profdant139 wrote:
Jon, your style of camping is fairly close to mine, so your comments are particularly persuasive. How do you recalibrate the Victron? Is it difficult? Do you have a bluetooth-equipped monitor?
Thanks in advance.
I have a Victron solar controller (which is a 100/50). I had to add a Victron dongle to it to be able to read the device from my truck. I have read that the Smart Shunt produces fairly weak Bluetooth & requires the dongle as well. My old 100/30 didn't need one; neither does the 712.
As to a daily recalibration or sync, if the solar controller shows it reached 14.5V & the absorption stage runs at least 15 minutes, and it switches to float, I assume that the batteries (3 100 amp hour Battleborn lithium) are full. Most of the time, under these conditions, the Victron 712 battery monitor does an automatic sync, if not, I'll do it manually.
If I was really concerned, I'd test the batteries every year by running them down to the BMS low voltage shut off & note the number of amp hours used, but to be honest, I don't bother.
With lead acid batteries, it might be more important to know the true battery capacity, however I suspect that shortened discharge times before hitting low voltage would become obvious as the battery capacity drops. Not so obvious with lithium...
Hope this is helpful.
Jon
