Victron Relay assistant AC Load switch condition not working with "Non-essential" loads

Inverters Victron
1

Hello guys.
I hope I am not asking a question that has already been answered elsewhere but I think I have a little unexpected behavior with the relay assistant.

Because I have not yet fitted (More accurately sourced) the Victron PWM fan mod for my 10kVA Multi I resorted to using the silent assistant and that works great at keeping the fan off, but since I am a chicken I thought I should at least start the fan if the inverter started working at 1.2kW.

So I wired the AUX1 input into the Programable relay as NC (To keep the fan off by default) and only turn the fan on if : There is more than 1.2kW of load or in the event of a temperature pre-alarm/alarm.
At first I though the relay might be faulty because the fan never came on, later I noticed in VeConfig that the aux relay state had never changed, despite my AC Load rule:

RelayAssistant

Then I added a dumb rule to change the aux relay if the battery voltage > 48V and the relay worked as expected.
Early this morning I flipped all the loads on the changeover to the non-essential side because I knew I was going to be turning the inverter off and on a couple times and didn’t want to disturb everyone else in the house.
So while the inverter was inverting and sending over 2kW to the non-essential side the fan never came on, I then flipped the loads back to the inverter and loaded it again with a 2kW load and the relay state changed as expected.
So my question is: Does the exported power from the Multi not count towards the AC Load switch condition?

2

I didn’t read in too much depth, just noticed you have only one relay assistant, and you probably need two. You need a “Set relay off” condition as well.

The assistant can only drive a relay to a certain state, it will remain in that state until another drives it off again.

If you have several assistants stacked, the last assistant that evaluates to true wins.

Probably as simple as adding a second relay assistant.

The rest of your issue sounds like “load” is only measured on the output by the assistant. Don’t know this non-Venus part that well. May have to look at another triggering method?

3

I already have those in place :slight_smile:

Yes, the “load” parameter is only measured on the output.
I did look around at using some other parameter, sadly there is only battery voltage and not current, because that could have also worked.
I think the second best option here is to just use some external relay managed by a ESP32 and it comes with the advantage that I can create even more granular rules, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible :slight_smile: