Manually setting battery charge percentage on the Ekrano

Been wrestling with this one on my own setup and curious if others have hit the same wall.

Running a Victron system in my static caravan — Multiplus-II, SmartShunt, a couple of Renogy panels feeding into an MPPT, and a bank of Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 batteries. The Fogstar units have their own Bluetooth BMS app which is great, but obviously they're not talking directly to the Cerbo/Ekrano ecosystem.

The issue I keep running into is that the Ekrano seems to be pulling its State of Charge figure from the Multiplus rather than the actual BMS, which means it's often reading wildly different from what the Fogstar app is showing me. Sometimes 15-20% out, which on a smaller battery bank matters quite a lot practically speaking.

A few things I'm wondering:

• Has anyone managed to manually correct or calibrate the SOC on the Ekrano without having a Victron-native battery?
• Is the SmartShunt a better source to anchor the SOC to, and if so how do you set that as the primary reference in VRM/the GX settings?
• Do you just do a full charge sync periodically and accept the drift, or is there a cleaner fix?

I've read a bit about using the SmartShunt as a battery monitor and setting that in the GX device settings, which apparently gives you more accurate coulomb counting — but I haven't pulled the trigger on reconfiguring it yet in case I break something that's currently sort of working.

Anyone running non-Victron lithium with an Ekrano who's cracked this? Would be good to hear what's actually working in practice rather than just what the manual suggests.

@CharlieStevens85 interesting one — are you trying to set the SoC manually via the Ekrano's touchscreen, or pushing a value through VRM/MQTT?

On my shepherd's hut setup I had a similar head-scratch after a SmartShunt reset. The key thing I found was that the SmartShunt is the SoC "master" — the Ekrano just displays what it's told. So if the percentage looks wrong, you're better off correcting it at the SmartShunt level (hold the button to sync to 100% when you know it's genuinely full).

Worth checking:

• Is your SmartShunt configured as the battery monitor in VictronConnect?
• Has the Ekrano been set to pull SoC from the correct device?

What firmware are you running? Some earlier versions had quirks around manual SoC override that got patched.

@CharlieStevens85 on the Ekrano GX you can manually sync the SoC by going to Device List → SmartShunt → State of Charge and tapping the value to override it — though honestly your SmartShunt should be doing the heavy lifting there, so if it keeps drifting you've probably got a synchronisation issue (check your "Charged voltage" and "Tail current" settings in VictorConnect, they're almost always the culprit on static setups where the batteries rarely hit a proper full absorption).

Worth noting: once the SmartShunt sees a genuine 100% charged cycle it'll self-correct anyway, so forcing a full charge overnight and letting it tail off properly often sorts it without any manual fiddling — did exactly this on my narrowboat after a winter of grief.

Just to add to what @RetiredChef mentioned — worth bearing in mind that if your SmartShunt hasn't had a proper full charge cycle yet, any manual SoC you set will drift pretty quickly regardless. The shunt needs to see a genuine tail current reading to start tracking accurately from there.

Also double-check your battery capacity and Peukert settings are correctly configured in the SmartShunt itself via the VictorConnect app, as those directly affect how reliably it counts coulombs going forward. Getting those wrong is a really common one on LiFePO4 setups especially.

Once you've manually synced and done a full charge, it should settle down nicely. What battery chemistry are you running? That might affect which approach works best for you. 🔋

@CharlieStevens85 one thing worth checking that nobody's mentioned yet — make sure your Charged Voltage and Tail Current settings in the SmartShunt configuration are actually correct for your battery chemistry. If those thresholds are off, the shunt won't recognise when the battery's genuinely full, so it never properly resets to 100% on its own and your manual corrections keep drifting.

Also, if you're running Renogy panels through a Victron MPPT, double-check that the charge parameters in the MPPT match what the SmartShunt expects — inconsistency there can confuse the whole SoC calculation over time. Worth a look in VictronConnect before you pull your hair out tweaking things on the Ekrano screen! 😄