The VICTRON SETUP and a CONNECTED BOAT
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2024
- Hi guys,
In this weeks episode we look at some wiring considerations for a solar charge controller setup with the Cerbo GX and how to get the most out of the Victron devices. I also touch briefly on the Wifi and the Raspberry Pi configurations.
Hope you get something out if it.
Cheers, Chris
Im from an electronics and Mainframe computer support background and can see a lot of thought and planning has gone into this - well done! I can’t wait to see how you get on with connecting it up, configuring it and the end results, particularly as I will soon be taking delivery of the same model boat.
Thanks Peter, glad it could possible help you. I find it super interesting playing with this stuff. I hope it goes well with your new boat :)
Hi Chris, all really interesting and thanks for sharing. We are on very similar road with our Hanse. Installed Cerbo this year after messing with Raspberry Pi for a long time; Pi worked well but does not give all input/output functionality. Almost everything here is Victron too!
We took bilge pump connection from back of manual 'pump on' switch to a DI; this works perfect except manually using the pump sets off the alarm which is a very rare event. Also have a smoke detector intended for connection to intruder alarms that runs off 12V and has relay alarm output connected to another DI. Our B&G plotter external alarm is connected to another DI so we can monitor the anchor alarm when ashore (providing we have GSM of course!). Both Hanse tank senders work perfect if disconnected from Hanse display (Phillipi on our boat). It's nice to sit at home when the weather is terribel or we've not been able to visit for a few weeks and be able to check all looks (appears) well :-) Great job, Chris!
PS: One piece of advice with the Cerbo, beware of stray currents in the negative lines to Cerbo digital inputs. All four DI negatives are parallelled on the Cerbo circuit board. If through a fault or other mishap, you end up with current in the negative leads, there is risk of frying the board. We have only one connection to the negative input side which is fuses at 1A.
Hi there, you are very welcome, definitely sounds like you are on a similar road. I know what you mean with the Pi, it would have been a fun project but the Cerbo covers many more bases and it's easy. Sounds like a good setup with the anchor alarm and bilge pump. I am going to look further into this when I have time, thanks for the info.
We disconnected the fuel tank and water tank from the Hanse display and took them to the Cerbo, worked great. I need to crimp the ends of the wires though I think to make it a little more robust.
Good advice with the digital inputs, have been considering trying to play around here but don't want to break anything. Thanks so much for all the input, I'm learning new stuff everyday. I will post an update soon. Cheers, Chris
Wow! Very impressive. The new Auroa is going to be very special. Hope you have a great season.
Cheers Jon, I hope you guys are having a great season
An amazing well done job. Clearly, your experience from your work profession serve you very well. It can be hard to balance between the DIY route and when it make more sense to buy a ready made well made unit (i.e Victron Cerbo unit). I guess, either you stay home and build stuff or you more often go out and enjoy sailing. I'm looking forward to know more about the Grafana and dashboard RPI setup, although a bit "nerdy" for some. You will be very satisfied with your system when you finished the installation, for sure very cool. Cheers.
Thanks again Sgt-Bond, your comments are always appreciated. You are totally right though, I do really enjoy tinkering in the winter with the technology but as soon as summer comes I just want to get out and enjoy the sailing. If you constantly have to fix stuff it can take away some of the experience. Better to keep it as simple as possible so that you don't have to remember a million things to make things work. :)
A beautiful job Chris. Wish I was as ‘OCD’ as you 😊. My set up is fairly scrappy but it works. I just boat a portable Induction top from Xiaomi. I used it last weekend on my 1600 watt inverter and it worked beautifully when taking care not to raise the power too much. I did blow the thermal breaker on my inverter, but simply needed to reset ( it is set bellow the power rating so very safe ). Looking forward to seeing the final install.
Hi Miles, OCD can sometime be a hinderance, I can tell you. Sometime the simplest solution is the best one. Good to hear some experiences with the induction stuff, I was a little concerned that Mulltiplus 2000 wasn't enough but I think it should be. I will make the video of the full install soon. Cheers, Chris
Loving it Chris. I’m in it as well and have been playing with the open source pi version from Victron as I don’t have the need for all the inputs. Will need to look into the grafana docker as well. Som many thing an so little time 🙂
Keep the videos coming 🙂
Thanks Peter, much appreciated. It's a nice feeling when something comes together
Wonderful presentation. My first viewing for your channel. Can’t wait to see your other videos. Thank you very much.
