Smart Battery Sense temperature reporting in VRM portal issue

Been running a Victron Smart Battery Sense on my LiFePO4 bank out in the garden office for a few months now, and it's been brilliant for keeping an eye on temperature during these unpredictable British winters. Paired it up with a GlobalLink 520 so I can check in remotely via VRM when I'm not out there — dead handy when you want to know if the battery is getting too chilly before heading out for a morning work session.

Here's where I'm hitting a wall though. Voltage is showing up in VRM without any bother, but the temperature readings from the Smart Battery Sense are simply not appearing in the portal. It's not greyed out or showing an error — it's just... absent. The temperature displays perfectly in the Victron Connect app over Bluetooth when I'm physically nearby, so the sensor itself is clearly working.

From what I can piece together, the GlobalLink 520 pulls data via the VE.Smart network, but I'm wondering whether temperature specifically isn't being forwarded to VRM properly — or whether there's a configuration step I've missed somewhere.

A few things I'm uncertain about:

• Is temperature data from a Smart Battery Sense actually supposed to appear in VRM, or is voltage the only parameter transmitted via GlobalLink?
• Would adding something like a Cerbo GX to the setup change things, even without a full Victron inverter/charger in the mix?

Running a fairly modest setup — Fogstar Drift 100Ah, a Renogy 40A MPPT, and a small Victron Phoenix inverter — so I'm not sure a Cerbo is overkill or actually the right fix here. Anyone navigated this before?

@WattNick the VRM temperature display for the Smart Battery Sense can be a bit temperamental — worth checking a couple of things:

1. Bluetooth network — is it properly joined to the same VE.Smart network as your MPPT/charger? VRM pulls the temperature data via that chain, not directly.
2. Firmware — had this exact gremlin on mine last winter. Updated the Battery Sense firmware through the VictronConnect app and it sorted itself immediately.
3. VRM dashboard widget — sometimes the temperature tile simply isn't added. Check under "Edit dashboard" — it won't appear automatically on older portal setups.

My garden office setup had identical symptoms; turned out the Smart network wasn't propagating properly because I'd renamed the device mid-setup, which apparently confuses things royally. Factory reset, rename after network join, job done.

What firmware version are you currently running?

Seen this exact issue. VRM temperature graph goes blank or shows dashes when the Smart Battery Sense loses Bluetooth sync with the MPPT or BMV — doesn't matter how strong the signal is, if the Venus device can't see it directly via VE.Smart networking it won't log properly.

Fix that worked for me: make sure VE.Smart networking is enabled on every device in the network, not just the Sense itself. Took me an embarrassingly long time to spot that my SmartSolar had it disabled after a firmware update reset the settings.

Also worth checking — VRM only logs temperature if it's configured as a data source in the GX device settings. Easy to miss.

@TracyAllen is right to flag the temperamental side of it, but nine times out of ten it's a config issue rather than a fault.

Useful thread — just what I needed to read actually.

I've been considering adding a Smart Battery Sense to my motorhome LiFePO4 setup, partly to protect the cells during overnight charging stops in winter. A few questions if anyone can help:

1. Does VRM log historical temperature data from the Smart Battery Sense, or only show live readings?
2. If the Bluetooth link drops (as @GrumpyBuilder mentions), does VRM show a gap in the graph or just hold the last known value?
3. Is there a minimum polling interval — can you get readings more frequently than every few minutes?

My MPPT and Multiplus data logs fine through a Cerbo GX, so I'm wondering whether the Smart Battery Sense integrates into that same VRM history cleanly or whether it behaves differently being a Bluetooth-only device rather than wired to the Cerbo directly.

@GrumpyBuilder the Bluetooth sync dropout is the bane of my existence — my Smart Battery Sense in the static caravan does the same thing whenever my neighbour's dog presumably sits on the WiFi router or something equally mysterious.

Worth checking your VE.Smart network is actually still showing the Battery Sense as a member device in the Victron Connect app — mine silently booted itself off the network after a firmware update and VRM just showed dashes for a fortnight before I noticed.

Also @BevJackson64 for a motorhome the temperature compensation alone makes it worthwhile, especially if you're on hook-up and the charger doesn't know it's -3°C outside — Victron's voltage compensation curve actually does something useful for once.