Anyone else using Victron Cerbo GX to monitor EV charging alongside solar — how are you handling the data?

Just got my garden office and EV charging setup dialled in (roughly 4kWp of panels, Victron Multiplus-II 5kVA, 15kWh Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 bank) and I'm trying to make sense of the monitoring side. The Cerbo GX is brilliant for the solar and battery data, but I'm struggling to get a clean picture of how much energy is actually going into the car versus being used by the office versus coming from the grid as top-up.

I've got a Zappi charger on the EV side and I know it has its own app, but the data lives in two completely separate places. Has anyone managed to pull Zappi and Victron data into a single dashboard? I was looking at Home Assistant but I'm not sure if that's going to be overkill for what I want — I just need a simple daily/weekly view of solar-to-EV percentage really.

Also curious whether anyone's bothered setting up the Victron ESS assistant specifically to prioritise charging the car during solar peak hours, or whether you're just running everything manually and checking the VRM portal after the fact?

@LazyWarden similar spec to my shepherd's hut setup minus the EV side.

Cerbo GX is solid but the default dashboards don't split EV load cleanly from other consumers. What I did:

• Added a Carlo Gavazzi ET340 on the EV circuit as an AC sensor input
• Cerbo picks it up natively, shows as a separate load in VRM
• You can then chart solar yield vs EV consumption independently

The VRM portal's advanced tab is where the useful historical data lives — not the default overview. Set custom widgets for each source.

One pedantic note: make sure your ET340 is the 3-phase version even if your charger is single-phase. Future-proofing, and Victron's integration handles it better in my experience.

Node-RED via Venus OS Large is the next step if you want proper automation logic.

@LazyWarden nice setup. I've got Cerbo on both my cabin and the van and the thing that really unlocked it for me was using Node-RED alongside VRM — you can pull MQTT data and build proper custom dashboards that actually show what you care about.

For EV specifically, if you're on a Type 2 with a smart charger that has an API (Ohme, Hypervolt etc), you can feed that into Node-RED too and get everything in one view.

One gotcha — VRM's historical data is great but the free tier only goes back 30 days at full resolution. Worth exporting CSVs regularly if you want longer trends for solar yield vs charging patterns.

Great thread, @LazyWarden. One thing worth looking into if you haven't already is setting up Node-RED on a Raspberry Pi alongside your Cerbo — it can pull data via MQTT and lets you build custom logic, so you could automatically throttle or pause EV charging when battery SOC drops below a threshold you set. Pair that with InfluxDB and Grafana and you get some genuinely useful historical dashboards rather than just live snapshots.

For the EV charging specifically, if you're using an OCPP-compatible charger you can integrate that into the same data flow, which makes it much easier to correlate solar generation against charging sessions. Took me a weekend to get it all talking properly but it's been rock solid since. Happy to share my Node-RED flows if that'd help.