Hi Mike, you are welcome, glad you enjoy them
rewiring a mini cruiser, great job on the panel layout, watch your wire crimp connections and use ferrules for the solar charge controller connections. well done!
It's a good point with the ferrules, just need to buy a kit. Cheers
I like what you are doing I’m looking to put lithium batteries in with in a couple of years also, so happy to learn lots more. Well done on this video
Thanks very much, appreciated
Always fun to see what you're doing. I can miss the desire to install new things on a new boat. On my old boat it feels a bit like: if I have managed so far, I do not want to spend money on it now😁
by the way, how many subscribers you got 👍 People like what you do.
Cheers pal, yea things are going well with the channel it seems :) Mostly because of the repair videos though. I know what you mean with the older boats but the good thing is you can be more ambitious, like with your boat extension project. If you mess it up, it's way less painful. You did a great job with that by the way. I hope your having a good season so far. Cheers, Chris
Very nice setup! This is very similar to the layout I am putting together. As several others point out, it may be smart to run multiple MPPTs and you should consider connecting your panels in series.
Thanks, probably wont change to series because of all the cabling I have put in, it probably won't make sense. I will just but another couple of charge controllers
Thanks Chris top effort and great explanation of the system. Cheers Ross
Your welcome, thanks
Interesting video, it seems more equipment is now available for power management now that solar is more popular onshore. We have a Hanse 470e with a genset onboard so power management not so important but it would be nice to understand the condition / performance of each of our battery banks - house / bow thruster & windlass and starting
Thanks very much. I may think about installing a genset someday but not necessary for now just coastal cruising. I may even thinking about skipping that and putting a high power alternator in. First of all we need Lithium though, just waiting for the existing AGM's to expire. Indeed it would be nice to get a report on each battery so at least you know when it's close to replace them
Very nice and neat setup.
Thank you so much David. Cheers, Chris & Tanja
You are right - AC breakers are tested, rated and safe for AC.
Great video, as a (software) developer i appreciate this kind of detail. As a non-boat owner I geeked out on the house network, but i imagine when eventually owning a boat ill tech it up and probably use this as an example. We professionally use grafana (more for network statistics), i didn't realise one could use it for this as well.
U mentioned using open source / free software as backup. Have you considered or do you see using it as primary and perhaps only system.. Ditching out the garmin's en b&g's and whatnot?
Hi Arjan, Glad you enjoyed the video. It's always interesting playing with open source stuff and we could replace the B&G stuff we have but the quality just would not be the same. It's nice to have a backup and that's the main reason I have put it in. The B&G integration is just really good, it updates itself with the Navionics charts, which I trust and also have seemless integration with the NMEA network picking up the engine data, victron date etc etc.
Nice to find that you have a similar setup to our own. We have the CerboGx, RUTX11, Raspberry pi running OpenPlotter v3, Victron Multiplus, and solar controller. I’ve connected a bilge alarm to one of the digital inputs on the Cerbo, and have an alarm configured to capture when the main battery bank voltage has discharged too much (via a Victron smart shunt). I can see when these alarms have been raised on the display connected to the Cerbo GX, but I’m wondering whether it produces an OpenGL packet so I could capture the alarm condition and store it in InfluxdB so I can review the alarm at a later date, and possibly relate it to other conditions occurring at the same time?
Nice toys! I have "borrowed" your idea of using the space behind the coach for electronics, freeing the space under the couch for future batteries. I think that Francis here below is right though, you should not just connect in parallel panels of different wattage or who might be exposed to different sun conditions. The weakest panel will be seen as a load thus absorbing energy from the others instead of supplying its own limited capacity, or at best it will just be blocked by the diodes with zero output. I don't know if that can be fixed by electronics, otherwise multiple small MPPTs might give a better result.
Hi Aristides, sorry late to reply on this one. Glad you got a use for the space behind there. A few people have said this now about running different panels in parallel and I think it will be my winter project to install a couple of new MPPT chargers :) shouldn't be that much of a job. Thanks very much for the advice. I hope you are well, cheers, Chris
The Cerbo GX came out just after I got my Colour Control GX, but I am still tempted to switch to Cerbo. There is a firmware version for the Cerbo that includes node-red, which would be really cool.
Ahh well thats a pain when upgrades come up it's painful, but at least the cerbo isn't too pricey. I have been tempted with code red also
Thanks for posting this. I wish I'd seen this before trying to build my own system with the Raspberry Pi - I could have saved myself a week of tears 😪
...I think I need to buy the Cerbo GX now.
