Had exactly this with mine for the first couple of years. Short trips are basically useless for proper charging — the Orion needs time to go through bulk, absorption, float properly, and if you're only doing 20 minutes to the shops you're barely tickling the leisure battery.
Long motorway runs are where these things shine though. I've got a 100Ah Fogstar Drift in the back and after a 2-hour run it comes off the Orion looking properly healthy.
Few things worth checking:
- Make sure you've got the engine detection set up correctly — some people accidentally have it triggering too early or on a voltage threshold that's too low
- Check your cable gauge between the starter and leisure battery. Undersized cable will throttle your actual charge current even if the Orion says 30A
- If you've got a smart alternator (most post-2015 vehicles do), the Orion DC-DC is handling that properly, but worth confirming in VictronConnect what voltage it's actually seeing
Short trips will always be a weak point honestly. Not really a fault, just physics. If short runs are your main use case you might want to supplement with a bit of solar on the roof — even 100W makes a surprising difference when you're parked up afterwards.
What vehicle are you running it in? And have you connected it to Victron's app yet? Makes diagnosing this stuff much easier when you can actually see the charge curves.
Others had similar patterns with theirs? Curious whether it's worse with certain alternator types.
