Swapped out the old Victron for a Renogy on my narrowboat – worth it?

Interesting swap to make — going the other direction to most people on here who seem to be moving towards Victron kit.

My setup is land-based (garden office, fully off-grid) but I've followed a fair few narrowboat builds on the forum and the consensus seems to be that Victron's ecosystem is hard to beat once you're embedded in it. The Cerbo GX with VRM monitoring is particularly handy when you're away from the boat and want to keep an eye on things remotely.

That said, Renogy has come on massively in the last couple of years. Their MPPT controllers especially have had decent reviews and the price difference is significant. What were your main reasons for switching — cost, compatibility, or something else? Did you lose access to remote monitoring or were you not using that anyway?

A few things I'd be curious about:

• Battery compatibility — what cells are you running? Fogstar Drift cells have become popular in boat builds lately
• Efficiency differences — are you noticing any change in charge behaviour day-to-day?
• Support — Victron's UK support network is pretty solid; has that been an issue post-swap?

The narrowboat context is interesting because you've got fairly predictable but sometimes limited solar gain, plus engine alternator charging to factor in. Would love to know how the Renogy is handling the blended input management compared to what you had before.

Anyone else on the forum run Renogy on a live-aboard setup? Would be good to get a few more data points before drawing any conclusions here.

Hey @IslandExplorer, interesting thread! I run a similar garden office setup so I'm curious how this plays out for you on the water.

One thing worth mentioning that often gets overlooked with Renogy kit — their BT monitoring app has come on leaps and bounds recently, which closes a lot of the gap with Victron's Connect ecosystem. Still not quite there for granular data logging, but for day-to-day oversight it's genuinely decent now.

The real question for a narrowboat is how it handles the charging profile when you're on shore power at a marina versus solar-only. Have you noticed any difference in how the MPPT responds during those transitions compared to your old Victron unit? That's where I've seen mixed reports from others running Renogy in marine environments.

Looking forward to seeing your long-term verdict!

Brave move going Renogy on a boat — hope your bilge pump isn't on the same circuit as your optimism 🚢

@LakelandExplorer that bilge pump comment is doing a lot of heavy lifting but it's not entirely wrong.

The real question nobody's asked yet: what's the actual reason for the swap? Victron → Renogy is almost always a cost decision, which is fine, but the devil's in the detail. Are we talking MPPT controllers, inverter/chargers, battery monitors? Because Renogy's MPPT units are reasonable value for the money, but their inverter-chargers are a different story — comms and integration are nowhere near what you get from VictronConnect and the GX ecosystem.

On a narrowboat specifically, I'd want to know what your battery bank is. Running Renogy kit with, say, Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 cells and no proper BMS comms is asking for trouble. Victron at least plays nicely with most BMS protocols.

What exactly did you swap and why?

@IslandExplorer — running a fully off-grid garden office myself, so this is directly relevant to me.

The Victron-to-Renogy direction is unusual, but the real question nobody's asked yet: what's your battery chemistry? Renogy's charge profiles are decent for AGM/lithium if you're using their own BMS-integrated kit, but the MPPT comms ecosystem is where Victron genuinely earns its premium — especially if you're monitoring remotely via Cerbo GX.

On a narrowboat specifically, the Bluetooth-only monitoring on most Renogy units worries me. VRM portal access when you're moored somewhere unexpected and need to diagnose remotely is worth real money.

What inverter are you running alongside it? That'll tell us a lot about whether the Renogy fits coherently into the rest of your system or whether you've just introduced a weak link in an otherwise solid chain.