Orion Smart 12V/12V-18A DC to DC Charger Firmware V1.13 - Locked in disabled?

Been wrestling with something similar on my garden office setup and thought it worth posting here in case others have hit the same wall.

After updating my Orion Smart 12/12-18A to firmware V1.13, the unit locked itself into a disabled state and flatly refused to resume charging. When I dug into the "off reason" section in VictronConnect, I got two simultaneous notifications:

• Low input voltage (fair enough, my starter battery was a bit marginal at the time)
• Engine shutdown detected (this one threw me — I'm running it between a vehicle and a 200Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4, not a traditional alternator/ignition setup)

The combination of both flags seems to trigger a kind of protective lockout that doesn't self-recover, even once input voltage climbs back into normal range. Factory reset did clear it, but I had to re-enter all my absorption, float, and equalisation parameters from scratch, which is mildly irritating when you've spent time dialling those in.

My suspicion is that V1.13 tightened the engine detection algorithm — possibly interpreting voltage ripple from my DC distribution board as an ignition-off signal. Has anyone else noticed the Orion behaving more conservatively post-update?

A couple of things I'd genuinely like to know from people who've resolved this cleanly:

1. Is there a way to suppress the engine shutdown detection entirely for permanent off-grid installs where there's no ignition signal wired?
2. Does rolling back firmware remain possible via VictronConnect on Android, or are you locked to the latest?

Running a Raspberry Pi with Venus OS on a Cerbo GX emulator here, so happy to pull logs if that helps anyone

@EcoFlow_Queen oh brilliant, firmware updates — the off-grid equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" except it breaks things instead of fixing them 😂

Mine did exactly this after V1.13 — the Orion just sat there looking disabled like it had given up on life. Turns out VictronConnect was caching old settings and the unit needed a full storage mode reset via the app before it'd play ball again.

Try holding the button sequence to force a factory reset, then reconnect fresh in VictronConnect — don't just "update settings," do a full disconnect/reconnect of the Bluetooth pairing too.

If it's still locked out, Victron's own community forum has a thread specifically on V1.13 regression bugs — worth a read before you're tempted to launch it across the garden office. 🏡⚡

@EcoFlow_Queen had almost the exact same thing happen on my cabin setup last autumn — Orion locked itself into a disabled state post-update and VictronConnect just sat there looking smug about it.

What actually sorted it for me was clearing the stored configuration entirely rather than just toggling the charger on/off through the app. Go into settings, note everything down first, then do a full reset to factory defaults. Reconfigure from scratch.

The V1.13 release seemed to have a quirk where existing configs from older firmware weren't being read properly after the flash — particularly around the engine detection threshold settings.

Worth also checking whether your Bluetooth connection dropped mid-update, as a partial flash can cause exactly this behaviour. Victron's support were surprisingly helpful when I rang them directly rather than going through the forum rabbit hole.

@EcoFlow_Queen this is a known quirk with V1.13 — the engine running detection threshold got tightened up, so if your alternator voltage isn't climbing high enough (or fast enough), the Orion just sits there doing nothing.

Check in VictronConnect under Charger → Settings → Engine shutdown detection — you might need to bump the threshold down slightly, or switch to a fixed input voltage trigger instead of the alternator detection algorithm.

Also worth checking: is your vehicle/source battery showing a genuine charge voltage above ~13.2V? I've seen cheap alternators barely hit that, especially older ones.

If you've got a BMS on the load side that's asserting a DVCC signal, that can also ghost the unit into disabled state — caught me out on my van build before I realised what was happening.

@EcoFlow_Queen this caught me out on my shepherd's hut build last year — not firmware related in my case, but the symptom was identical. Worth checking your VE.Direct connection is solid before diving deeper into settings. A loose connection was feeding the Orion corrupted config data and it just sat there refusing to do anything useful.

Also, if you're connecting via VictronConnect and the unit shows as disabled with no obvious toggle to re-enable it, try forgetting the device entirely in the app and re-pairing from scratch. Sounds daft but it cleared a ghost configuration state for me that no amount of fiddling with settings would shift.

The shepherd's hut is now my emergency backup for the main house, so reliability matters — I wouldn't accept anything less than a clean fix rather than papering over it.