Extra features for scheduled charging settings

Been thinking about this a lot lately after tweaking my Victron Multiplus settings on the van build.

The scheduled charging feature is genuinely useful, but it feels like it's missing one key piece of logic — a SOC threshold trigger. Right now you can tell it when to charge, but not whether it actually needs to.

My setup runs 400Ah of Fogstar Drift LiFePO4, and during summer I rarely dip below 70% overnight. But I've got a schedule set to top up from shore power on Monday mornings regardless. Half the time the inverter fires up, draws from the hook-up, and the batteries were already fine. Pointless cycling, wasted standing charge costs, and unnecessary wear.

What I'd love to see — and I suspect this would benefit anyone running a motorhome or static backup system — is something like:

"Run scheduled charge only if SOC is below X%"

So if it's a sunny week and my panels have kept everything above 80%, the schedule simply skips. But after a grey British January weekend where I've burned through the pack, it kicks in automatically. Best of both worlds.

I know you can bodge this with Node-RED on a Cerbo GX and write your own logic, which I've half done — but it shouldn't require that level of faff for what's a fairly obvious use case.

Anyone else found workarounds for this? Curious whether the Victron community forums have surfaced any firmware requests along these lines, or if other BMS/inverter combos handle it more elegantly out of the box.

Victron's scheduled charging is brilliant until you realise you've essentially just built a very expensive alarm clock that occasionally forgets what day it is. 🕰️

What I'd kill for is state-of-charge triggers layered on top of the time windows — so if my Fogstar Drift cells are already at 90% from a sunny afternoon, the schedule just... skips itself rather than topping up unnecessarily and cycling the batteries for no reason.

@MarinePhil also worth lobbying for seasonal profiles — my winter EV charging overlap with the van system means my "summer" schedule is absolutely useless by October without manual fiddling every few weeks.

@MarinePhil totally feel this — I've been wrestling with the same thing on my narrowboat setup. The bit that gets me is there's no weather-aware option. Like, if I've got solar coming in the next day, why is my Multiplus still hammering the shore power at 2am like it has no idea?

What I'd love to see is some kind of integration with forecast data so it can decide "actually, crack on, you'll top up naturally by noon."

Is anyone running Node-RED or similar to bodge something like this together? I've seen mentions of it on the Victron community forums but never actually found a proper walkthrough that doesn't require a computer science degree to follow 😅

Feels like such an obvious feature gap for boats and vans where your charging sources are constantly changing day to day.

@MarinePhil what you really want is SOC-conditional scheduling — "only charge if battery drops below X%" — because blindly hitting grid at midnight when your Fogstar's already at 90% from yesterday's solar is just burning money for the sake of a cron job.

Victron's Node-RED integration via Venus OS can actually handle this logic already if you're comfortable getting your hands dirty; a simple flow checking SOC via the MQTT broker before enabling the scheduled charge input will sort it entirely.

On my own setup I've got it refusing grid charge unless SOC dips below 30% and tomorrow's forecast looks grim — keeps the cycle count down and my electricity bill from being embarrassing.

@OldSailor nailed it, but I'd also love a "don't bother if solar's already winning" condition — my Fogstar cells in the static don't need the grid kicking in at 6am just because I might have had a cloudy night.

@OldSailor @CopperMaker both good shouts. On the boat I've got a Node-RED instance running on a Pi that does exactly this — checks SOC via MQTT from the Cerbo, checks solar yield forecast from Solcast, then decides whether to enable the scheduled charge via VRM API. Bit of a faff to set up but it works a treat.

The frustrating thing is Victron clearly have the data available natively — SOC, PV power, grid price if you're using ESS. There's no technical reason this logic couldn't live in Venus OS itself. It's a firmware decision, not a capability gap.

Someone started a feature request on the Victron Community forum ages ago. Worth upvoting if you haven't already — that's genuinely the best way to get their attention.