Anyone else running a Victron Orion-Tr Smart in temp extremes — how's yours holding up?

Fitted a 30A isolated Orion-Tr Smart in my static last winter to charge a 200Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 from a leisure battery bank. All good until we had that proper cold snap in January — ambient in the van was sitting around 2–3°C overnight and the unit was throttling back hard, sometimes cutting to near nothing.

I get that it's protecting the battery, but the Victron Connect app was showing input voltage fine (13.4V from a Victron SmartSolar keeping the lead bank topped up), and the LiFePO4 has its own BMS with low-temp cutoff. Just wasn't sure whether the Orion itself was being overly cautious or whether there's a setting I'm missing — I've got it in "lithium" mode but haven't touched the absorption/float figures much beyond defaults.

Curious whether anyone's added a small heat mat under the battery to nudge the temp sensor reading, or if there's a smarter way to handle this through the VE.Smart network. Does the Orion actually talk to the battery BMS directly or is it purely reacting to its own internal sensor?

@DailyBuild — worth checking your Victron Connect app for the stored fault log. The Orion-Tr Smart will throttle or shut down charging below around 5°C on the output side if it detects low battery temperature via the smart network, but only if you've got a Smart Battery Sense or BMV connected and sharing data over VE.Smart.

In my tiny house setup I had identical behaviour last January — turned out the Orion was correctly protecting the Fogstar Drift cells from cold-charge damage rather than misbehaving. Entirely intentional.

Check:

• VE.Smart networking — is temperature data actually being shared?
• Low temp cutoff setting in the charger profile (mine's set to 5°C)
• Whether the Fogstar BMS itself was already disconnecting upstream

If no Smart Sense is fitted, the Orion has no temperature input and won't self-protect — different problem entirely.

Hey @DailyBuild — had similar with mine in a cold outbuilding last winter. One thing worth checking beyond the fault log is your absorption voltage setting. LiFePO4 cells don't want to be pushed hard when cold, and the Fogstar Drift BMS will actually reject charge below around 0°C anyway, which can look like a charger fault when it's actually the battery protecting itself.

Have you got a battery temperature sensor fitted? The Orion-Tr Smart supports Victron's Smart Battery Sense over Bluetooth — absolute game changer for cold weather charging. It'll back off the voltage automatically based on actual battery temp rather than guessing.

What are your current charge profile settings? If you're still on a default AGM profile that'd definitely cause grief with a LiFePO4. Happy to share my settings if useful.

Hey @DailyBuild — one thing worth adding to what @DontPanic and @GazBrown72 have mentioned: the Fogstar Drift has its own low-temp charge protection built in at the BMS level, so even if the Orion itself is happy, the battery may be refusing charge if it dropped below around 0°C internally. The BMS will just block the charge port entirely and your Orion will see it as a completed charge or high-resistance load depending on how it interprets the situation. Worth sticking a cheap temperature sensor on the actual cells rather than just going by ambient. If that's the culprit, a bit of insulation around the battery goes a long way before you start pointing fingers at the charger itself.

Something nobody's mentioned yet — if you're charging the Drift from a leisure battery bank rather than directly from alternator/solar, make sure your source bank isn't also sagging in the cold. LAs lose serious capacity below 5°C, so if the source voltage is dropping, the Orion-Tr has less headroom to work with even before its own thermal protection kicks in.

Had this exact issue with my van setup last February. Source bank looked fine on paper but was actually struggling, and the Orion was just doing its job cutting out.

Worth chucking a voltage logger on the input side overnight and seeing what it's actually doing while cold.