We discovered our house battery capacity had, slowly over time, diminished to the point where the low State Of Charge alarm on our
Victron BMV-700 battery monitor would go off in a short amount of time. We only use a single 100 Ah AGM battery, but apparently the three stage power convertor we initially installed cannot be left plugged in all the time. Even though it' supposed to have a "float" stage that allows this...
After a bit of research, I selected this
Victron IP65 "Blue Smart" Charger that has a nice feature, a fourth state called "Storage". After reaching the float level for a specified amount of time, the charger will go dormant into this "Storage" mode. It will wake up once a week to move back into float mode long enough to keep the battery charged if your RV is stored plugged in for a long time. So I can again leave ours plugged in full time here in the RV storage building we have on our property.
We ordered a new
Renogy 12 volt 100 Ah "Gel" battery and the Victron IP65 Charger, and replaced the old equipment in the house battery system storage area. Once nice thing about the new charger, is that I can connect to it using bluetooth to "see" the state of the charger to confirm it's doing what it's supposed to do!
While we were upgrading our house battery system, we also added Victron's VE.Direct
bluetooth module to our trusty BMV-700 battery monitor. I REALLY like it as now I can easily see the State Of Charge including estimated time remaining at current load on our 12 volt house battery system!
With the upgraded technology, all from Victron, we have a more intelligent charging system. And we can easily see the state of our house battery system including the charger using the
Victron Connect app on our IOS devices.
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