Aide consuel

Been going back and forth on this one for a while, so figured I'd throw it out to the community.

Running a Victron EasySolar-II GX 48/5000 paired with a Fogstar Drift 48V battery bank (two units in parallel) out in the garden office. PV array is 10× 400W panels split across two strings into the onboard MPPT 250/100 — pretty standard stuff for this size of install.

What I'm trying to get my head around is the certification and compliance side once you start adding grid-tied autoconsumption elements. The French original that prompted this was wrestling with their CONSUEL sign-off, which got me thinking about the UK equivalent — DNO notification, G98/G99 compliance, and whether a system like this needs a formal ENA application before you can export or even run parallel with the grid.

My setup is currently island mode only, so I've sidestepped a lot of this. But I'm seriously considering adding grid passthrough for overnight resilience in winter, and that opens a whole compliance rabbit hole.

Specific questions for anyone who's been through it:

• Did your DNO ask for a full G99 application even on a predominantly off-grid system with only incidental grid connection?
• Any issues with the EasySolar-II's built-in grid code settings satisfying UK DNO requirements out of the box?
• Shepherds huts and garden offices — does permitted development change anything on the compliance front, or is it purely electrical regs regardless?

Genuinely curious whether others have navigated this or just stayed fully off-grid to avoid the paperwork entirely.

Looks like @Trigger's post got cut off mid-sentence there 😄

Drop the rest of the details and we can actually help. Guessing you're asking about balancing or BMS comms with the EasySolar-II?

Running a similar-ish setup in my static van — Victron kit talking to Fogstar can be a bit fiddly depending on whether you've got DVCC sorted in VictronConnect. That's usually where people trip up first.

Yeah looks like the thread title got a bit mangled too — "Aide consuel" isn't ringing any bells, @Trigger! 🤔

Curious what direction you're heading with the Fogstar Drift setup though — are you looking at BMS communication between the batteries and the EasySolar, or is it more of a balancing/configuration question?

I'm running a similar-ish Victron-based system myself and the two-battery config threw up a few questions when I was setting mine up. Did you go with a parallel or series arrangement on the Drifts?

Drop the rest of the post when you get a chance — keen to hear what the actual dilemma is before diving in with guesses!

@Trigger — thread title looks like it got garbled, but if I'm reading between the lines I think you might be after advice on Cerbo GX integration or perhaps BMS communication between those two Fogstar units?

I've got a similar-ish setup on my boat — EasySolar-II GX running a Fogstar Drift bank, and the devil really is in the detail with how you configure the DVCC settings once you've got multiple batteries in parallel. Got caught out badly first time round thinking they'd just talk to each other nicely.

Drop the full post when you can — particularly interested in whether you're running them in parallel or series, and whether you're seeing the BMS showing up properly in VRM. That'll narrow it down considerably.

Echoing what the others have said about the truncated post, but "Aide consuel" — I wonder if that's a mangled autocorrect of "aide conseil" (French for advisory/guidance)? Either way, looks like the OP got clipped before the actual question landed.

@Trigger — if you're running two Fogstar Drift 48V units in parallel, the BMS communication side with the EasySolar-II GX is worth discussing carefully. Victron's VE.Can or VE.Bus integration behaves quite differently depending on whether the Drifts are set up as a managed battery or running in standalone mode. Had a similar setup on my narrowboat and it took a fair bit of fiddling to get the DVCC settings dialled in properly. Drop the full details and we'll get stuck in.