Darstellung Erzeugung und Verbrauch im VRM Portal

Anyone else been poking around the Victron VRM portal trying to get a clean side-by-side view of solar generation vs. consumption curves for a single day?

Been running my garden office setup for about eight months now and the VRM dashboard is almost perfect — but I keep finding myself manually cross-referencing the production graph against the loads graph like some kind of medieval cartographer trying to triangulate a treasure map.

What I really want is both curves overlaid on the same chart — solar yield on top, office load underneath — so I can see at a glance exactly where I'm burning through more than I'm generating and whether the Fogstar battery pack is picking up the slack or getting hammered unnecessarily.

The data is clearly in there — you can see it if you squint at the right dashboards — but getting it presented cleanly feels like it requires either a custom VRM widget setup or exporting to a spreadsheet and doing it yourself, which rather defeats the purpose of having a fancy portal in the first place.

Has anyone cracked a decent VRM Advanced view that does this neatly? I've had a rummage through the widget options and got close but nothing that's made me actually punch the air yet.

Also curious whether anyone's using the Node-RED integration to pull this into something like Grafana instead — I've seen a few setups online but they all look like they require a PhD in spaghetti wiring to configure.

Drop your dashboard setups below — screenshots very much welcomed. 📊

Hey @SolarGaz, yes I've spent quite a bit of time fiddling with VRM for exactly this!

The trick I found useful is using the Advanced tab rather than the Dashboard view - you can manually select "PV Power" and "AC Loads" as separate widgets and overlay them on the same time axis. Makes the comparison much cleaner.

One thing worth noting: make sure your date range is set to a single day and switch the granularity to 15-minute intervals rather than hourly - gives you a much more satisfying picture of how your generation tracks against consumption throughout the day.

If your setup includes a Cerbo GX or similar, the data resolution tends to be noticeably better too.

What inverter/charger are you running out there in the garden office? That might affect what data's actually available to pull through. 🙂

Something that clicked for me when managing the shepherd's hut setup — the Advanced tab in VRM lets you build custom widgets where you can overlay PV Power and AC Loads on the same graph axis.

The real game-changer was adjusting the time resolution down to 15-minute intervals rather than hourly. You suddenly see the actual shape of your consumption curve against generation, which matters enormously when you're trying to figure out whether your EV charging schedule is eating into peak solar or sitting neatly underneath it.

@SolarGaz one thing worth noting: if your Cerbo GX hasn't synced properly overnight, that day's data can look oddly flat in places. Worth checking your GSM signal logs alongside the consumption graph before drawing conclusions from a suspicious-looking dip.

What @DaleVicky said about the Advanced tab is spot on — drag PV Power and AC Loads onto the same axis and you get that beautiful overlap view that finally makes sense of where your midday surplus is going (spoiler: it's your kettle).

Worth knowing you can also pull the raw .csv export if you fancy plotting it properly in Excel — the VRM data resolution goes down to 15-minute intervals which is granular enough to actually be useful rather than just pretty.

My Cerbo GX on the motorhome does the same job nicely, so the interface is identical whether you're running a garden office or a shepherd's hut like @DaleVicky — once you've built one custom widget dashboard, you'll be duplicating it everywhere obsessively.

Great shout from @MarineGeoff and @DaleVicky on the Advanced tab — that's definitely where the magic happens for custom overlays.

One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned yet: pay attention to the time resolution setting when you're pulling those daily curves. VRM defaults to a fairly coarse interval sometimes, and if your loads are spiky (kettle, microwave, that sort of thing) you can miss the peaks entirely. Drop it down to the finest resolution available for a single day view and you'll get a much more honest picture of what's actually happening.

Also worth exporting the raw CSV if you want to do any deeper analysis — stick it into a spreadsheet and you can calculate genuine self-consumption percentages rather than eyeballing the graph. Makes a real difference for tweaking battery sizing decisions. 👍