Non-victron charger/inverter with smartshunt as dc meter; benefit?

Running into something similar with my garden office setup and curious if anyone's had experience with this.

I've got a Fogstar Drift battery bank with a Victron Cerbo GX, a couple of SmartSolar MPPTs, and a SmartShunt doing the main DC monitoring. The inverter/charger is a non-Victron unit though — a Voltronic-based hybrid I picked up before I went properly down the Victron rabbit hole.

The SmartShunt sits at the battery negative and gives me a decent overall picture, but I'm wondering whether adding a second SmartShunt as a dedicated DC meter in line with the inverter/charger actually gives you anything useful, or whether it's just noise in the system.

My thinking is:

• Would it help Cerbo GX attribute loads/charge current more accurately to the correct device?
• Could it improve DVCC behaviour when the non-Victron charger is doing its thing?
• Or does the main shunt already capture everything it needs at the battery terminal anyway?

I'm also half-tempted because I do occasional EV charging from a portable EVSE connected to the inverter output, and I'd love cleaner data on what's actually coming in vs going out at any given time.

Has anyone actually done this — two shunts in a Cerbo-based system where the inverter/charger is a third-party unit? Did it genuinely improve your monitoring or just add complexity for no real gain?

SandyViking | 847 posts | ⚡ Off-Grid Enthusiast

@JulieGraham yes, absolutely worth doing! The SmartShunt acting as a DC energy meter alongside a non-Victron inverter/charger is genuinely useful — the Cerbo will still pull in accurate SOC, voltage, current and power data and display it all nicely on the VRM portal.

The main limitation to be aware of is that the Cerbo won't have control over your charger the way it would with a Multiplus. So you lose things like DVCC and any automated charge management through the GX device itself.

But for monitoring purposes it's cracking — especially paired with a Fogstar Drift which has its own BMS data potentially coming through via Bluetooth anyway. You'd basically have a solid overview of what's going in and out even if the two systems aren't truly "talking" to each other. Well worth the SmartShunt cost in my opinion.

Drift_Geek | 1,243 posts | 🔋 Battery Nerd

@JulieGraham the real benefit nobody mentions — when your non-Victron inverter/charger is talking to the Cerbo via the SmartShunt acting as DC meter, VRM starts building genuinely useful historical data. Battery trends, consumed amp-hours, the lot.

I ran a Solis inverter alongside my Cerbo for eight months before switching. The SmartShunt gave the Cerbo something concrete to report against rather than estimating from the AC side. State-of-charge accuracy was noticeably tighter, particularly during partial-state charging cycles which absolutely confuse calculated estimates.

One practical caveat — make sure you've set the SmartShunt's charged voltage threshold and tail current to match your Fogstar Drift's actual charge profile, otherwise the SOC reset logic misfires and you'll be chasing phantom discrepancies for weeks. Ask me how I know. 🙃

HappyBuilder | 312 posts | 🏡 Tiny House & Boat Nerd

@JulieGraham worth adding — the SmartShunt's charged detection settings matter a lot here. If your non-Victron charger has a slightly different absorption/float profile, the shunt might not recognise when the battery's actually full, so your SOC drifts over time.

Dial in the tail current and charged voltage thresholds in the VictronConnect app to match what your charger actually delivers. Took me a good few cycles on my boat setup to get it tracking accurately.

Once it's tuned properly though, the Cerbo dashboard becomes genuinely useful even with mixed kit — you're not flying blind anymore.

FETFan | 2,156 posts | 🚐 Van/Boat/Hut Obsessive

@JulieGraham the pedant in me has to point out — the SmartShunt isn't measuring DC "through" the Cerbo, it's doing all the coulomb counting itself and just reporting to the Cerbo via VE.Direct, so even if your Cerbo throws a wobbler the shunt's still tracking accurately onboard. Ran this exact combo on my narrowboat with a Sterling inverter-charger for two years — the Victron ecosystem basically just watches the non-Victron kit without controlling it, which means your VRM dashboard looks lovely but DVCC and ESS features are obviously off the table. Worth knowing before you start expecting magic.