Quote:
Originally Posted by Perryb67
We own a Victron BMV-712 battery monitor. At $210 it is vastly overpriced. I wanted it for 24 hour history and despite my conversation with Victron it does not show 24 hour history. It does bluetooth, so we can watch the charge from my phone as were driving down the highway.
We do get some history with our Victron Smartsolar 100/20 that was purchased for $160 and can also read the 100/20 as were driving down the road.
If I had it to do over again (don't we all wish we had 20/20 vision) I would have purchased the Victron Smartsolar 100/20 and our simple/cheap 12v, plug-in battery monitor.
FYI, we have a 170 watt solar panel permanently mounted on the roof and a 100 watt portable, for those rare times the 170 watt isn't enough.
If you're not purchasing a new solar controller this is the monitor I would purchase.
Enjoy,
Perry
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A lot has happened since this was written nearly two years ago. First of all I want history, something the Aili battery monitor doesn't do.
A year ago we started noticing our two year old AGM batteries were failing. I looked at the Victron 712's history and saw the batteries were getting 20.3 volts, not the maximum 14.4 volts my WFCO and GoPower were supposed to provide. Upon further research it took only one day to realize our WFCO charger had decided to provide 20.3 volts to our AGM. The WFCO had failed and destroyed our batteries in the process!
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I've had the 712 for two years and it's history showed the WFCO failed. A year ago, two weeks after the AGM failure (we limped along with what the dying AGMs could give us), I installed a pair of 260 ah Soneil SiO2 batteries. At the same time I removed the two reverse polarity fuses so the WFCO could no longer charge our batteries at 20.3 volts, and removed the dumb GoPower
solar controller and installed a Victron 100/30 smart
solar controller.
It's been a year since I removed the reverse polarity fuses. All our 12v appliances run off solar, since the 12v WFCO converter has been disabled. We've yet to even come close to running out of battery. The most we've used before a full charge back is 82 ah's of our potential 260 ah's.
However, last June we installed 300 more watts to the roof for camping underneath dense shade that can occur in Minnesota. Since the additional 300 watts we have not needed to deploy our 100 watt portable. The 465 watts wired in parallel put out about 60-90 watts in dense shade.
Since I mounted the 712 readout in the upper cabinets we can easily be 100 feet away and Victron's bluetooth app works perfectly. The Victron Smart Shunt has the bluetooth in the shunt and many cannot read their Smart Shunt when traveling down the road, so if that's a consideration I'd go again with the Victron BMV 712.
The Aili battery monitor is merely a real time meter with no history. I would not have been able to quickly realize the reason for our failure if we'd only had that cheap Aili monitor. The Victron 712 also ties our two Victron solar controllers together to work as a unit and gives us battery temperature compensation as well.
Forget a cheap battery monitor. Get a monitor that keeps history so you can minimize your downtime and help analyze your problem.
Food for thought,
Perry