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

[wattmatters]

My PACE BMS SOC drifts over time. I would never rely on it. Wrote about that recently:

Backup down under

Quite the jump in value recently as energy tariffs have risen substantially. And on that, just got notice today of changes to tariffs applying from 1 July: The tariffs are all cents per kWh, the daily charges are cents per day. CL = controlled load, a utility controlled circuit for water...

diysolarforum.com

 

[Derka181]

This ad is bought and sponsored by Victorian haha

 

[BradCagle]

Personally, I feel the BT by @BradCagle is experimental. I have discovered that if I try to edit anything in the config file, it pretty much breaks the driver.

I have purchased the UART to USB adapter for the JBD and plan to switch to the @Louisvdw driver once I have it.

The BT driver was to address my delay of gratification issues.

Yeah, I haven't found the time to continue work on it ATM. I think the Louisvdw repo now has bluetooth, so you might try that.

BTW if anyone is interested in my repo I added a Virtual battery driver so you can series multiple batteries, and show up as one.
I have two 12v batteries in my garage that show up as a single 24v

 

[sunshine_eggo]

Yeah, I haven't found the time to continue work on it ATM. I think the Louisvdw repo now has bluetooth, so you might try that.

I thought it did, but I didn't find it in the documentation, and the attempts to get it running via options in the config file didn't work.

Thanks! Been really cool having something to tinker around with on my new RPi...

 

[Yurtdweller]

Well if looks matter (and they DO), then Renogy has them beat.

Love my Victron, but it looks like a blue blimp designed by a 4-year old boy. Ask him, watts your favorite color? “Blue!” he says.

I just discovered that my charge controller is water resistant! I don't need that, usually, but my yurt collapsed while I was away from home for two months, and my cc survived I was pleasantly surprised. I've never had a Victron product fail. Only own two pieces, so far, but I bought a used BMV-700, and it worked flawlessly for years. When I switched to LiFePo4 I left it out of the rebuild, though.

 

[Tomthumb62]

I just discovered that my charge controller is water resistant! I don't need that, usually, but my yurt collapsed while I was away from home for two months, and my cc survived I was pleasantly surprised. I've never had a Victron product fail. Only own two pieces, so far, but I bought a used BMV-700, and it worked flawlessly for years. When I switched to LiFePo4 I left it out of the rebuild, though.

Oof! How did your yurt collapse? Did your panels survive?

 

[Bossrox]

They do make good stuff, and it's about as close as you'll get to plug and play with a level of scalability engineered in. I'm already heavily vested in Growatt and have learned a lot getting it to work as it should. If I were doing a more mission critical application, it would be all blue.

Might want to reconsider that, I've gone thru 4 victron 150/100. About 1 year avg they lasted. Replaced them with growatts & no issues thus far.

 

[Tomthumb62]

Might want to reconsider that, I've gone thru 4 victron 150/100. About 1 year avg they lasted. Replaced them with growatts & no issues thus far.

How long have you had your growatts?

 

[sunshine_eggo]

Might want to reconsider that, I've gone thru 4 victron 150/100. About 1 year avg they lasted. Replaced them with growatts & no issues thus far.

You are an extreme outlier. I'm still not convinced your 3S arrays weren't over-volting them on Voc. I can't find that you ever posted their Voc values... just a claim that they never got over 120V.

With the exception of the manufacturing issue with the RS 450 units, you won't find anyone that has had your experience.

THIS:

Just got 3 Growatt 80 amp chargers to replace failed victrons

I've had 3 out of 4 victron 150/100's go bad on me so far. They replaced 2 of them but wouldn't on the 3rd, said it was wired wrong which is bullshit so I'm ditching their crap & trying out these Growatt mppt chargers. About the size of a shoebox, screw terminal lugs, better warranty than...

diysolarforum.com

is a much more typical experience.

 

[Bossrox]

You are an extreme outlier. I'm still not convinced your 3S arrays weren't over-volting them on Voc. I can't find that you ever posted their Voc values... just a claim that they never got over 120V.

With the exception of the manufacturing issue with the RS 450 units, you won't find anyone that has had your experience.

THIS:

Just got 3 Growatt 80 amp chargers to replace failed victrons

I've had 3 out of 4 victron 150/100's go bad on me so far. They replaced 2 of them but wouldn't on the 3rd, said it was wired wrong which is bullshit so I'm ditching their crap & trying out these Growatt mppt chargers. About the size of a shoebox, screw terminal lugs, better warranty than...

diysolarforum.com

is a much more typical experience.

VOC on my 3 string is no more than 125 or about 40ish per panel & even if I was exceeding the VOC with the expense of victron it should have some kind of over volt protection. Even my cheap growatts have that.

 

[Murphyslaww]

For those familiar with my post-whoring ways, this subject line is likely quite shocking.

Just trying to make a point...

Seemed a good lead into the question.

The answer?

