DVCC Setup and Shared Temperature Sense (STS)

Been looking into enabling DVCC on my setup and could do with some collective wisdom before I dive in.

Running a Victron Multiplus-II with a Fogstar Drift 200Ah (not the networked version, so no VE.Can or BMS comms to the GX device). Charge controller is a Victron SmartSolar, all talking nicely via VE.Direct to a Cerbo GX.

My main question is around Shared Temperature Sense (STS) — since my Fogstar's internal BMS isn't networked, the Cerbo has no visibility of battery temperature whatsoever. I've seen conflicting advice about whether STS will just grab temp data from the nearest Victron device (SmartSolar in my case), or whether it essentially does nothing if there's no networked battery feeding that data in.

Has anyone actually verified what temperature source DVCC/STS ends up using when there's no BMS on the network? Is the SmartSolar's own sensor accurate enough to be meaningful, or is it measuring its own ambient rather than anything near the cells?

Also wondering whether it's worth fitting an external Victron temperature sensor to the Cerbo instead, just to get something reliable into the loop.

A few specific things I'd love input on:

• Does STS pull from VE.Direct devices at all?
• Any risk of enabling DVCC with an unnetworked BMS?
• Would a Victron BMV-712 with temp sensor solve this cleanly?

System is in a static off-grid setup rather than a motorhome, but the fundamentals should be the same. Keen to hear from anyone who's worked through this.

Ran the same combo on my shepherds hut build — non-networked Fogstar Drift with a Multiplus-II is basically DVCC's awkward blind date, works but nobody's sharing temperature data over candlelight.

Stick a Victron Smart Battery Sense on the cells and let it broadcast via VE.Smart Networking — your MPPT and Multiplus can at least see temperature and voltage without the BMS needing to gossip directly on VE.Can.

Key thing @CopperSparky: with STS enabled, Victron will pull temp compensation into charge decisions, but you're still manually babysitting your charge limits since the Drift's BMS can't enforce CVL/CCL remotely. Set conservative absorption voltage (~54.4V for 48V) and don't trust the defaults.

@CopperSparky — went through exactly this rabbit hole when setting up my shepherds hut last winter.

The bit that caught me out: with no networked BMS, DVCC essentially becomes a charge current limiter rather than a full system orchestrator. Still worth enabling, but temper your expectations.

For STS specifically — without a BMS temperature feed over VE.Can or VE.Direct, Cerbo just doesn't know what the battery is actually doing thermally. I ended up fitting a separate Victron Smart Battery Sense near the terminals. It pushes temperature and voltage over Bluetooth into the Venus OS ecosystem, which at least gave DVCC something sensible to work with.

Not a perfect substitute for a proper networked battery, but it meaningfully improved charge behaviour through some genuinely cold nights on site.

Worth the £30 odd before fiddling with anything else.

Worth adding to what @BorderWanderer and @IslandOffGrid have already said — without the BMS communicating over VE.Can or VE.Direct, DVCC can't pull real cell-level temperature data anyway, so STS becomes a bit academic in your situation. What I'd suggest is fitting an external temperature sensor on the negative terminal of the battery itself and wiring that into your GX device. It won't be as granular as proper BMS comms, but it gives DVCC something sensible to work with rather than ambient guesswork. Also double-check your fixed charge parameters in VenusOS are conservative enough to compensate — Fogstar's own recommended figures for the non-networked Drift are a reasonable starting point. The lack of network integration isn't a dealbreaker, just means you're doing manually what a networked battery would handle automatically.

Good points all round, but one thing worth flagging that hasn't been mentioned yet — with STS enabled and no networked BMS, your temperature compensation source matters enormously. Victron will pull from whatever sensor it can find (often the Multiplus internal sensor), which in a van can read significantly warmer than the actual battery due to proximity to the inverter.

On my Sprinter build I ended up running a Smart Battery Sense purely for accurate ambient readings near the Fogstar cells. Night-and-day difference in charge curve behaviour once that was feeding into the network properly.

Also worth checking: DVCC with SVS (Shared Voltage Sense) enabled simultaneously — without a networked BMS, SVS can actually fight your charge settings in certain edge cases. Disable SVS first, validate behaviour, then layer complexity back in gradually.