2 replies to this topic

[Jack]

While I love Victron stuff, when I replaced my old Nasa BM-1 battery monitor, I went with the $73 Ali battery monitor (same as the Renogy at $96). I'm a glutton for numbers and the Ali displays everything: Ah, SoC%, V, A, W and time left. The victron gives me 1 number and an SoC bar graph.

 BatMon.jpg   44.37K   24 downloads

 

The Drok "battery monitor", below the Ali, measures camper load with a hall effect sensor on the wire to the 12V shut-off switch.

 

The Renogy/Ali has a 500A shunt but my typical max current is 30A or 6% of the shunt so I was concerned about accuracy. Compared with my LiFePO4 battery BMS, the Ali is almost always within 1% - but I'm almost always above 80% SoC. The lowest I've gotten was 66% and it was within 1% of SoC. Volts tracks with BMS within the approximately 3.5 digits of precision, as do the MPPT charge controller and Drok BM. Different sampling intervals make amps harder to compare as the current draw (fan, refrigerator, cell/pc charging) even at night varies slightly over a few seconds.

 

Pressing the top << button for 2 seconds toggles the light on/off. If on, the screen dims every second or so when charging.

Edited by Jack, 08 August 2021 - 11:31 PM.

[JWL]

I have the little round AiLi BVM (love it!) and at first a lot of users complained about it”glowing all night” then I read something about being able to hold down two of the buttons and it turns it off or to a low readable state.. I was ready to cover mine up until I found that! You might check into yours it’s probably the same circuitry. 

[Jack]

Thanks JWL. A little experimentation and pressing the top << button for 2 seconds toggles the light on/off.Thanks.