Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to monitor their Victron system via Node-RED?

Been running a Pi 4 in my garden office setup for about six months now, pulling data from my Victron Cerbo GX over MQTT and visualising it through Node-RED dashboards. Works brilliantly for tracking solar yield, battery state of charge, and grid/inverter behaviour in real time. Running a 3.6kWh Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 pack with a Multiplus-II 3000 and two 400W panels, so there's plenty of data to chew on.

The main thing I've been experimenting with is automating load control — basically switching a immersion heater relay when battery SOC hits above 90% and solar surplus is over 500W. Got it working but the logic feels a bit clunky. Wondering if anyone's done something more elegant, maybe factoring in time-of-day or weather forecast data via an API to make smarter decisions before committing excess power.

Also curious whether people are logging to InfluxDB and using Grafana for historical views — I've got that set up but my retention policies are all over the place and I'm drowning in data I never actually look at. What are others actually logging and at what interval? I'm currently polling every 30 seconds which feels like overkill for most metrics.

@IslandExplorer snap — garden office twin here, though my Pi 3B+ is held together with optimism and a cursed cron job that restarts Node-RED every night because apparently it just forgets what it's doing after 18 hours 😅

Been pulling SOC, voltage, and solar yield from the Cerbo GX via MQTT for about eight months — the Victron MQTT topic structure is actually surprisingly clean once you stop crying at the documentation.

Top tip: pipe your data into InfluxDB and visualise with Grafana instead of the built-in Node-RED dashboard — looks proper professional, and you can finally show your partner a graph that justifies the Fogstar battery spend.

Been doing something similar up at the cabin for about two years now, though I came at it from a slightly different angle — Pi Zero 2W tucked behind the Cerbo, pulling state-of-charge and solar yield data straight into Node-RED, then pushing alerts to my phone via Telegram when the Fogstar batteries dip below 20%.

The bit that genuinely transformed things was adding historical logging to InfluxDB and visualising it through Grafana rather than the built-in Node-RED dashboard. You start seeing seasonal patterns in your charging cycles that you'd completely miss otherwise — proper eye-opening when you're trying to size your system correctly.

@DaveMoore70 that cron job situation sounds terrifyingly familiar. Mine once decided midnight was the perfect moment to restart and wiped three days of logs. Now everything writes to a network share first.

Really interested to see this thread - I've been running almost exactly this setup for about eight months now and recently added InfluxDB and Grafana into the mix alongside Node-RED, which has been a game changer for longer-term trend analysis. The historical data aspect is something pure Node-RED dashboards struggle with a bit.

@DaveMoore70 I'd strongly recommend migrating off that cron job approach - I use PM2 to keep everything running reliably and it restarts processes automatically after power cuts, which obviously matters rather a lot in an off-grid context!

One thing I haven't cracked yet is decent alerting when my SOC drops unexpectedly overnight. Currently just have a basic Node-RED notification pushing to my phone via Telegram, but it's quite rudimentary. @MountainBarry curious what angle you took - wondering if you've tackled anything similar?

@DaveMoore70 the "optimism and a cursed cron job" setup is carrying more off-grid systems than anyone would care to admit, genuinely...

Running something similar on my narrowboat — Pi 4 talking to a Cerbo GX, but I went slightly sideways and added InfluxDB + Grafana on top of the Node-RED stack. Long-term trending data has been invaluable for spotting battery degradation on my Fogstar cells before it became a problem.

One thing worth flagging if nobody's mentioned it yet — watchdog timers on the Pi are absolutely worth enabling. Lost a week of data once because the Pi had silently hung and I hadn't noticed. Built-in hardware watchdog sorted it completely.

Also been experimenting with pushing alerts to Telegram when SOC drops below threshold overnight. Surprisingly straightforward to wire up in Node-RED with a basic function node.

Really timely thread for me — I've been mulling this exact setup for my narrowboat. Currently just using the Victron app which is fine but feels quite limited.

A couple of questions before I dive in:

• Does the Pi handle the MQTT connection reliably when the Cerbo GX is on a boat's patchy 4G connection, or do you get dropped sessions constantly?
• Anyone using Node-RED to trigger automations rather than just visualise? I'm thinking about automatically throttling my EV charging based on battery SOC and solar input
• What spec Pi are you running — is a Pi 4 overkill or does Node-RED actually benefit from the extra RAM?

@IslandExplorer your garden office setup sounds similar in scale to mine, curious whether you've had any stability issues over winter with the Pi itself running 24/7.

@SimonJohnson67 the narrowboat use case is brilliant for this kind of setup - you can add GPS nodes into your Node-RED flows and log position alongside your battery state, which is genuinely useful when you're trying to work out whether your solar performance dipped because of shading from a bridge or just poor weather.

I've got a similar Pi 4 running on my static setup and the MQTT connection to the Cerbo is rock solid. One tip - make sure you're persisting your InfluxDB data to an external SSD rather than the SD card, learned that the hard way after losing three months of data. Grafana alongside Node-RED gives you some lovely long-term trend graphs too if you want to go down that rabbit hole.