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Victron BMV 600S Battery Monitor - quallty, ultra high resolution, lower cost.
Do you really know how much power is left in your battery? A battery monitor from Victron allows you to manage your battery use on fact rather than guess work. Victron Energy's latest battery monitor provides precision monitoring and renowned quality at a lower cost. The essential function of a battery monitor is to calculate ampere-hours consumed and the state of charge of a battery. Ampere-hours consumed is calculated by integrating and evaluating all of the current flowing in or out of the battery. In the case of a constant current, this integration is equivalent to current multiplied by time: for example a discharge current of 10A during 2 hours amounts to 20Ah consumed. However, in reality this flow, in and out, is varying all the time and therefore a truly accurate monitor has to perform a very complex task. The BMV 600 is based on a powerful microprocessor, programmed with the algorithms needed for precision monitoring. Information and alarms:
In short, exactly the information that is needed in a motorhome, caravan or campervan: presented in a clear and easy to understand display. Not only do you know exactly how your battery is faring at any one time; you also gain understanding about how charging devices attached to you battery are performing and about how much current is consumed by the various appliances which you use. This understanding will help you to avoid over-discharging which will damage your battery - and also will help you to assess whether your battery is in good shape or needs replacing. BMV 600 specification:
Download User Manual / Installation Manual Why we rate it GREAT STUFF! We installed the BMV 600 in our own motorhome and immediately began to feel more relaxed about our battery. We had become accustomed to constantly and wearisomely (boringly, some would say) doing mental arithmetic, taking into account the voltage reading from our built-in panel, the Ah capacity of our battery (while wondering if it actually could deliver that capacity), whether it was fully charged or not to begin with; doing a quick tot-up of how much power we were likely to be drawing at the moment and later on; all this because we fretted about discharging our expensive gel battery too far and thereby shortening its life and its ability to hold a full charge on another day. Not to mention running out of power before the next opportunity to recharge. But it is important to realise that there is good reason to pay attention to these matters: there are many factors that affect the life and capacity of batteries but looking at the depth of discharge alone illustrates dramatic effects. To give an example from one manufacturer for its gel batteries, if you regularly discharge the battery to no more that 70% (so you use only say 30Ah from a 100Ah battery, and them immediately recharge) the life of the battery is 1300 cycles. Go to 50% and the life reduces to 600 cycles; go to 100% and the life is only 300 cycles. And long before your battery is beyond any further use, its capacity will be much less. With the BMV 600, arithmetic is replaced by simple button pushing (but be warned, this can get compulsive too) which provides readouts of accurate, factual information about you battery. It constantly measures, with great accuracy and resolution, exactly how much current is going into and out of the battery; you can view this in its display. The monitor uses these measurements to calculate and display an accurate reading of the battery's state of charge. No more guesswork about the state of the battery and no more guesswork about how much power you are actually drawing for various appliances. Turn on lights and appliances one by one and you can immediately read its exact consumption on the monitor. We were also able to work out from the state of charge displayed, compared to the number of Ah used, that in fact our battery is in good condition and still retains a very high proportion of its as-new capacity. On the other side of the coin, we found it revealing (and disappointing) to note the very small contribution which our solar panel makes early in the season when the sun is low in the sky. While it is only a small 40 watt panel with a nominal maximum output of 2.4 amps in ideal conditions, we observed that on a very bright sunny day in mid-February it was only producing around .7 amps. This is useful information, though. Installation was straightforward. The monitor comes with a 'shunt' - a device which is inserted between the negative terminal of the battery and the negative cabling to the rest of the circuit. This means that all the existing negative wires which are attached to the negative terminal on the battery are moved to one terminal on the shunt; then the second terminal of the shunt is attached via a short length of cable to the battery negative terminal. In between the two terminals on the shunt is a small socket and the cable from the monitor plugs into this, enabling it to measure all battery currents flowing across the terminals, as well as voltage. The piece of cable which you need to connect between the shunt and the negative terminal is the only thing that's not provided in the monitor kit; requirements here are too variable since the cable diameter will depend on the maximum total load of your 12v system. With hindsight we would have placed the monitor itself in a different position because we have found that the display can be difficult to read if you don't view it straight-on. However, the current model now has an improved display which should eliminate this issue.
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