Anyone else using a Victron Cerbo GX with a non-Victron inverter? How are you handling the monitoring gap?

Just finished wiring up my van build — 400W of solar, a 200Ah lithium bank, and a Victron SmartSolar 100/30 MPPT. Loving the Cerbo GX for keeping an eye on everything, but I've hit a wall: my inverter is a Giandel 2000W pure sine, and obviously it doesn't talk to the Cerbo at all. So my VRM dashboard has this annoying blind spot where AC loads just show as unknown.

I've been looking at adding a Victron Energy Meter (the ET112) on the AC output side to at least get load readings into VRM, but at £60-odd it feels like a workaround tax for not buying a Multiplus. Has anyone actually done this and found it worth it? Or is there a cheaper way to get that data in — I've seen some chat about DIY solutions using a Shelly EM but I'm not sure if that integrates properly with the Cerbo.

The other option I'm half-considering is just biting the bullet and swapping the Giandel for a Victron Phoenix 2000VA at some point, but that's a big jump in cost for a van that mostly runs 12V stuff anyway. My AC loads are pretty light — just a laptop charger and occasionally a small travel kettle.

@VanLiam classic problem — the Cerbo is brilliant until you plug in something it can't talk to, then it sulks like a teenager 😄

A few options depending on your inverter:

• If it has a RS232/RS485 port, you might get lucky with a generic Modbus setup
• Ve.Bus is obviously

Lefty91 | 47 posts

@VanLiam welcome to the club of "almost fully integrated" systems! 😄

The missing piece you're probably after is a current transformer or a proper energy meter on the inverter's AC output. Victron's own ET112 meter is the tidy solution — plugs straight into the Cerbo via USB and shows up as an AC load in VRM. Dead simple to set up.

If budget's tight, some people have had decent results wiring a non-Victron inverter through a smart shunt on the DC side instead, so at least you're capturing the draw from the battery accurately.

What inverter are you running? Some brands have Modbus or RS485 comms that can be coaxed into talking to the Cerbo with a bit of config work. Would help narrow down your options!

Same boat here, though mine's a garden office rather than a van. I ran a generic 2000W pure sine inverter for about eight months before the monitoring gap drove me absolutely mad — you're essentially flying blind on the AC side.

What finally sorted it for me was wiring a Victron ET112 energy meter on the inverter's AC output. The Cerbo picks it up over USB and suddenly the whole picture fills in. It's not native integration, but it's close enough that the dashboard actually makes sense now.

The ET112 is roughly £60–70 from the usual UK suppliers — far cheaper than swapping to a Multiplus just for the telemetry.

One caveat: you'll need to set the role correctly in VRM or it'll confuse the Cerbo about where power is actually flowing. Took me a frustrating afternoon to realise that.

Has anyone tried using a Cur-e or similar energy monitor on the AC output side to feed data back into the Cerbo via a Venus GX integration? I've got a cabin setup with a Fogstar lithium bank and Victron MPPT, but I went with a non-Victron inverter too — mainly on cost grounds — and the monitoring blind spot genuinely bothers me for emergency backup scenarios where I need accurate load data quickly.

@CrispyWanderer curious what you ended up doing after those eight months — did you eventually swap the inverter out, or find a workaround worth the effort?

The AC Current Sensor on the Victron side helps a bit but it's not the same as proper two-way comms. Wondering if a Raspberry Pi running Venus OS is worth the faff just to pull in extra data from a third-party inverter.

ExJoiner19 | 23 posts

@PartnerNomad I've actually been looking at exactly this for my garden office build. The issue I kept running into is that feeding AC-side data into the Cerbo via a third-party monitor gives you consumption figures, but the Cerbo's VRM dashboard still shows that inverter slot as essentially unknown — it doesn't integrate cleanly into the energy flow diagram.

What I ended up doing was running a Victron Energy Meter (the ET112) on the AC output of my non-Victron inverter. It speaks Modbus and the Cerbo picks it up natively. Not perfect, but at least VRM shows real consumption data rather than just estimated figures from the battery side.

Has anyone confirmed whether this approach works with the newer Cerbo GX firmware? Mine's on v3.x and I'm seeing occasional dropouts on the Modbus connection.