Victron EnergySmartSolar MPPT TR VE.Can Solar Charge Controller (Bluetooth) - Charge Controllers for Solar Panels - 250V, 100 amp, 12/24/36/48-Volt

This was the latest in a long list of Victron purchases. Every piece of kit I've bought from Victron has excellent quality and a superb feature set. There are times and places when skimping on a purchase is reasonable. But having a reliable of supply of electrical power isn't one of them. This particular MPPT charge controller was easy to configure and install and the Victron Connect app works great with it.

Love this charge controller! It's my second Victron product, and it does not disappoint. With the Bluetooth app, you can see exactly what it is doing. App tells you current input, output in watts. Shows total charging output history for many days. Not sure how many. Tells you how long it was in bulk, absorb, and float. This allows you to better plan your usage. It tells you accumulated kWh over time. I run 1000 watts PV, generating as high as 900 watts peak. Regularly runs at about 55 amps charging current, and barely gets warm. No fans. Just sits there silently, doing it's job without issues. Wire lugs are of a generous size. I have Monster brand 600 strand 4gg cables running into it right now. I have an old cell phone permanently running as a monitor. No need for the auxiliary monitor that Victron offers. (Sorry Victron:) The cell phone runs on bluetooth, so it can be moved anywhere in the house within range. I bought the 150V/100 amp and run it on 12v, but I like having the option to continue using it if I choose to go to 48v. I hope to have this cc for many years. I've burned up two cheaper CCs running them near 100% of rated capacity.

What can one say, it's a Victron! Absolutely the best MPPT Controllers on the market today. Seamless integration with bluetooth app, easy setup it really does it for you and allows you to tweak it to your parameters. Why I wasted my time and money on others is beyond me. I should have gotten Victron from the start. It may cost more but you won't be sorry at the added expense.

Side note:All Victron products come with a 5 yr manufacturer's warranty. I forgot about this when purchasing and purchased the 4 year Asurian warranty. This Asurian warranty runs concurrent with the manufacturer's warranty and won't kick in until the manufacturer's warranty has been exhausted. This would be fine if the manufacturer's warranty were only 1 or 2 years. Being 5 years, you will never be able to use it. I wish this Asurian wasn't an option for this purchase. Makes me wonder how many folks fell for it. Anyways, I quickly requested a refund on the Asurian and got my $79 refunded.Review:My last Victron controller of 4 years blew up due to an induced lighting strike. Got smart after that and wired lighting arrestors on both sides of my 100ft stretch of line.Thought I would try out a much cheaper charger controller after that to see how that would go. 6 months and that controller was toast .Decided this is one of those purchases that you can't cheap out on. So I decided to go with Victron again and upgraded from the 150/60 to the 150/100. Haven't looked back. I missed this charge controller. The app and being able to see the stats are awesome.

Works like a charm. Hooked up to 1400 watch of solar. The Bluetooth function is really nice too as you can monitor and gives you a history of your daily output.

