Perhaps I can ask a question and ask for some replies here.
Suppose one has a 3 x Multi RS inverters connected to a FW with the Orion BMS, the Lite range. A cerbo can also be in the mix if that makes a difference.
Assume that we are a little further down the road than we currently are and that the Multi RS are in parallel. Just pretend. (or for the sake of this discussion pretend they are Multiplus II)
Can one add another battery to this mix, can the Victron world (either via the cerbo or the Victron Connect) address two completely different BMSes that are controlling two battery banks? Maybe the answer is that one battery is controlled via the cerbo and the second via Victron Connect.?
Is one locked into a battery supplier for life once one chooses the first one? In other words only another FW in this particular case.
The tinkerer in me wants to have a go at a battery build, maybe even one of these Apexiums or something like that.
Don’t like the idea of never being able to add another brand of battery. Maybe that’s something that Victron wants to work on if it cant be done right now, ability to run different banks and bms and address them? Maybe there is a node red solution?
Normally only the same batteries can have a master slave relationship , and one has to be the controlling battery to tell the GX the battery status. There are a few drivers around that can soft “merge” different batteries which is normally used in DIY batteries.
Sjoe, not so sure how stable, over a decade, cells in different brands of batteries will be. The more cells one has, the more variances one can expect, assuming all the cells are the same ah, the next level issues will be the “Batch Matched” (same resistance) inside all the cells.
I once did a 100ah with 280ah cell bank, because I could, as did Andy at Off-grid Garage, his Frankenstein bank. That is the same as having different banks, one bank different cells or multiple banks having different cells. It gets tricky to keep them all in line, the cels that is.
Suppose one can do this long-term if your balancer has the balancing capacity.
Then again, Andy has multiple banks using different BMS’es on the same system… and he has found interesting differences over time.
Mixing different banks on the same system, “eish ja” … and I’m a big “bok vir sports”. Even I’m hesitant, and that says a lot.
It is not that it cant be done … it depends on clever software in the future, to make it as one bank.
It is about stability over 1-5-10 years.
It is about using the same BMS across all the banks. As Andy found, not all BMS’es are the same.
Combining multiple banks (each with their own BMS) into one. Basically a battery service that combines multiple battery services into one. If you are suitably skilled, you can of course already do it, and on github there is at least one project where someone made multiple Serial-BMS batteries into one.
As always, there are massive caveats around it. Things have to be safe, so you have to consider failure modes. Manufacturers do that for their own banks when in parallel with their own banks, but when you mix and match, this is no longer the case. You’d have to match voltages properly, and so on. All fine and well when you know what you are doing.
On the Blue side, the real target is to be able to put multiple Lynx BMSes in parallel, where this is already known to work correctly.
Lightning knocked out all 3 of my batteries bms a couple of years ago. I replaced 2 with Ant and 1 with JBD bms.
Over time I built another 2 DIY batteries with JBD. I have all 5 wired to copper busbars, and from there to the inverter. They have been running flawlessly, first on a Victron and now on a Deye inverter.
