Anyone else using a Victron Cerbo GX with non-Victron kit — how are you handling the gaps?

I've had my Cerbo GX running for about six months now and overall it's brilliant, but I'm hitting a frustrating wall with monitoring my Jakery Explorer 1000 Plus that sits alongside my main 200Ah LiFePO4 bank. The Cerbo can see everything on the Victron side — my SmartSolar MPPT 100/20, the MultiPlus-II, the SmartShunt — all lovely on VRM. But the Jackery just does its own thing with no way to pull its state of charge or watt-hours into the dashboard. I end up checking two separate apps constantly.

I've had a poke around with the Cerbo's Venus OS and there's clearly a lot of power under the bonnet if you're willing to get your hands dirty. I've seen a few threads mentioning Node-RED integration baked into Venus OS Large, and apparently some people have bodged together MQTT bridges to pull in data from third-party devices. Has anyone actually got this working with a Jackery or similar closed-ecosystem unit, or is it fundamentally a dead end because Jackery lock down their Bluetooth protocol?

The wider question I suppose is — for those of you running hybrid setups where not everything is Victron, what's your monitoring strategy? Are you just accepting the fragmentation and using a separate dashboard like Home Assistant, or have you found a cleaner way to get everything into one place? Genuinely curious what people have cobbled together.

Hey @JackeryGeek, I've got a similar mixed setup and honestly the Jackery is the awkward one in every integration scenario — they're very closed ecosystem.

What I ended up doing is grabbing a cheap CT clamp on the AC output side of the Jackery and feeding that into a Shelly EM, which then pushes data to Home Assistant via MQTT. From there I wrote a simple automation that overlays it onto my VRM dashboard using a virtual device. Bit of a faff to set up initially but it's been rock solid for four months now.

Not native Victron integration obviously, but you get surprisingly decent visibility. The main thing you lose is bidirectional SOC data directly from the Jackery's BMS, which is a genuine limitation nobody's really cracked cleanly yet.

What's your main priority — are you after SOC accuracy or just power flow monitoring?

@JackeryGeek yeah the Jackery stuff is basically a closed ecosystem, never plays nicely with anything external. I just stopped trying to integrate mine and treat it as a completely separate unit with its own display.

What I have had luck with on the narrowboat is pulling in non-Victron battery data via a Bluetooth-to-MQTT bridge into VRM using Node-RED on a Pi. Bit faffy to set up but once it's running it's solid. Cerbo sees it as a "generic" device basically.

For anything Victron-native though — Fogstar cells with a proper JK BMS talking Modbus — that's where the Cerbo really shines. Might be worth considering whether the Jackery is actually worth integrating or just leaving standalone tbh.

@JackeryGeek the Jackery being a closed ecosystem is the core problem — no Modbus, no CAN, nothing exposed. What I've done with non-Victron kit in my garden office setup is use a clamp-based energy monitor (I'm running a Shelly EM) on the AC output of the Jackery and feed that into the Cerbo via MQTT. You lose SoC visibility entirely, but at least you get real-time power flow data represented as an "AC load" or "AC source" depending on how you wire the clamp.

Not perfect, but it gives VRM something to display rather than a blind spot. Victron's Node-RED integration on the Cerbo makes this considerably cleaner if you're comfortable with basic flows — you can label the source properly rather than it appearing as generic consumption.

Worth checking whether your firmware version supports the full Node-RED environment before going down that route.

@JackeryGeek I had exactly this headache last year. What I ended up doing was treating the Jackery as a completely separate "black box" and just monitoring its AC output with a cheap Shelly EM clipped onto the cable. Gets the consumption data into Home Assistant via MQTT, and I've got a basic Node-RED flow that pushes a virtual sensor value across to VRM using the Cerbo's dbus. Not perfect, but it gives me a rough state of charge estimate based on cumulative draw against the rated capacity. Takes a bit of calibration but it's been surprisingly reliable. The Shelly EM is about £25 and the setup took me an afternoon. Happy to share the Node-RED flow if that'd help?

@JackeryGeek same boat here — Cerbo GX handling my main 280Ah Fogstar Drift bank beautifully, but the moment I introduced a secondary unit it became a monitoring headache.

What actually solved it for me was a smart plug with energy monitoring on the Jackery's output side, then pulling that data into Home Assistant via MQTT and displaying a custom tile on my VRM dashboard. Bit hacky, but it gives me watt-hours in/out without wrestling with closed firmware.

The Cerbo does what it does brilliantly within Victron's ecosystem — anything outside that you're essentially building workarounds. My motorhome setup taught me to stop expecting the Cerbo to be everything and let it be brilliant at its job while other tools fill the gaps.

@JakeShaw96's separate-entity approach is genuinely the sanest framing for this.

@JackeryGeek I went through exactly this philosophical crisis when I was setting up my shepherd's hut system. The Cerbo GX is magnificent at orchestrating its ecosystem, but anything closed-box gets treated like an uninvited guest at a very organised party.

What I eventually landed on was a small Raspberry Pi running Node-RED sat alongside the Cerbo, scraping what little data the Jackery exposes via its app (reversed-engineered MQTT in my case — results vary, mind you). Not elegant, but it pipes a rough state-of-charge figure into VRM via the Cerbo's dbus. Bodge-tastic, but functional.

The pedantic truth nobody wants to hear: the Jackery was never designed to live in a proper monitored system. Treat it as a standalone emergency reserve and stop trying to make it something it isn't. Your sanity will thank you.

@JubileeClipHero shepherd's hut solidarity 🤝 — mine ended up with a Victron SmartShunt on the main bank and a cheap Bluetooth power meter babysitting the Jackery like a suspicious neighbour, then I just mentally average the vibes and pretend I'm in control of my own energy system.

@JackeryGeek I spent ages trying to wrestle a similar setup into submission — in the end I accepted the Cerbo simply won't talk to proprietary kit like the Jackery natively. What I do now is treat them as two separate systems and monitor the Jackery via its own app. Not elegant, I know, but trying to bodge something into VRM just creates headaches. If you want everything under one roof though, a small Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant can pull data from both sides and display it together. Bit of a project, but deeply satisfying once it's working.