Battery monitor question
I am about to replace my battery with 4 6 volt batteries. (I have another post with some other questions about this) When I do this, I plan on adding a Victron battery monitor. It looks like it w...
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dieseltruckdriver wrote:
Thanks again for your input. Actually my wife is looking forward to the new system, as she got used to watching the voltage to see how the solar was doing.
We are on night six right now and the little group 24 batteries are suffering. I need to get solar and a real battery bank installed soon.
The Trimetric has "auto reset" for the AH counter that must be disabled if you have solar. Easy to do that-instructions in the manual. Otherwise, it resets every time it gets dark. I don't know how Victron works for that, but it must do it somehow.
Whatever monitor you get, if you get AGMs you need an ammeter to tell when they are truly full, so it is handy if the monitor does amps as well as volts. Once it can do amps, the next step up is AH counting. After that, the programming can get fancy so the thing can do all sorts of tricks you don't care about.
I don't use most of the fancy things the Trimetric can do, but I paid for them. After eight years, the cost per year is now quite low and getting lower with each passing year. If the Victron does the things you will actually use for less cost, why not get that? Of course, you might not be able to say what features you will actually use until you get one.
With any battery monitor that does amps (it does amps to/from the battery), you can compare that to the amps reading on your solar controller and see how much of the solar is going to loads and how much to the battery. Sometimes useful. Or if you are "easily entertained" it can be fun. :)