Because Victron is worth it. It's a small company run by people who give a shit and care about their product, its performance, features and the user experience.

Problems?

• 5 year warranty - can be serviced by any Victron distributor. Can upgrade to a 10 year warranty for 10% the purchase price. If you have a problematic distributor, you can submit a warranty claim directly through Victron. Someone claiming Victron doesn't honor warranties is doing it wrong.
• Community forum - not 100% successful, but most legit questions/issues get addressed either by Victron, Victron installers or power users.
• Wealth of information available online.
• Documentation is continually improving.
• Wiring Unlimited.

Features?

• Son of the founder personally oversees the development of the Venus OS.
• New features based on user requests or new equipment are regularly added to all types of hardware.
• Firmware updates to older hardware is still actively released due to the newest hardware sharing common firmware even if not all features are available on older hardware.

Why do I have blue smudges on my lips from all this Victron butt-kissing?

Because Victron does shit like this:

Introducing Solar Production Forecast - Victron Energy

VRM Solar Forecasts combines Victron's model of your sites solar production potential, and integrates irradiance forecasting data from Solcasts global fleet of weather satellites.

www.victronenergy.com

Then, after a month of feedback from users and obvious improvements, they pull this shit:

VRM Solar forecast range extended to 7 days - Victron Community

community.victronenergy.com

I've personally watched my own system get increasingly more accurate.

Why in the world offer this feature? How can it possibly benefit the company? Because it's run by people who love this stuff. They see the value, they use their own hardware, and they probably just think, "dang... this is really cool."

I'm confident in saying that there's no other company on the planet in this space that is this actively engaged with their user base.

Well... I'm two Victron's in, and although there are some obvious monitoring benefits, I'm not seeing a performance reason to choose them over Epever. If you are relatively tech savvy, you can get whatever monitoring you want out of the Epever(they have an available API.) It's too bad the US and china are having their issues, as it appears it's keeping Epever from releasing their 48v hybrids here.

For most of my use cases, Victron doesn't have a cost competitive product, and sometimes just one that works. The load out's on the 75/15 are apparently notoriously touchy, with some software glitches that apparently have existed for awhile, whereas they work just fine on my $80 Epever 30 amp. Yeah, most people don't use the load out's, but it's handy to track the juice I'm sending to my home office without buying any other monitoring. The 30amp Epever has been running outside in a non-temp controlled, other than 24v 120mm fans temp triggered, ryobi link tool box I have it and the inverter in.

I rolled the amazon dice when I first started my solar journey and won. I chose the Epever charge controller, RoarBatt inverters, PowerQueen batteries, and they have all had zero issues, and have since bought more that also performed the same.

I've been doing day by day, and now week by week testing of the 100/50 vs the Epever 8415AN, (on a Victron Smartshunt) and there is literally no difference in performance, other than a slight lead by the Epever on most days. I don't think they are euro trash, I just don't think they are any better than the Epevers I have, and Epever seems to make a pretty good product from my relatively short experience, especially with cost considered. Ours have been running without an issue for a year and a half on a 1200watt shed running a 9k btu 20 SEER, mini-split with 5Kw of batteries in Texas summers.

 

[BradCagle]

Well... I'm two Victron's in, and although there are some obvious monitoring benefits, I'm not seeing a performance reason to choose them over Epever. If you are relatively tech savvy, you can get whatever monitoring you want out of the Epever(they have an available API.) It's too bad the US and china are having their issues, as it appears it's keeping Epever from releasing their 48v hybrids here.

For most of my use cases, Victron doesn't have a cost competitive product, and sometimes just one that works. The load out's on the 75/15 are apparently notoriously touchy, with some software glitches that apparently have existed for awhile, whereas they work just fine on my $80 Epever 30 amp. Yeah, most people don't use the load out's, but it's handy to track the juice I'm sending to my home office without buying any other monitoring. The 30amp Epever has been running outside in a non-temp controlled, other than 24v 120mm fans temp triggered, ryobi link tool box I have it and the inverter in.

I rolled the amazon dice when I first started my solar journey and won. I chose the Epever charge controller, RoarBatt inverters, PowerQueen batteries, and they have all had zero issues, and have since bought more that also performed the same.

I've been doing day by day, and now week by week testing of the 100/50 vs the Epever 8415AN, (on a Victron Smartshunt) and there is literally no difference in performance, other than a slight lead by the Epever on most days. I don't think they are euro trash, I just don't think they are any better than the Epevers I have, and Epever seems to make a pretty good product from my relatively short experience, especially with cost considered. Ours have been running without an issue for a year and a half on a 1200watt shed running a 9k btu 20 SEER, mini-split with 5Kw of batteries in Texas summers.

I've used a lot of the Epever 20a, and 30a in remote IOT applications. To this day they are all running, never had a problem.
Now that being said I had a 60a Epever for my own personal use, it died in 3 months of use. Never got a response back from Epever.

