Victron BMV-712 Battery monitor

As the title says, I’m interested in the Victron battery monitor. My cheap Chinese monitor just got fried. I am willing to splash out on something a bit more decent.

The 712 comes with Bluetooth so can communicate with phone app. Otherwise it pretty much does what the other 700 series monitors do. Anyone using one?

It works by measuring the cumulative current in and out of the battery Pat as voltage alone can be a poor measure of state of charge. Once you tell it things like, ‘this is my battery fully charged’ and ‘it is so many Amp-hour in capacity’, it should then be able to keep track of your battery state of charge and let you know your are say 80% s SOC etc. as well as that it shows the usual stuff, battery voltage, instantaneous current draw and wattage. But it is the Amp-hours consumed on load and supplied on charging that I really use to guage my battery.

It will require that you synchronize the battery to your monitor every once in a while, I.e. my battery is fully charged so monitor should say so. It uses a ‘shunt’ wired in series with the battery (negative pole usually). The shunt is essentially a current sensing resistor and all load current and charge current should flow through this.

I decided to bite the bullet so I have the Victron on order

The BM1 was on my shortlist too. I think it was the Bluetooth connectivity of the Victron that swung it for me. Maybe the iPhone app is a little gimmicky , if all it does is to double up on the front panel UI , but it does allow you to do firmware updates on the monitor via the phone.