Ekrono and energy meters only application

Anyone else running Ekrono with nothing but energy meters and no inverter in the mix?

Here's my situation — I've got a fairly unconventional setup on my narrowboat where I'm trying to monitor two separate power sources independently. One 3p75CT meter is clipped onto my shoreline feed from the marina, and a second is watching my diesel generator output. No Victron inverter/charger in the loop, just the meters feeding back to the Ekrono.

The problem I'm running into is that the Ekrono doesn't seem to know what to do with itself when there's no inverter present. It appears to want to be the centre of an ecosystem rather than just a passive aggregator. Has anyone managed to configure it purely as a data collection and switching brain without an inverter attached?

Specifically I want it to:

• Log consumption from both sources separately
• Automatically prioritise shoreline when available, generator as fallback
• Give me a proper dashboard view without it throwing fits about missing devices

I've had a rummage through the Ekrono docs and it reads like it was written by someone who assumed you'd always have a full Victron stack underneath it — which on a boat where space is tighter than a marina car park on a Bank Holiday, simply isn't always practical.

Has anyone bodged — sorry, engineered — a workaround for this? Particularly interested if anyone's done something similar on a boat or motorhome where you're juggling shore power and a genny rather than solar and batteries.

@BoatMark yes, ran almost exactly this on my 40-footer before I added the inverter last spring.

The key thing I found with Ekrono in a meter-only config is that it's genuinely quite happy without an inverter in the device tree — it just needs at least one meter it can treat as the "grid reference" point. On a narrowboat that's usually your shorepower hookup or the alternator feed, depending how you've labelled your circuits.

Where it gets interesting is when you've got two separate DC systems (I had engine bank and leisure bank both metered) — Ekrono handles that cleanly as separate entities rather than trying to sum them.

What meters are you using? I was on Victron BMV-712s talking over VE.Direct and it was rock solid. Some of the cheaper Renogy shunt options needed a bit of coaxing.

Hey @BoatMark, interesting setup! I did something similar when I was first getting to grips with monitoring before committing to any inverter kit.

One thing worth noting that nobody's mentioned yet — Ekrono handles the maths between multiple meter instances really well, so if your two circuits have any shared reference points you'll want to make sure you've assigned them correctly in the device settings, otherwise the aggregate readings can drift and give you misleading consumption figures over time.

Also worth checking whether your meter firmware is on the latest version before you spend ages troubleshooting anything — I wasted a good afternoon once on what turned out to be an old firmware quirk. What meters are you actually running? That might help narrow things down if you're hitting any specific issues.

@BoatMark worth clarifying what Ekrono expects at the application level when there's no inverter node present — in my tiny house setup I ran it meters-only for about four months before adding a Victron MultiPlus, and the energy balance calculations behaved oddly until I explicitly configured the "grid-only" topology in the device settings. Without an inverter declared, some firmware versions assume bidirectional flow through a phantom device and your consumption figures come out skewed.

Check whether your two circuits are on separate phases or a common DC bus too — that affects how Ekrono aggregates the readings. On my setup, Fogstar cells feeding two separate meter points caused duplicate counting until I mapped the topology correctly.

What firmware version are you running? There were some meter-only stability fixes pushed in later releases that made a meaningful difference to my logging consistency.

@BoatMark the meter-only topology is perfectly valid and I've run something similar on my static caravan before adding an inverter. One thing nobody's mentioned yet: make sure your energy meters are configured with the correct grid code in Ekrono's device settings, otherwise the energy balance calculations go a bit haywire — it assumes a topology that doesn't match reality and you'll see phantom import/export figures.

Also worth confirming whether your two circuits share a common neutral or are genuinely isolated — that'll affect how Ekrono aggregates the readings. If you're using Victron Energy Meters (the ET340 or similar), they handle this cleanly. Third-party meters sometimes need manual phase assignment tweaking within the application config.

@CrispyRoamer raises a good point about the inverter node absence — the application should still function but some dashboards stay greyed out, which catches people off guard.

@BoatMark one thing worth flagging that nobody's mentioned yet — if you're running Ekrono meter-only with no inverter node, double-check how it handles the grid/shore power reference. On my shepherd's hut backup setup I ran a similar topology and found Ekrono was making odd assumptions about the reference phase when there was no inverter to anchor it. The calculated values looked plausible but were quietly wrong.

Narrowboats are particularly awkward here because your "grid" is whatever the marina hookup is doing, which can be genuinely quite dirty. Worth logging raw meter values alongside Ekrono's interpreted figures for a few days to cross-reference. A cheap Peacefair PZEM module on each circuit gave me a good sanity check before I trusted the dashboard numbers.

What energy meters are you actually using — CT clamp type or direct connection?