Feature Request DCDC input voltage

Been thinking about this one for a while, running a Victron Orion-Tr Smart in my garden office setup fed from the van's starter battery.

The VRM display labels the DC-DC charger input as "alternator" which makes sense for most mobile installs, but what's actually being reported is the output voltage — i.e. the leisure/house battery side. That's fine as far as it goes, but I'd really like to see the input voltage (starter battery side) surfaced more prominently and consistently.

Right now you can sort of hunt it down in a couple of places depending on your firmware version, but it's not cleanly presented alongside everything else. For anyone monitoring alternator health or trying to catch a failing starter battery before it becomes a problem, that input voltage figure is genuinely useful data.

My specific ask would be:

• Input voltage displayed as a dedicated field in VRM, not buried
• Option to rename the "alternator" label for those of us using it in fixed off-grid setups where there's no alternator involved at all
• Historical logging of input voltage, same as we get for other parameters

Feels like a relatively straightforward firmware/interface change rather than anything radical. Anyone else finding the current reporting a bit limited? Curious whether this is something Victron have acknowledged anywhere — I've not spotted it on their feature request forum but might be worth pushing there too if there's appetite here.

What does your monitoring setup look like for the DC-DC input side?

@TonyLee yes this has caught me out too — on my narrowboat the Orion-Tr Smart is fed from the bow thruster battery bank, absolutely nothing to do with an alternator, and yet there it sits labelled as such in VRM.

The underlying assumption baked into the firmware is essentially "DC input = vehicle alternator" which made sense when these units were primarily marketed at van conversions. More flexible input source labelling would be genuinely useful — even a simple dropdown: alternator / solar / battery bank / other.

Worth raising directly on the Victron Community forum rather than here, they do actually action feature requests occasionally, particularly if enough people vote on them. Victron's dev team seems reasonably responsive to VRM UI suggestions specifically.

Ooh this is interesting — does it cause any actual confusion in the data logging or is it purely a display label issue?

On my boat setup I've got an Orion-Tr Smart pulling from a dedicated bow battery and I've always wondered if Victron might introduce custom input source labelling via VRM at some point. Seems like a fairly straightforward feature request for their dev team?

Worth raising directly on the Victron Community forum if it hasn't been already — they do actually listen to those threads, especially when multiple users flag the same thing. Could even tie into how the MPPT units handle custom naming now.

@PanelEwan does yours show any weird behaviour in the charge history graphs because of the mislabelling, or is it genuinely cosmetic only?

@RustySkipper purely cosmetic as far as I can tell — my VRM data is spot-on, it's just that "alternator" label sitting there judging me every time I glance at the dashboard while I'm actually pulling from a Fogstar battery bank in the shed 😅

@VoltBarry glad it's just cosmetic — though I'd argue labels matter more than people think when you're troubleshooting at 2am wondering why your shepherd's hut batteries aren't charging.

My Orion-Tr Smart pulls from a dedicated LiFePO4 bank rather than anything alternator-adjacent, so every time I glance at VRM I have that split-second "wait, what alternator?" moment. It's a small friction, but it's constant friction.

A simple custom label field in the device settings — even just a free-text box — would solve this entirely. Victron already let you rename MPPT inputs in some contexts, so the framework presumably exists. Would love to see it trickle down to the Orion config pages.

Flagging this as a genuine usability improvement rather than a vanity tweak.