NB: The issue I am having is that the Pi keeps dropping the USB devices (Smartshunt 500VA, 100/30 MPPT & 12/800 Inverter). I'm hoping that the VE.Direct to the Cerbo GX will be more stable but my concern is that I need to run the cables about 2m and through a brick wall.
Thanks again.
No worries, glad you found it useful. Good luck with the installation. It's now the second year with the Cerbo GX and it's been awesome. I personally wouldn't bother reinventing the wheel with the Pi. I do have both but barely use the Pi
Great video thank you
Very welcome
Nice setup!
Thanks! Cheers, Chris & Tanja
Extremely cool !!
Thanks Silvano, and sorry for the late reply!
Nice design! I recently got a smartsolar 75/15 and phoenix inverter but i'm going to use it in my home as backup power during blackouts. Do i have to ground (with grounding rod) them?
Thanks, I think a couple of things are grounded including the MPPT charger, and these I ground to the keel
That's very cool setup, nicely engineered and done. Do you have a Victron BMV battery monitor in Aurora or do even need that anymore with Cerbo GX?
Good question I am also searching the answer for
Hi Mika, sorry for the late response on this. We had the BMV battery monitor with the shunt before we bought the Cerbo, so we just connected the two with a VE Direct cable. I think you will need to buy the shunt at least to connect to the Cerbo GX. Hope this helps now. Chris
hi there awesome content all around did you end up making a video about the grafana display?
Hi there, thanks for the compliments, I didn't end up making one in the end as to be honest we barely use it. Most of the time I am just using the touch display from Victron, it's really good and has pretty much everything you need
hello great video, can you explain how you made the temperature sensor with potentiometer? Thank you
Thank you. Now I would just go with the default one from Victron, the offset can now be set on the Cerbo itself
Would like to see the followup video on this. I recently bought a Albin Nova and are going to rebuild the electrical system so it would be nice to so how you did it ;)
There will be a follow up video coming soon, life has just taken the editing time away from me at the moment. This year we installed Lithium and a bigger inverter, looking forward to showing it to you.
I’ve just designed and bought my system for 4G onboard.
Rutx09 in a QUspot antenna/enclosure (bridged the x09 ) that will be mounted up in the mast and a RUTx10 down in the boat for Wi-Fi.
I’m looking to build a small system to feed a few led lights, a camper water pump, a home box fan. I would incorporate a generator for feeding a toaster and a window air conditioner.
Nice👍 well done
Hi, will you get 2 kW from the inverter running AGMs? You need to pull around 170 A for all the time you run.
Hi Peter. Sorry for the late reply and thanks for your comment. Yes we will, but only for short period of times as the inverter overheats. We have tested this with the water heater and kettle, but it's not ideal. Lithium batteries would be prefered, for sure. Cheers, Chris & Tanja
With all of that concentrated on one small panel, are you concerned about heat? Or better yet how do you dissipate heat?
Hi Jess. Thank you for your question and sorry about the late reply. Wasn't really concerned about the heat from the panel, as it's the inverter/charger that produces the most heat. Where the panel sits there are vents in the top of the couch and there is plenty of space around the panel. Cheers, Chris & Tanja
Did you do a follow up on the install, test, and review?
It's coming soon, I've been trying to get around to doing it.... Life has got in the way
And all I could think as I watched this was: I'm sooooo old... I remember sailing back before the internet. Anyway, this is very cool. I'm looking forward to hearing about your adventures with this, and the boat itself, this sailing season.
Hi Karl, I know what you mean don't worry, I am starting to struggle keeping up with some technologies these days. Glad you found this one useful :) We will post an update soon, currently we are moving out of our apartment so I have limited time. I will find some time though soon, cheers, Chris
hi,
i don't think it's best practice to put (different types of) solar panels in parralel.
you will probable get better result (more power) when adding extra mppt's
Hi Addy, thanks for the comment. After a few mentions on this I will definitely be buying a new MPPT controller this winter :)
Hi there! i'm interested in the Konnected step down module. Is it only available from them in the States as shipping is $16!! I've tried other 5V - 3A modules but my Pi4 keep crashing so looking for a better solution. Many thanks!
Yes unfortunately I have only found them in the states :( maybe there are more on the market now, this was months ago. Sorry I can't help more
Can one connect the smartsolar mppt via bluetooth to the Cerbo GX or do you always need to use a cable?
Looks like you need a cable at the moment at least. My bigger mppt conencts over victron direct the other smaller one does not
The wires coming from the MPPT controller seem quite thin. Are you sure they can handle the current? Even if they won't overheat, they will still cause energy loss.
