Given that Starlink gives us pretty good and near permanent connectivity and my side project to reverse engineer how Victron broadcasts the status of their kit - I thought it time to have some fun.

You’ll notice a new menu item above - Tech Status. This will give a near real-time update on the status of our house bank - both amp-hours consumed and current. Also the output of our solar panels. These are graphs for the last 6 hours at the moment, I’ll try to make these 24hrs soon.

So an example above - this was this afternoon. So the green is our battery level, which ranges from 0 amp-hours consumed, down to -700 (utterly empty). Scale is on the left. The yellow line is the current into (positive) or out of (negative) the batteries. This afternoon the solar has been working well, so the current was positive, and the consumed amp-hours was rapidly decreasing. Around midday we switched on our watermaker which reduced the current charging the battery. As the battery became full, the current tails off. The large dip is due to the kettle which on its own consumes about 100amps.

At the same time, the solar output looks like this

We have 4 strings of panels. 2 with 2 panels, and 2 single ones. 2 strings are over the davits on the back, they are the newest and most powerful. 2 strings are on the hardtop, with 2 on the starboard side, and 1 on the port (to leave room for a hatch for us to see the sail. In total, we have 2.2kw, and today they’ve been kicking out 1.6kw for quite a chunk of time.

Anyway, thought this would be interesting for some people to see… Battery level is one of the main things we keep a constant eye on. Along with water, its the critical thing for the boat.