Originally Posted by MAWilsonPE
Hello Brad & Chris,
When looking to upgrade the charge controllers, I first considered two Jaboni 50amp units but they will not work with the display panel provided with the 30's, nor do they make a panel for the 50's that I could see, so that was out.
Of course, I talked to Matt about this before I did anything, just to get his take. He happened to have two Victron SmartSolar 100-50's available from some previous testing he did and offered them to me at a really good price. He mounted them on a panel, provided the breakers and lugs, and pre-wired the whole thing! The decision at that point was easy. The mounting plate he provided was bigger than I expected so my only mounting option was on top of the SSF box. You have to be pretty close to the lugs on that box to keep the wires short. See the picture below (it is getting pretty crowded in there!).
Connecting it up was pretty straight forward. I cut the solar panel feed lines going into the SSF box at the splice just outside the box (do this when it is dark, no sun, no power being generated) and was able to reach the new controllers without adding any more wire. There are two positive lugs on the SSF box. The top one is always connected to the batteries (the hydraulic slide/jacks pump and brake pump are on this circuit so they are always powered). The lower positive lug is the one that is switched from control panel inside the unit. The positive feed from the controllers is connected to the top lug. Ground to the ground lug.
I left the Jaboni controllers in place (I do not want to wrench around inside the SSF box!) so I could perhaps add more panels later and reconnect those.
If you decide on Victron, be sure to get the SmartSolar (bluetooth capable) and not the BlueSolar (not bluetooth, despite the name...). I see no reason you could not use one 100amp controller with the panels wired in parallel but I would check with Victron. I do like having a bit of redundancy.
In order to add a display and data logging capability, you have two options, purchase a Victron Cerbo GX box ($300) and a GX Touch Panel ($220)... or you could add a Raspberry Pi with touchscreen (~$150). Unfortunately, the PC version of the Victron Connect app does only what the iPhone app does, no data logging. Victron is great in that their software is open source and they have developed the Venus OS for R-Pi. It is not plug and play, and I am having some difficulty getting it working, but I love a challenge.
Although the controllers and battery monitor are bluetooth capable, I don't think I can get the data feed into the R-Pi via bluetooth (I understand Victron is working on this in a beta version). Currently, you have to use a VE Direct USB cable ($28 each). I will probably have to extend this USB cable with a boosted signal USB extender to get the display where I want it inside.
The controllers and battery monitor will communicate with one another via bluetooth so I think only one cable is needed to the R-Pi, but I haven't got that far yet. Once you have all three on the bluetooth VE network, the controllers operate in a "synchronized charging" mode, which simply means that they will both stay in the same charging mode, bulk, float, etc. You will never have one in float and one in bulk (which would happen occasionally with the Jabonis).
The bluetooth access via iPhone does provides a lot of information from the controllers such as peak daily power and total daily charge, see the second pic below (note the 613 watt peak at the right, this is for two 300 watt panels... WooHoo!!). I want minute to minute data logging so hence the effort to install the R-Pi. I will keep you posted as I work out the R-Pi bugs.
I hope this is clear and helpful, albeit a bit long and wordy....
Best, Mike
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