MONITOR PACKAGES

There’s nothing more important than knowing how much energy you have left in your battery bank during your dry camping adventure or the status of your integrated components as they work seamlessly for you day in and day out. Whether you’re interested in a Battery Monitor that provides a more easily readable State of Charge (SOC - usually output in %) or to have full knowledge and control over your Victron devices via the Victron Color Control, we can include this as an upgrade to the solar or inverter system of your choice.

INTEGRATED VICTRON BATTERY MONITOR PACKAGES

There are certain applications where having the ability to monitor your system is crucial. With a Battery Monitor, it acts as a fuel gauge for your battery bank helping to provide valuable insight into the system that can show how much current is entering or leaving the battery bank. It also performs well as a tool to help diagnose issues should they develop down the road. While Charge Controllers offer monitoring of your solar system, the data it provides is limited to solar performance, battery charging status, and gross battery voltage. To get the true state of charge, we have to ensure we capture all the loads that are drawing current from your battery bank and all charging sources (i.e. shore power, solar, etc.) pushing current back into your battery bank. To do the job properly, we install a Victron BMV-712 Battery Monitor with Temperature Sensor on the most negative side of your battery bank. A shunt is used by the battery monitor to calculate the net voltage of your battery bank and thus provide battery state of charge (SOC) in the form of a percentage (%). Since battery voltage is influenced by loads and charging sources, gross voltage readouts from factory equipment (including charge controllers, equipment panels inside your RV, or voltmeters), would provide potentially inflated voltages when the batteries are being charged or the reverse if the batteries were under heavy loads.

The Victron Color Control provides insight into your entire system linking to all your Victron-enabled devices displaying everything from the current shore power/grid charging state, to solar performance, battery monitoring along with data logging & analysis. We recommend for anyone planning to do extended dry camping to purchase the Victron Battery Monitor package at a minimum to help you have the greatest insight into how your system is functioning at any point in time out on the road.