in the same time. That is 3.125 Sun Hours. So I am still only getting 88% of the STC yield compared to the AC system. That is very close to what the BougeRV charge controller has been doing. I was hoping for better, but it seems the BougeRV controller was not all that bad. The reduced power seems to be caused more by the PV panels themselves being less power than the rating, and the sun angle and shadows not being as favorable over the whole time. I will probably finish out the month to see if th trend holds. Then I will likely split my array and put 1,000 watts on each controller to directly compare the BougeRV to the Victron. I will also then swap the arrays to see if any difference follows the panels of the controller.
There is no doubt the Victron is a better quality unit. The data logging is far better and it is able to pull some power even in horrible conditions. But when the sun is decent, it's advantage is tiny at best.
Here is a high res graph.
As the panel voltage approached the battery voltage, down to less than 2 volts above, the MPPT search did goa bit goofy trying to pull any power. Then at about 1 volt difference, it went into that linear drop. I think it actually was discharging the input capacitor(s) on the PV side. It showed the 0.2 amps of panel side current down to 40 volts. My Fluke clamp meter showed 10 ma (0.010 amps) on the PV cables, but I could not get a steady reading on the battery side. The Enphase inverters had shut down and the XW-Pro was pushing over 1,000 watts running the house. The current ripple on the battery side was more than any DC current from the Victron controller.
What I saw yesterday seems to be a smoothing/filtering error in the data. After just 1 minute, much of those hi res wiggles are gone and the graph is smoothed out so it looks like there is some current while the voltage is too low. And it also appears the PV input side power shows the energy used by the controller and coming from the capacitors as well. The controller was pulling 4 watts from the solar panels for a couple minutes after the array voltage was below battery voltage, then it seems to go into a shut down mode.
I have been running the Victron for 2 weeks now, 14 days of production, yes, it went online on Jan 1st. In those 14 days, it harvested 77 KWHs from 2 kw of panels. That is an average of 2.75 Sun Hours per day. My Enphase system produced 210 KWHs from 4,800 watts of panels in the same time. That is 3.125 Sun Hours. So I am still only getting 88% of the STC yield compared to the AC system. That is very close to what the BougeRV charge controller has been doing. I was hoping for better, but it seems the BougeRV controller was not all that bad. The reduced power seems to be caused more by the PV panels themselves being less power than the rating, and the sun angle and shadows not being as favorable over the whole time. I will probably finish out the month to see if th trend holds. Then I will likely split my array and put 1,000 watts on each controller to directly compare the BougeRV to the Victron. I will also then swap the arrays to see if any difference follows the panels of the controller.
There is no doubt the Victron is a better quality unit. The data logging is far better and it is able to pull some power even in horrible conditions. But when the sun is decent, it's advantage is tiny at best.
ricardocello
Watching and Learning
That sounds like a solid explanation. Thanks for spending your sunset with Victron Connect!
GXMnow
Solar Wizard
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We have a winter storm moving in and it was cloudy all day and rained a bit. My Enphase system dropped from over 15 KWHs a few days ago to just making 3.7 KWHs today. That is a 75% drop in production.
This seems to be where the Victron MPPT really shines. Yes, the output dropped, but my 2,000 wats of cheap panels still managed 1.70 KWHs today on the Smart Solar 150/35. It had topped 6 KWHs a few days ago, so the drop n the Victron was only 71%. It's not a whole ton better than the Enphase system, but this is a string setup with 1 MPPT, the Enphase is 16 separate panel and MPPTs all trying to pull their best.
3.7 / 4.8 = 0.771 sun hours for the Enphase system.
1.70 / 2.0 = 0.85 sun hours out of the Victron setup.
It did better on a watt for watt basis out of the panels. That never happened on the BougeRV charge controller.
Here is the even bigger surprise. The Enphase system let's me look at each panel. The best producing panel in the array today managed 244 watt hours. That single 300 watt panel is up on the higher roof with no shadows at all, and at a better tilt for the sun angle. And that one still only did 0.813 sun hours. The whole array running series parallel on the Victron with some shading issues still managed to pull more from this gloomy sky.
This seems to be where the Victron MPPT really shines. Yes, the output dropped, but my 2,000 wats of cheap panels still managed 1.70 KWHs today on the Smart Solar 150/35. It had topped 6 KWHs a few days ago, so the drop n the Victron was only 71%. It's not a whole ton better than the Enphase system, but this is a string setup with 1 MPPT, the Enphase is 16 separate panel and MPPTs all trying to pull their best.
3.7 / 4.8 = 0.771 sun hours for the Enphase system.
1.70 / 2.0 = 0.85 sun hours out of the Victron setup.
It did better on a watt for watt basis out of the panels. That never happened on the BougeRV charge controller.
Here is the even bigger surprise. The Enphase system let's me look at each panel. The best producing panel in the array today managed 244 watt hours. That single 300 watt panel is up on the higher roof with no shadows at all, and at a better tilt for the sun angle. And that one still only did 0.813 sun hours. The whole array running series parallel on the Victron with some shading issues still managed to pull more from this gloomy sky.
