Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Battery update and AES enabled

We have relaxed here at Grove for a bit as the weather hasn't been too good. We had a good day when we moored up and managed to do some washing, but then the weather turned and we had very little solar..
We have been running a bit low on food, but we are using everything up and we have the pub here at Grove Lock (albeit that this pub is a bit expensive). We have made some bread using the bread maker on the batteries and it coped fine..
So we have found so far that with no solar we have had to run the engine every couple of days and then the batteries drop down to about 50% and then charge back up to around 85%.
We have now changed the inverter settings, putting on low power AES (auto energy saving) mode, which is an energy saving setting which takes out one of the waves and drops the voltage to 110v when nothing is turned on.. This saves the battery life overnight and only turns on to 230v when something like the fridge comes on..  This can be adjusted and we are still playing with it. This saved 5% on the SOC (state of charge) overnight..
Anyone with a Victron Inverter will have this setting, and for boats its a big saving on your battery discharge.. You can adjust it by plugging into it by VE Config and then ticking the box AES enabled..
When we have to run the engine the graph looks like this.
Del has also found out that the solar panel brackets will tilt stern to bow, which is handy when we are facing East or West.. If its not windy then just one stay can be used, but if it is windy then two stays are a must.. This is another advantage against the brackets that just tilt side to side..

2 comments:

Brian and Diana on NB Harnser said...

With your inverter on Power Save, did it still pick up on the bread maker electronics OK with such a small load?

Del and Al said...

Hi Brian & Diana, yes, the bread maker coped fine. At the moment the AES is set at 70W and we haven't had a problem, but you can set it to any wattage you want...