Victron Orion TR Smart & Solar interaction

[PeteS]

I'm about to fit an Orion-Tr Smart to my motorhome which currently has a SmartSolar MPPT charging the leisure battery and a VanBitz BatteryMaster maintaining the starter battery.
For those with the Orion Tr fitted already, how do you stop the B2B being activated by the Solar charging the starter battery when its voltage gets above the switch on for the B2B.
Can you use the vehicle ignition to turn on/off the charger via the remote on/off?

 

[wildebus]

I'm about to fit an Orion-Tr Smart to my motorhome which currently has a SmartSolar MPPT charging the leisure battery and a VanBitz BatteryMaster maintaining the starter battery.
For those with the Orion Tr fitted already, how do you stop the B2B being activated by the Solar charging the starter battery when its voltage gets above the switch on for the B2B.
Can you use the vehicle ignition to turn on/off the charger via the remote on/off?

This can be a problem as you have identified. If the Battery Master is allowing the starter battery to go above the "on" Threshold of the B2B, then the B2B will switch on unless you are remotely controlling it. You can indeed have an ignition signal controlling the B2B via the Remote connector.

I would check what voltage the Battery Master takes the Starter Battery to, and if stays under around 13.8V or so, just set the Victron B2B to have an On-Threshold of 13.8V and no need to worry about an ignition signal.


If you are interested I posted some info about the Orion-Tr Smart B2B and how it reacts to a Starter Battery voltage without the engine running -
Victron Orion-Tr Smart B2B and Remote Control

 

[PeteS]

Thank you as always for the your input, I havent actually measured the voltage yet, I have assumed it is a series pass element in the Battery Master and therefore in Bulk or absorption mode from Solar or mains charger would pass 14.4v to the starter although it is meant to limit that to 1.1A so I'm guessing it could be voltage limited as well.
I will check that next time I'm out and will report back.

I did your read your post but at the time wasnt thinking of a B2B charger so didnt really take it in, I notice you used the isolated Orion unit, does the non-isolated version operate the same way do you know?

This is all due to my decision to move over to lithium power so trying to put together a victron base solution.

 

[wildebus]

Thank you as always for the your input, I havent actually measured the voltage yet, I have assumed it is a series pass element in the Battery Master and therefore in Bulk or absorption mode from Solar or mains charger would pass 14.4v to the starter although it is meant to limit that to 1.1A so I'm guessing it could be voltage limited as well.
I will check that next time I'm out and will report back.

I did your read your post but at the time wasnt thinking of a B2B charger so didnt really take it in, I notice you used the isolated Orion unit, does the non-isolated version operate the same way do you know?

This is all due to my decision to move over to lithium power so trying to put together a victron base solution.

Isolated and Non-isolated work in the same way. The only reason I have the Isolated model is that it was the only one available at the time

I am not familiar with the internal design of the Battery Master but quite a few of these trickle charge type devices employ a diode in the circuitry that results in a 0.7V difference between Leisure and Starter Batteries, so 14.4V at the Leisure would result in 13.7V at the Starter in that case which would make a 13.8V Threshold on the B2B work quite nicely.

 

[PeteS]

Yes, even a series pass element will have a volts drop across it, I will go and measure tomorrow!!

So if you had a Venus GX unit could you get all these units to talk to each other and not try to compete with each other or is that what you have been doing with a RaspberryPi

 

[wildebus]

The Venus GX (or Raspberry Pi running Venus OS) would let you monitor various devices but generally does not control anything
For example this is my Camper:

But if the mains charger (AC Input) was active, it wouldn't disconnect the PV Charger. We would just see what both were up to.
(there are a few bits of info that gets shared though)

PS. The current Orion-TR Smart B2B has no data connection and the only monitoring is via the Bluetooth App.