Click and Design not showing pv/battery consumption?

Been playing around with Victron's Click & Design tool lately whilst planning an upgrade to my motorhome system and I've noticed something that's been bugging me — the PV and battery consumption figures don't seem to populate properly in certain configurations.

Specifically, when I set up a system with a Multiplus-II paired with a SmartSolar MPPT and a decent LiFePO4 bank (Fogstar cells in my case), the tool shows the inverter/charger loads fine but the battery discharge contribution and PV harvest figures just show blank or zero in the consumption summary panel. Anyone else seeing this?

I think it might be related to how the tool handles ESS (Energy Storage System) configurations versus a purely off-grid setup. The distinction matters quite a bit here in the UK since we're not dealing with the same grid export restrictions that apply in some other countries — but the tool doesn't always seem to recognise when you've deliberately set something up as fully islanded.

A few things I've tried:

• Toggling the "grid-tied" vs "off-grid" toggle
• Removing and re-adding the MPPT
• Different browser (Chrome vs Firefox)

No joy so far.

Would be curious whether anyone's managed to get the consumption breakdown working correctly, particularly in a split AC/DC coupled setup. My actual physical system works a treat and VRM shows everything I'd expect — it's purely the design tool that's confusing me.

Is this a known quirk or am I missing something obvious in the configuration workflow?

@LDVAdventure yeah, I hit the exact same wall when I was speccing out the system for my shepherd's hut last spring. Click & Design is brilliant for laying out components and checking compatibility, but it's genuinely not meant to show consumption figures — that's VRM Portal territory once you've got a Cerbo GX or similar comms device actually logging real data.

What Click & Design will show you is whether your proposed setup is correctly sized, but the actual PV yield and battery draw analytics only appear once the system's live and reporting.

Worth having a poke around the VRM demo portal — Victron keep a live demo account you can browse. Showed me exactly what I'd be seeing post-installation, which helped enormously with planning my EV charging schedule around solar generation.

@LDVAdventure had the same head-scratching moment when I was planning the narrowboat setup last winter — standing in a cold engine room wondering why the numbers weren't adding up on screen.

The thing Click & Design does (and doesn't tell you clearly) is that it's primarily a component sizing and compatibility checker, not a full consumption simulator. For actual PV harvest vs battery drain modelling, you want to be running your numbers through something like PVGIS for the generation side, then cross-referencing manually.

Victron's own VRM Portal gives you gorgeous consumption graphs once everything's installed and running, but pre-purchase planning? It's a bit like asking IKEA's website to tell you if the wardrobe will fit your life — technically it shows you the parts, not the whole picture. 😄

Worth posting your load calculations here though — plenty of eyes happy to sanity-check them.

What @DaleVicky and @BoxerWanderer are circling around is worth spelling out plainly — Click & Design is a sizing tool, not a monitoring tool. It'll tell you what kit you need, not what's actually happening in your system.

For real consumption figures you want VRM Portal once your Cerbo GX or similar is wired in. That's where the magic lives — I've been watching my cabin system's solar harvest and draw patterns for two years through it and it's genuinely brilliant data.

If you're still in the planning phase and want to model realistic consumption scenarios, Victron's own Excel load calculator is more granular than Click & Design for that specific job. Spent an embarrassing number of evenings with it before commissioning my motorhome build.

Don't confuse the planning stage tools with the operational ones — two completely different beasts.

Good shout from @MountainHermit spelling that out clearly. One thing worth adding — if you want proper consumption visualisation, VRM Portal is where you'll want to spend your time once everything's installed and running. It'll show you historic PV yield, battery state of charge cycles, and where your consumption is actually going in really granular detail.

For the planning stage though, if you need something more than Click & Design offers, have a look at @Victron's Excel-based sizing spreadsheet — it's a bit old school but lets you model loads against expected solar input more flexibly. Plenty of motorhome builders swear by it before they commit to hardware.

Hope the upgrade goes well — always enjoy seeing what people squeeze into motorhome installs! 🚐

Great thread, this one. Just to add a practical tip on top of what @DaiWalker61 was getting at — once you've got your system up and running, VRM Portal is genuinely brilliant for digging into historical consumption data. You can see exactly how your PV is performing day by day and track battery cycling over time. For the planning stage though, I'd suggest pairing Click & Design with a decent spreadsheet to manually log your expected loads — it fills the gap nicely until you've got real-world data coming in from VRM. @LDVAdventure for a motorhome build especially, your consumption patterns will vary massively with seasons and location, so having that flexibility matters. Don't let the limitation put you off the tool entirely — it's still one of the better sizing calculators out there for Victron kit.