Feature request: Venus OS, DVCC; ignore Orion XS output current setting when State OFF

Been thinking about this one for a while and curious if others have run into it.

Running a couple of Victron Orion XS 50A units in my setup — one dedicated to shore power input, another for a secondary DC source. They're almost never active at the same time, but DVCC doesn't really care about that. When you've got DVCC managing charge current limits across the system, it apparently still factors in the configured output current of an Orion even when that unit is in State: OFF.

So if you've got, say, two Orions with 50A output each configured, DVCC might be capping your active charger lower than it needs to, because it's reserving headroom for a unit that's completely off and contributing nothing.

Feels like a gap in the Venus OS logic to me. Surely if a unit reports State: OFF, its configured current should be excluded from the DVCC current budget?

Has anyone raised this with Victron via the community portal? Or found a workaround — maybe using assistant-based on/off rather than just disabling the unit?

Would be good to know if this affects Cerbo GX users specifically or if it's a wider Venus OS thing. My Fogstar batteries have pretty tight charge parameters so I notice when the headroom gets unnecessarily squeezed.

Anyone else running multiple Orions and seen this behaviour? Worth pushing as a feature request I reckon.

Yeah this catches people out. When the Orion XS is in State OFF, DVCC still references the output current limit you've set rather than treating it as zero contribution. Means your system maths goes wrong for load calculations.

Raised something similar on the Victron community forum ages ago — think it's a firmware oversight tbh. The fix should be straightforward: if State = OFF, Venus OS ought to report that unit's available current as 0A regardless of configured limit.

Worth logging it properly on the Victron GitHub as a Venus OS issue rather than just the community forum — gets more traction there.

My garden office setup had similar weirdness with DVCC when I had a unit disabled for maintenance. Fudged it by temporarily zeroing the current limit manually, which is obviously not ideal.

Cheers @LB_Camper, good shout raising this. I've hit exactly this with a similar dual-Orion setup — when one unit is deliberately switched off, DVCC shouldn't really be factoring its rated output into the overall current budget. It's phantom capacity that simply isn't there.

Worth raising directly on the Victron Community forum if you haven't already — the Venus OS devs do actually pick up feature requests there, especially when there's a clear logical case behind them. Tag it under Venus OS and DVCC.

As a workaround in the meantime, have you tried setting that offline unit's current limit to 0A via the GX device when it transitions to OFF state? Bit of a faff to automate but Node-RED could handle it with a trigger on the state change. Not elegant, but it bridges the gap until Victron sort it properly.

Worth noting that Victron's own DVCC docs are pretty clear that the charge current limit is supposed to reflect available charging capacity — an offline Orion XS contributing its rated 50A to that pool is about as useful as a chocolate fuse in a static van. Raised something similar on the Victron Community forum months back and got tumbleweeds. The fix should be dead simple: if charger state == OFF, exclude that unit's current from DVCC's CCL calculation entirely. Fogstar cells don't appreciate being starved because Venus OS can't do basic maths with its own device states. @LB_Camper stick it on the Victron feature request tracker — more votes = more chance they'll actually look at it before the next firmware that breaks something else.

@ForestDaz raises the key point — if the docs say "available" capacity, then counting a switched-off Orion in that figure is a bug, not a feature request IMO.

My garden office runs a single Orion XS 50A off the house feed and I've noticed DVCC behaving oddly when I manually disable it during low-demand periods. The maths simply doesn't add up once you factor in a zeroed source.

Victron's community tracker is probably the right place to log this formally — they do actually action well-documented reports, especially when there's a clear delta between documented behaviour and observed behaviour. Worth linking the relevant DVCC section verbatim in your submission rather than paraphrasing it.

Has anyone tested whether this varies across Venus OS versions? Wondering if it crept in with a recent release or has always been present.