Starting with Node-Red on Victron [Guide]

Short answer is No.
The cells don’t mind where you keep them, but if you are going to store them for a year or more then it is best to charge them to around 60% before you store them.

There are 3 main things that impact your lithium cells.

  1. They only have a limited amount of use cycles in them, after which they will start to have a reduced capacity.
  2. how fast your charge/discharge the cells and if this is inside their limits.
  3. any overcharge / undercharge of the cells.

If you keep them inside their limits, then the amount of cycles you should get should be as expected.

There is 1 negative when keeping the cells low for long times. And that is that you could see cell imbalances over time which will not be corrected as your balancers on your BMS only start working when the cells reach higher voltages. This again will depend on the health of your cells as older cells could need more balancing.

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I see that happening with bad weather days. The balancing does take longer if you don’t recharge them fully once a day.

Methinks that is why the brand names say 1 discharge/charge per day to ensure it stays in balance.

I think most require once a week. One of the selling points of LiFePO4 is precisely that you can leave them half-discharged for longer periods.

The bigger issue (I think?) is SOC drift. If you run them between 30% and 80% for long periods of time, then SOC drifts occurs (the real state of charge is different to the estimate from the BMS). The BMS needs to hit a “waypoint” to get a better estimate, and for that to happen, you need to push it above 85% (or something like that) periodically.

I can nearly swear I read on some warranties, the once-a-day cycle.

Can you please share your json for the nodered?

Welcome Brian.

There you go.

Inverter and SOC Control with a basic Dashboard.

Victron Control.zip (12.8 KB)

Share back if you can make it smarter?

Unzip and import each flow. Should work as is if you are running on the Venus Large.

Thanks for the quick reply

This one works better, two options to up the SOC.

SOC Increase.zip (3.9 KB)


after everything i cant get it to work, is there a step i am missing?

Thank you SO much for sharing!
I was totally lost in the nodeRED Settings of Victron.

Is there maybe an Update to you File from back than?
Can you maybe tell my why one line is shown different?

Once again thank you and have a nice day!

That was testing which one works best.

New one:

File attached.
SOC Increase - set Evening Use flows.zip (3.4 KB)

Increase the SOC on bad weather days with 10% increments to cater for clouds moving over.
Then setting the inverter to draw from batts from 6 pm till the sun takes over, the wattage set to cater for LS in-between.

The only time where this “falls off the horse” so to speak, is on really bad weather days with no spare to recharge the batts. Then the human “AI” has to intervene IF there is LS early morning.

Hence the Weather App is now the most important App for solar systems.

On good sunny days, one does not need these Flows, as Victron takes care of most.

The problem comes in with Cpt winters, or any rough weather days anywhere, to give the batts a wee bit of a headstart, where possible.

The SOC increase ties in with limiting the inverter to the max the panels can do.

This NodeRED flow, seeing what goes into the batts, setting the inverter max wattage accordingly, my case, max 4kw. The 4kw in my case also solved any and all overload warnings I used to get too, when grid-tied.

Here is that file:
Inverter Max Wattages Flows.zip (3.6 KB)

Case point, cold Cape Town with cloud moving over.

On days like this, I can get 6.63kW spikes from the 5.2kW installed. Hence the 4kw limit. Must go to the batts, not overload the inverter.

In the last 5 minutes - the reason why I do this:

Dryer is on - all is fine:
image

Clouds move over - batts take the load:
image

Clouds took too long, inverter watts lowered - to not drain the batts too fast:
image

Sun comes out again - back to normal:
image

Thats absolutly brilliant and i didn’t even thought about that case, thanks a lot for sharing. :open_mouth: :+1:
We are completly new to this topic, and even if i have a lot of IT experience, i have to admit that the possible functions and configurations are a little overhelming.