Victron Energy SmartSolar MPPT 100V 30 amp 12/24-Volt Solar Charge Controller (Bluetooth)

I purchased a couple 100W Renogy panels for our travel trailer as dry camping opens up a lot of sites for us and I don’t like firing up the generator unless I have to. The panels are deployed on folding stands which is really the only way to get them in the sun in the wooded campgrounds we frequent. I used them the first weekend with the PWM controller that came with the kit. It blinked nicely at me, but even with a voltmeter added to our control panel inside the camper there wasnt really a way to see what was going on. I started looking at adding monitors with shunts, but things start getting rather involved for my particular setup. At home in the off-season the camper is covered and plugged into shore power to keep the batteries up. I realized a few things. First, I’m paying for electricity to charge the batteries when I have two solar panels in a box. Second, the on-board inverter/charger is OK for maintaining batteries, but really lacks the ability to keep them at a full charge as they hover around 13.4-13.6 volts regardless of battery condition and with no temperature compensation. Third, to charge the batteries requires the battery kill switch to be on, meaning I’m also powering gas and carbon monoxide detectors and who knows what other parasitic loads in the camper. Not a monetary issue but things without power on them can’t cause unforeseen issues. I had originally fallen prey to the argument that you’re better off buying another panel vs. paying for an MPPT controller. That works on paper but I realized that I’ll set out 2 panels, but I will never set out 3 or 4. That meant the Victron SmartSolar 75/15 would work nicely and the cost was within my threshold of pain. The need for a separate monitor was also negated. Installation was easy as I was just replacing the PWM controller. My setup is a couple of group 24 lead acid deep cycle batteries with around 160ah. Power is brought into the storage bay of my travel trailer with 4/0 wiring where it splits off to a 3000/6000 pure sine inverter. The Victron is wired into the 4/0 cables which are only about 18” away with 10 gauge cabling. The Zamp plug that came with the camper was replaced with a 10 gauge wire unit, and the 20’ of Renogy cable going to the panels is 10 gauge. The storage bay isn’t heated so it’s within a few degrees of the batteries which are on the tongue. After doing an update the unit automatically selected 12v and the default charge setting was for deep cycle gel batteries. I was initially a little worried that there wasn’t a specific setting for lead acid batteries but the parameters of this option are apparently fine from what I can gather. Equalization is off by default. After installation I zipped the camper cover back up all I have to do now is walk by and log in to see what’s going on, no need to unzip/unlock or interrupt my nap when we’re actually camping to check our state of charge. The attached screenshots were for the first few days. I’m only using one 100W panel as I felt this would be sufficient. The battery bank was at 90% charge the first day (see handy chart) and I was pleased to see that it got fully charged but concerned that my 100W panel was only putting out 35W in full sun. A 100W panel is going to max out somewhere around 70W in the northern hemisphere on the best day in the summer and this was in January, the lowest amount of available solar energy (insolation) of the year. The following days were even worse until I understood that Pmax isn’t your panel’s peak wattage, it’s the peak that the controller will draw from the panel as it manipulates current and voltage to get what it wants. You’re not going to see a Pmax that resembles the published output of your panels unless you have a big load on them (or drained batteries) and maybe not then. This is a layman’s explanation, but if it keeps you from thinking you have a bad panel or connection it’s worth the keystrokes. Of the following three January days the first was sunny, the next was cloudy and the next was rain. The Victron doesn’t care, it still pulled plenty of voltage out of the panel and quickly went into float. It’s like a honey badger. Perhaps more interesting will be what happens when a live load is applied (such as when we’re actually camping and using power). Toggling the electric tongue jack gets an immediate response from the controller as it ramps up to offset what you’re using, then it goes back to putting the battery back to the state of charge that it wants. Comparisons between PWM and MPPT controllers are made in somewhat of a vacuum, you can spend hours reading them. In the real world of RV use the MPPT probably offers more advantages than published. On cloudy and rainy days MPPT wins, but though it’s hard to quantify it also wins when you have partial sun exposure due to your location. I love wooded/private campsites. Most examples use a sunny day with no loads and the PWM can do what the MPPT does, it just takes longer. Let’s say I’m fully charged by noon and at 4pm I decide to take a shower (water pump, exhaust fan, lights). Which one will have a chance of recovering the batteries given the limited amount of remaining daylight? Exactly.

I have built 3 so called Solar Generators, and have used Victron Energy charge controllers in all of them. I tried other brands, and always seemed to run into issues with configuration, ease of use and size. I have two 100/30 charge controllers and I love them both. They are small. very very efficient and they are so reliable. I love the Bluetooth connection and Victron Energys app. Configuration is a breeze, and I can even do a little logging of the chargers performance. This controller also has a very small footprint, and it fits into tight places. Installation is easy as well. These are little more expensive than other controllers, but they are worth it to me. They have never let me down, and they are very reliable. I find them to be a good value for the price and I highly recommend them. I give this controller 5 stars.

