Multi RS Solar higer AC consumption in OFF mode after firmware upgrades

So my Multi RS Solar did something similar after I let Victron Connect talk me into that firmware update last autumn — standby draw in Off mode went from "meh, acceptable" to "oi, who left the kettle on?" levels, measured at the AC input side.

Mine's the 48/6000 as well, sitting in the garden office feeding a couple of Fogstar 48V batteries, and the built-in MPPT is just... decorating the unit (no PV wired to it yet, same as the chap who flagged this originally).

Rolled back to see if it made a difference and — spoiler — faff ensued, because apparently Victron didn't fancy making that easy.

Few things I'm wondering:

• Is the higher draw related to the MPPT being uninitialised with no PV connected, causing some polling loop to go daft?
• Anyone seen this on v1.28 specifically, or does it kick in from v1.31 onward?
• Does it settle down after a few charge cycles, or is this just our new reality now?

Currently sitting at roughly double what I was seeing before — not catastrophic, but when you're trying to keep parasitic losses sensible on an off-grid setup it adds up over a winter night.

Curious whether anyone else on here has measured actual figures with a decent clamp meter before and after upgrading, or whether I'm just imagining things because I've been staring at my Cerbo GX graphs for too long again.

@MrBodge73 Ha, "oi, who left the kettle on" — know that feeling well!

Worth checking whether the Multi RS is actually going into a proper Off state or if the firmware's changed the behaviour so it's sitting in some kind of low-power standby rather than genuinely off. I noticed after one of my updates that what looked like Off mode was actually still polling the MPPT inputs periodically, which obviously costs something.

Have a dig through VictronConnect and check the assistant settings too — sometimes an update quietly resets things back to defaults.

Also, what's your actual measured draw? Clamp meter on the AC input cable rather than trusting the reported figures, as the internal metering on these seems to drift a bit post-update in my experience. Would help narrow down whether it's real consumption or just dodgy reporting.

@MrBodge73 had almost the exact same thing on my boat last winter — updated the Multi RS and suddenly the battery bank was grumbling by morning despite nothing running.

What eventually sorted it for me was doing a full settings backup, then a factory reset via VictronConnect, and restoring from the backup rather than letting it carry the old config forward through the update. Seemed like some legacy settings were clashing with how the new firmware handles the Off mode relay behaviour.

Worth also checking your ESS assistant version if you're running one — that was a separate culprit in my case, an outdated assistant sitting on top of new firmware wasn't playing nicely at all.

Took a couple of evenings of head-scratching but the standby draw came right back down afterwards.

@MrBodge73 had this on my shepherd's hut setup — turned out the firmware had reset the "switch as group" behaviour and the inverter was basically half-awake rather than properly off. Worth digging into the ESS assistant settings in VE.Configure if you haven't already.

Also check your AC input current limiter — mine had defaulted to a daft value post-update which was causing phantom draw.

Victron's changelog for that batch of updates was pretty vague tbh. Posted about it on the Victron Community forum and got a workaround from one of their devs — happy to dig out the thread link if useful.

@WillWebb makes a fair point about group switching, but before you go down that rabbit hole — check your ESS assistant configuration first. Post-update it's not unheard of for the Multi RS to revert certain assistant parameters, and if it's sitting there with a confused ESS state it'll chew through standby power trying to "decide" what it's doing.

On my shepherd's hut system I log AC consumption via a Victron Cerbo GX, so discrepancies like this show up immediately. If you're not logging properly you're basically flying blind.

Also worth pulling the VEConfigure file and comparing against whatever backup you made pre-update. You did make a backup pre-update, didn't you? Most people don't, then wonder why diagnosing this takes three weekends.

Victron's firmware changelogs are there for a reason — actually read them.