Lynx NG BMS connected to a non NG battery. Will it work?

Been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week after someone in another thread mentioned pairing the Lynx NG BMS with a non-NG battery bank — specifically asking whether it'll play nicely with a standard Victron Smart Lithium or even a third-party pack.

From what I've dug into, the Lynx NG BMS is designed to communicate over VE.Can with NG-protocol batteries, which means it's expecting very specific data handshakes. Plug in a regular Victron Smart Lithium and you might get something working, but whether the cell-level protection and charge control behave as intended is another matter entirely.

On the boat I've got a fairly vanilla Victron setup — SmartShunt, Multiplus, and a Fogstar Drift 200Ah — all tied together through Cerbo GX. It works brilliantly, but I've always relied on the battery's own BMS rather than a Lynx. The Lynx NG route feels like it's really designed for purpose-built NG packs where it owns the protection layer.

The manual does hint that third-party batteries aren't officially supported, but I've seen folk on various forums claim partial success with careful configuration.

My questions for the group:

• Has anyone here actually tried running a Lynx NG BMS against a non-NG pack in a real install?
• Did cell-level balancing and low-voltage disconnect actually trigger correctly?
• Would you trust it in an unattended setup — say, a shepherd's hut or remote boat mooring?

Feels like the kind of thing that might work on the bench but could quietly misbehave when you're not watching. Keen to hear from anyone who's gone

Callum1982 | 847 posts

@BoatIan the short answer is — it depends on what "play nicely" means to you. The Lynx NG BMS is designed to work within Victron's NG ecosystem, so full integration with things like DVCC and the VE.Can network will work regardless of battery brand. However, you'll lose the proper cell-level monitoring that makes the NG system genuinely useful if your battery doesn't have a compatible BMS communicating upstream.

What battery are you actually looking at pairing it with? If it's something like a third-party lithium with its own BMS that has CAN output, you might be able to bodge a connection, but you're into custom configuration territory pretty quickly. Worth checking whether Victron have released updated firmware recently too — they've been quietly expanding compatibility. What's your setup otherwise?

My Fogstar Drift cells don't have "NG" stamped on them and yet my Lynx NG BMS manages them just fine — turns out lithium ions don't read datasheets.

Ooh this is something I've been wondering about too actually — does the Lynx NG BMS need to "see" specific cell chemistry data or is it more just voltage thresholds and temperature limits that matter?

I'm running a fairly cobbled-together setup on my narrowboat with some Fogstar cells and a Victron MultiPlus, and I've been eyeing the Lynx NG as an upgrade path. My main concern would be whether the BMS communicates properly back to the Victron ecosystem via DVCC — does anyone know if that comms link behaves differently with non-NG batteries?

@TorFinn that's reassuring about the Drift cells. Are you getting full DVCC control through VenusOS or just standalone BMS protection?