Seems to work fine. I have the SmartSense battery monitor which this uses to get accurate battery voltage and that is really helpful since I have a ~20 wire run from my solar controller to my battery. But having now owned 4 different charge controllers in the last 7-8 years, I dont think Victron is worth the extra $. Heres why: First, you get zero support. Thats right, Victron will only provide support to certified resellers, so if you have a problem and you bought from Amazon guess what? Youre SOL. In my case I believe theres a bug in their charging algorithm, but I literally cannot talk to anyone at Victron directly. (That said their community support is great, but its not the same as actual technical support). Second, some of their really useful features (like being able to monitor charge voltage over time and graph it) only work if you disable screen lock and leave your bluetooth device (phone, typically) connected and running the app. Dont change apps because your graphs will reset. Why cant this run in the background? The unit does have daily stats but that doesnt help me when Im trying to understand why charging isnt cutting out as expected. My personal issue is that I have a LiFePO4 setup (which this device does support), but I want to cut off charging on my setup when the battery hits about 90%. The Victron has several settings to shorten the absorption times, all of which seem to work when I drain the battery and need to recharge it. However if the battery doesnt get drained one day and starts off full, the unit still goes into bulk mode for several hours and ends up topping off the battery. I assume this is a charging algorithm-related problem, but its disappointing behavior and defeats the reason I purchased the device.

I like the bluetooth connection to see what is happening real time. Im not crazy about the fact it doesnt store the history of the charge controller input/output. If you use different devices on it you cant get the same history downloaded. Connecting wires with the screw wire block seems less secure to me. I dont know why most of the companies do it this way. Seems to limit the size of wire and makes it less secure. Ive had wires come out easily. This isnt really a dig at this brand, they all seem to have these screw connectors. The back aluminum plate popped off one day. A whole bunch of sand came out of it; it looked like beach sand. Apparently the inside of unit has sand to help with heat dissipation. Never heard of this before but I read up on it. I thought it was a defect at first but others have experienced the same thing. This shouldnt be an issue for most people since they will have it mounted on a wall but I had been moving mine around a lot and one day it just popped off. It does seem to have affected its performance so far. Time will tell. Im using it with a 100ah LiFePo4 battery and RadioB BMS connected to a Renogy shunt/battery capacity. Also us it to charge up the battery with my solar panel and AC/DC power adaptor.

Great solid case, the efficiency is great and I really liked the bluetooth/wireless networking. This really helps overcome some of the documentation challenges with a Victron product. The ability of this device to network with the BMS product is great. Unfortunately the whole of the Victron line of products are not up to this same level of integration just yet, so dont expect the inverter/charger line of products to integrate with this system.

After purchasing a 26$ controller, which seemed to work okay, I decided to upgrade to a bit more professional controller for my simple solar solution so I could have a better view of what was really happening with my 400 watts of solar panels dumping to 2 marine deep cycle batteries. This unit is everything that I expected and much more. The bluetooth interface is amazing. 26$ will get you a charge controller and most likely it will work but with the bluetooth interface (iPhone, IPad, and Mac) on the Victron, I can watch this one work real time along with built in trending. It keeps track of my power generation daily with bar graphs showing peak Watts and Volts per day along with battery charge max and min. I can see, while writing this, I am currently making 301 watts and have been generating for 3h 43m in bulk mode loading the batteries. For me, that is worth the extra money and 5 stars for Victron for making a product that is easy to use and very stable. NOTE: Make sure you size it right. Many different models to chose from to fit your solar size.

Does a great job regulating the battery power on our RV’s solar setup.

I built out a 4x4 Sprinter cargo van as a camper and initally used only the alternator charging (with a 30 amp Sterling Battery to Battery charger) and a short power charger to keep my 310 amp hours of house batteries charged up. I didn’t want to drill through the roof to install solar panels there because of the snow that accumulates there after skiing. By itself the snow might not be a problem, but once I start driving it moves back and forth and eventually slides down the wildshield if I have to make a sudden stop. I was worried that would put extra stress on any roof-mounted solar panels, and possibly cause a water leak in the roof. We’ve all seen leaky RVs covered with a tarp, and I didn’t want that fate. So I bought Renogy’s 200 watt solar suitcase panels (without a controller) and connected the MC4 connectors for those panels to the cut off ends of a 10 AWG cigarette lighter plug that was rated for 25 amps 12v. In turn, that 12v recepticle is hard wired to this charge controller. I was worried that 200 watts of solar and a 15amp charge controller wouldn’t provide enough amps to charge up my battery, but it’s more than enough to recharge the overnight usage from my 130L Isotherm Fridge and Espar D4. I have an iPhone XS and the Victron app works well and doesn’t require location permissions like Android. I’m glad I didn’t get the higher amperage models (100/20 or 100/30) because the 200 watt panel is big enough to keep my batteries charged up and the higher amperage models would have taken up too much space.

Works better than I expected to it does exactly what it says and it works perfect for a battle born battery no problems with it very happy purchase Having built-in Bluetooth helps a lot if you dont have to buy the extra dongle for communication I really like the fact that its customizable you can set the parameters that you would like for your setup which is extremely helpful For whatever reason it seems to produce a little bit more voltage and current then I would expect it to thats probably what its designed to do but its a major Plus to me

I upgraded from a PWM controller with a hard to read LCD status screen. The Victron is a high quality product with very good printed documentation (though the web version is much easier to read.) Works very well including the load output which handles my compressor fridge current surge just fine. The Bluetooth status monitor works with their free app. The app is not perfect, but provides the important parameters in an easy to read format at a reasonable distance. Ive only had it for 6 months, but there have been several firmware and software updates, so obviously the company is supporting the product. Tech support is provided by the seller, not the manufacturer, but Victron does have a support forum that is very helpful. There are both experienced users and factory experts answering questions.