update 1/25: This relates to and further extends the original comments I made.The history page does keep accurate track of the state, however, the state itself tracks incorrectly (imo). Once the absorb set point is reached the controller correctly goes into absorb mode. If the controller then drops back out of the absorb voltage however, the controller still remains in absorb mode. That means that one little blast of sunlight at any point can trigger absorb and nothing will take it back out. That means the absorb timer is useless and the absorb history is extremely misleading. You don’t know how long you actually spent in absorb mode without watching it by eye. Couple this with the lack of manual mode control and you have a pretty lousy controller for any type of battery.I now have one Eg4-LL 12/400 battery and I deal with it by setting the absorb timer to 5 hours and the end-amps to 20a. The only time this doesn’t serve is when there are very poor conditions and the battery reaches 100% while still in bulk mode, meaning not that many amp hours needed replacing. In this case the battery can get over charged because the controller NEVER reaches the absorb set point (of 14.0v) and hence will never stop trying. I don’t know if it is damaging to the battery to face, say, 13.8v for hours and hours but I expect is is.That describes my open-loop situation where that battery is not in comms link with the controller. Closed loop only works if you buy the Cerbo-GX and you have to be very careful about non-isolated connections. I lost a smartshunt to a lightlning strike 2 blocks away because those do not have isolated comms. I do not want to lose a 150/100 mpp and a cerbo and possibly a battery as well because Victron couldn’t be bothered to put proper isolation on all the signaling lines.update 2/16/24: The History page shows the cumulative time spent in each mode, bulk, absorb and float but the values shown are wrong. It appears to count absorb time from when the batteries rise above the FLOAT set point instead of the ABSORB one like all the other controllers I own, notably Outback. So the history display undercounts the cumulative time for bulk and over counts it for absorb.Looking at the Trend data the numbers are close to what I expect, a 90 minute absorb timer holds the voltage at the absorb set point for about 90 minutes but you can’t tell that by looking at the history page.The amount it is off by depends on conditions, today mine was over by 100%, History showed 3 hours in absorb vs the 1.5 hours the timer is actually set for and which the Trend data shows is actually what the controller did.This is confusing and defeats the purpose of the history page not to mention how hard it becomes to validate the settings you’re using for whatever kind of battery technology you have.update 2/10/24: dropped to two starsLack of manual mode control is a major pita when the controller stays in absorb mode too long, frequently it overcharges but sometimes undercharges my GC2 batteries and I then want to force it. I think this is more than just me being picky. I’ve lived with it for my lead/acid batteries which are pretty forgiving but I will be switching over to LiFeP04 soon and at that time I may have to revert to using my Outback FM60 instead, that at least I can control.The most common situation is on poor solar days when it never reaches the absorb setpoint or only reaches it late in the day and as a result my coloumb counter shows that as much as +25ah has gone into the batteries. That high of a number is tolerated by lead acid batteries but it’s hard on LiFeP02 ones, I only expect to see high positive amp hour numbers after fully absorbing and then equalizing. The only way to force it out of absorb is to go in and move the absorb setpoint down to something less than whatever it’s delivering at the moment. Ugh.Also the History bar chart seems to indicate the time spent in each mode only roughly. Ex: if it reaches absorb but then conditions deteriorate to where it cannot maintain the absorb set point the absorb time continues to advance - it’s possible that internally they’re keeping track but just not showing it in the history (because often the history abs time value is greater than the abs timer value. Regardless it’s confusing). Coupled with the lack of an absorb timer countdown display you cannot predict when it’s going to transition to float. These are issues that Outback gets exactly right with their FM series.I am really not impressed with Victron right now.update 12/03/23:I’m dropping to 4 stars because of the lack of manual mode control. I will change this back to 5 stars if I learn over time that this controller really doesn’t need it and my complaint here is just that I’m not used to it (but honestly how freaking big of a compromise would it be to provide the option, the thing isn’t going to orbit the earth or travel to mars ffs).The controller is slow to transition from absorb to float, it can take 5-6 minutes once the batteries settle down to the float setpoint before the controller finally takes over supplying 100+% of the demand. It gets the delta down to less than an amp pretty quick but it dithers around for a long time trying to find the sweet spot where it’s producing enough current to feed the house and keep my battery’s coloumb counter net positive. Once it hits this state though it continues searching, it drops the voltage and the batteries go neg and then it raises it again. This could be the controller trying to learn my system, the wiring, loads and battery characteristics. It will take a few days before I can say. For now I can say it does a better job at regulating the float voltage when there’s ~10a of house demand, at 4a it was hunting its brains out. Again, it could have been learning.orig:All my other controllers have allowed the charger to be forced manually into float, or bulk mode. My Outback fm60 for example occasionally sticks in charged state after absorb completes and I have to force it to float. There’s nothing in the Victron manual, the front panel or the app that I can find to do this. If the controller does what it’s expected to do then it’s not necessary I guess but if it doesn’t then the recourse will be complicated.Also the trend data is not delivered in the BLE advertisement extra data field that allows their app (and my esp32) to receive instant data, only the basics are in there and I don’t believe Victron plans to add it. The solar panel voltage and amps are also not included. That’s disappointing, I have a stand alone BLE display solution but I want to include trend/solar data and the only way to get that is by connecting and requesting each one (which is why the app times out and has to reconnect). Ugh, I have to track min and max numbers myself.Regardless of that it’s a solid controller so far and for now I’m keeping it.

Running this smaller charger on 2 marine batteries and 200 watt 12v solar on the front of my camper. The Bluetooth on all these victron units I us

It handles a lot of power and has no weird quirks or stupid work arounds you have to worry about. Does just what it says and does it well