Orion XS – Feature Request: Stop charging after absorption / disable Storage mode

Been thinking about this one for a while, actually prompted by a conversation I spotted over on the Victron community forums.

Running an Orion XS 12/12-50 in my shepherd's hut setup, where the service battery is a Fogstar Drift LiFePO4. The scenario is fairly specific — the starter battery (donor) is on shore power via a mains charger, and the Orion is pushing charge through to the service side. All well and good, except the Orion wants to keep doing its storage/float dance indefinitely, which for LiFePO4 really isn't ideal. I'd much rather it hit absorption, call it done, and disconnect cleanly.

What I'd love to see Victron implement:

• A "stop after absorption" mode — charge to target, then simply cease rather than drop into storage float
• Some way to disable storage mode entirely for lithium-specific use cases
• Ideally triggered via a configurable threshold or timer

The BMS on the Fogstar will protect against genuine overcharge, but I'd rather not rely on it as the primary gatekeeper when the charger itself could just... stop.

I know some folks route around this with a relay or a Cerbo GX integration, but that feels like a workaround for something that should arguably be a firmware option.

Anyone else running DC-DC chargers into lithium banks where this has become a real-world irritation? Curious whether those of you with motorhome setups are hitting the same wall — especially if the alternator source isn't always available and you're leaning on a mains-fed donor battery instead.

Would be worth collectively nudging Victron on this as a feature request if there's appetite for it.

@IslandOffGrid curious about the EV charging angle here actually — I've been wrestling with something similar trying to top up a small EV battery pack from my off-grid setup without ending up in a weird float/storage limbo state.

Does the Orion XS expose enough via VE.Direct or VE.Bus to let you trigger a relay cutoff once absorption ends? I'm wondering whether a Victron MPPT with an external relay assistant could interrupt the DC-DC circuit at that point, rather than waiting for Victron to implement it natively.

Or has anyone tried scripting something through VenusOS on a Cerbo to watch the charger state and cut power accordingly? Feels like this should be doable without waiting on a firmware update that may never come.

What's the source battery chemistry in your shepherd's hut — lithium or lead? That might change which workaround makes most sense.

@IslandOffGrid this rings very true for me — I had exactly this scenario on my narrowboat last winter. The Orion XS would dutifully trickle into storage mode overnight, and by morning I'd lost a meaningful chunk of whatever the alternator had put in during the day's cruising.

What I ended up doing as a workaround was scheduling the unit off via a Victron smart relay triggered by my Cerbo GX once absorption finished. Clunky, absolutely — but it held the SOC where I wanted it rather than bleeding back to that 80% storage target.

A proper "stop at end of absorption" toggle in VictronConnect would solve this cleanly. Worth logging formally on the Victron community portal if you haven't already — their dev team do genuinely pick up feature requests that gather traction there.

Relevant question for my shepherd's hut setup too — I've got a similar situation where the van runs as a secondary charging source rather than primary.

One thing I'm not clear on: does the Orion XS actually report its current charge stage back through VE.Direct, or are we relying on the battery voltage alone to infer what it's doing? If it's just voltage-based, I can see why disabling storage mode cleanly would be tricky to implement without the charger "hunting" around that threshold.

Has anyone tried setting a lower absorption voltage as a workaround — effectively tricking it into thinking bulk is done earlier, so the tail current drops off faster? Not ideal but wondering if it buys anything practical in the meantime while Victron consider the feature request properly.

@IslandOffGrid this is a genuinely frustrating gap in the Orion XS firmware. Victron's logic assumes you want storage voltage maintained, but in a shepherd's hut scenario with decent solar, you really just want the DC-DC to do its job and step aside.

What I've done on my motorhome build is set a custom absorption time as short as the BMS will tolerate, then configure the float voltage low enough that it's essentially doing nothing meaningful. Bit of a bodge, admittedly.

The cleaner fix would be a dedicated "charge and stop" mode — charge to target, hold absorption briefly, then disconnect entirely. Fogstar actually touched on this in their BMS documentation, acknowledging that storage float on LiFePO4 is largely unnecessary if you're cycling regularly.

Worth raising directly with Victron. Their community devs do actually listen occasionally, which is more than can be said for most manufacturers.

Ooh this thread is basically my life right now. My shepherds hut setup has the exact same tension — the Orion XS being clever in ways that work against you.

What I've noticed is that if you're disciplined about disconnecting the vehicle before storage mode kicks in, you can sort of manually work around it... but that defeats the whole point of having smart charging, doesn't it.

@LiFePO4Nerd is right that the firmware assumption is the core problem. Victron seem to have designed around typical leisure setups rather than the "occasional top-up from a parked vehicle" use case that so many of us shepherd's hut and garden office people actually have.

I've raised something vaguely similar via a Victron dealer — apparently feature requests do get logged. Worth everyone here doing the same if we want the firmware team to take it seriously.