Hi, the wires are 6mm2, they can handle the current as the distance is very short. The recommended wire size for a length of 2m, 12v at 20 amps is only 2.5mm. There is a really good app from Bluesea called circuit wizard, its really good. Remember to calculate the distances based on the positive and negative put together. Cheers
Lots of new toys
You almost made me buy a boat, just so that I can play with all these toys ;-)
Hi Susana, awesome! You definitely need to buy a boat, you wont regret it, unless you buy the wrong one at least :) Cheers
Hi !
Thanks for a good tec video but what happen to part two with the pie and finally installation.
Keep up with your good and entertainment video.
Thanks and Best regards Richard
Hey Richard, Thanks very much. I will do a video on this hopefully soon. I changed a whole bunch of other stuff also.
Hi mate do you have a link for what i need to buy to gauge my water levels and fuel levels to connect the Cerbo GX
Hi David. You will need to measure the depth of your water tank; from the bottom the deepest point to where you will install the gauge. We bought the TGW250 from: www.philippi-online.de/en/products/supervision/tank-sensors.html. We didn't install a gauge to the fuel tank, we rerouted the gauge that was installed from the factory. Hope this can help you otherwise let us know if you need any further information. Cheers, Chris & Tanja
@@SailingAurora thank you so much for this
Hey can this work without cerbo GX? Even with fewer capabilities!
Sure, you can add to the system as much as you want, question is, can what work. The Cerbo GX ties alot of the Victron information together
What are you doing with the Raspi?
At the moment I am just using it for weather, google and looking at charts etc. I did install Grafana on it also with docker but with the Cerbo, i barely use that function l. Maybe in the future I will use it for more including NMEA data collection etc.
More enlightenment
Thanks :) hope it helps
Since you have many different solar panels, you should have distinct mppt to optimize current draw on each panel. If a panel is lower on voltage you will get 0% out of it in your setup. C.f. UA-cam pacific yacht system.
That is what I was thinking. You can expect every solar panel to have a different voltage at any giving time. I also hope there is diode at the solar panel to prevent current flowing the wrong way.
Hi Francis, thanks very much for the tip. This winter I will be installing more MPPT controllers because of this reason. Cheers
Sorry to say so, but I think you could give yourself problems by fusing the negative side of the solarpanels. Power has to run somewere and if the fuse break it will run elsware. Think about the installation in your house all negative eventually goes to ground (a copper spear etc). Best of luck
Good point, I will do a little more research on this. If I change, I can just put a really big fuse on the negative side.
Double pole DC isolator as per most installations.
Breaking both the pole in the DC side to the inverter is standard practise.
👍🏻
Uff. Electronics on boats. Hard going.
This is all simple stuff.
I’m talking naval combat systems with their multi billion dollar budgets, and we still couldn’t get it to work every time 😂
Because Govt multi Billion dollar systems are their mostly for the graft opportunism of Politicians and Apparatchik, not whether they doing anything useful.
@@mitch_the_-itch I have no love for those you mentioned, but the issues I think are that with all the complexity of modern military systems, it is oh so easy for some unforeseen consequence. Given the choice between conspiracy or plain old stuffup, the stuffup is the most likely cause
Yea was pretty simple to setup and that's the beauty of it. I don't want to spend too much time with it. If it plugs in and works well, I am happy
"I could have done it but I simply don't want to." Seems to be a very common theme for electronics on boats. Or did Victron give you some stuff? Raymarine is basically preventing people from DIY electronics on boats by buying off all the creators with "free" yet far over priced electronics, lol.
If you did use your engine block for a ground would that hasten the detioration of the metals on the engine block or keel in your case?
It's a lot of time to diy something barely similar. A lot. It would literally turn into your day job and some more. And in the end it won't be as nice as an off the shelf unit. So it's all about how much you value your time.
@@alxmnslv If you're a sailor don't you by default have a lot of time?
I think it's a delicate balance, if you already have a good base knowledge or are a developer, it will be a lot easier to make something like this. I agree though a lot of the electronics are fairly overprices but there is a lot of R&D behind this for a much smaller customer base than Apple or Microsoft for example. Also the electronics need weather proofing, the screens need to be tested with extreme temperature ranges, be seen in the sun etc etc. There is a lot of thought behind the good systems also
My kind of geeky.
Having different wattage panels ( voltages ) connected to one mppt is a bad idea. You will loose efficiency. You should have another mppt for the larger wattage panel.
Good advice, I will probably invest in another smaller one in that case. Thanks