I've since switched mostly to Victron, mainly for the monitoring in our remote IOT installations. The support guys can login to Victron VRM portal, and easily see whats up. That feature is worth the extra cost for our business use.

Now I personally switched to Vicrton for my own use, we'll because I did not care for the lack of support with my 60a Epever. I feel like $100 you just trash it, and move on, but @ $300.00 they should respond to emails.

EDIT: I have to retract that, I searched and found a reply from Epever. Must have missed it somehow.
Dang, and I thrashed it because I figured I wasn't getting support LOL. EDIT 2: I now see why I missed it though, response came in
at 4:20AM probably in the middle of a bunch of spam

 

[740GLE]

VOC on my 3 string is no more than 125 or about 40ish per panel & even if I was exceeding the VOC with the expense of victron it should have some kind of over volt protection. Even my cheap growatts have that.

Your expectations of “should” seems to be the outlier in everything I’ve seeing in specification and data sheets.

Why have a spec if it’s meaningless?

Either was sounds like your grow watts are suiting you’re needs, glad you’re happy.

 

[Dzl]

I wonder why there are very few mentions in this thread about the difficulty of getting Victron equipment to support NEC requirements?

I think there are two primary reasons for this:

- Victron's primary market is not the United States (and the NEC is an American thing)
- Victron's pimary markets are marine (and increasingly vehicle based) systems, not Residential/Commercial buildings / fixed structures where the NEC is more of a factor.

Even my cheap growatts have that.

What model of Growatt? I'd like to know more about the feature you mentioned.

 

[Solar Steve]

Yep... I just went through this for the first time... and used @Louisvdw / @BradCagle drivers to connect my JBD 4S BMS to it via BT. It's fucking awesome.

Now I have TWO VRMs!

Even did a discharge/charge test!

View attachment 166989

RPi on wifi and BMS connected via BT from across the room.

I was inspired by this post to also hook up a Raspberry Pi 3 with Venus OS and then installed @BradCagle's python code to use BT to read one of my JBD BMSs, after a bit of fiddling it works very well, I also now have two VRM connections! Thanks to Brad to putting this out there, and also we should recognize that Victron is doing us all a great service by opening up their VRM system so much. I hope Brad will someday modify the code to recognize parallel batteries, but this is as is a great help as I can monitor my most problematic cells.

 

[sunshine_eggo]

I was inspired by this post to also hook up a Raspberry Pi 3 with Venus OS and then installed @BradCagle's python code to use BT to read one of my JBD BMSs, after a bit of fiddling it works very well, I also now have two VRM connections! Thanks to Brad to putting this out there, and also we should recognize that Victron is doing us all a great service by opening up their VRM system so much. I hope Brad will someday modify the code to recognize parallel batteries, but this is as is a great help as I can monitor my most problematic cells.

Per @BradCagle , the @Louisvdw driver now includes BT support. I have verified this. I have also verified that while extraordinarily cool, neither are very reliable. They're decent with normal operation and light loads/charges, but more aggressive use and/or BMS protection triggers at least temporarily break them. When this happens they will periodically reboot the GX attempting to reestablish the connection.

I would not trust the BT interface to allow BMS control of connected devices.

I have abandoned the BT options and am using a UART to USB connection. It's been absolutely bulletproof even when conducting 2C discharges to LVD and >1C charges to HVD.

 

[Solar Steve]

thanks for the tip - I also regard the wired connection as more reliable, and when I rebuild my batteries to 48V with a JK BMS/active balancer I will add a hard wired 485 connection. I won’t rely on the data though; day to day control will still be via the Victron smart shunt

 

[BradCagle]

Per @BradCagle , the @Louisvdw driver now includes BT support. I have verified this. I have also verified that while extraordinarily cool, neither are very reliable. They're decent with normal operation and light loads/charges, but more aggressive use and/or BMS protection triggers at least temporarily break them. When this happens they will periodically reboot the GX attempting to reestablish the connection.

I would not trust the BT interface to allow BMS control of connected devices.

I have abandoned the BT options and am using a UART to USB connection. It's been absolutely bulletproof even when conducting 2C discharges to LVD and >1C charges to HVD.

Yeah, the BT hardware (and/or kernel driver) in the RPi is flaky, it will hard lock occasionally, and the only way to recover is to reboot.

 

[JRH]

The extent of my Victron set up:

View attachment 166622

That’s why Baskin Robbins has 27 flavors…to each his own…

 

[Bossrox]

I think there are two primary reasons for this:

- Victron's primary market is not the United States (and the NEC is an American thing)
- Victron's pimary markets are marine (and increasingly vehicle based) systems, not Residential/Commercial buildings / fixed structures where the NEC is more of a factor.


What model of Growatt? I'd like to know more about the feature you mentioned.

All their chargers have overvolt shutdown but I'm using the SC48120-MPV's & they don't mention it in the specs but I had an overvolt shutdown happen presumably from a solar flare that jacked my panels past their normal VOC.

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