VictronConnect: an improved system dashboard

Been running VictronConnect on the narrowboat for the past couple of seasons and the rebuilt dashboard is a genuine step forward — though I've got a few thoughts worth sharing.

The interactive card layout is much cleaner than what we had before. Tapping through to device detail views is intuitive, and I can now hand my phone to someone with zero Victron knowledge and they can make sense of what the system is doing. That's actually useful when you're stepping off the boat and leaving someone else aboard.

What I'm finding particularly handy:

• The solar/load/battery flow diagram updates in near real-time, which makes diagnosing afternoon shading issues on the canal much more straightforward
• The card-based layout scales reasonably well across different screen sizes — less fiddling than the old interface

Where I think it still falls short:

The historical data visualisation remains fairly basic. For anyone running a Fogstar lithium bank with a Victron SmartShunt, you want to be able to correlate SoC trends against weather patterns over a week or more without jumping into VRM. The app still pushes you toward the portal for anything meaningful in terms of logging.

Also curious whether anyone with a more complex setup — multiple MPPT controllers, inverter/charger running alongside a BMV — is finding the new overview actually represents their system accurately, or whether it flattens things in a confusing way.

My shepherd's hut uses a simpler single-MPPT layout and it renders perfectly there, so I suspect complexity is where the cracks appear.

Anyone else been testing this on a multi-device setup?

Not a boat setup here — running it on a van conversion with a Victron SmartSolar and a couple of Fogstar Drift 100Ah batteries — but the dashboard improvements translate across installs pretty well.

One thing I've found really useful is the history tab on the MPPT. Being able to glance back at daily yield figures without digging through logs has saved me a fair bit of head-scratching when something looked off with my panels.

@AshWalker curious whether you're using the VRM portal alongside VictronConnect or just relying on the app locally? On the van I mostly rely on Bluetooth locally, but I've been tempted to add a GX device purely for the remote monitoring when I'm parked up somewhere awkward and want to keep an eye on things from inside.

Not a marine setup either but jumping in — using VictronConnect on my static caravan and the dashboard update has made a real difference for keeping an eye on things remotely.

The one thing I'd flag is that if you've got multiple devices it can feel a bit cluttered on a phone screen. Works better on a tablet tbh.

@CoveMick curious whether the Fogstar Drift plays nicely with the SmartSolar BMS comms — I'm running a different battery and sometimes the SOC readings feel a bit optimistic compared to what the BMV-712 shows.

Similar situation to @HY_OffGrid here — static caravan rather than marine. I'll be honest, I was slow to trust the rebuilt dashboard after the update; took a few weeks of cross-referencing against my BMV-712 readings before I was satisfied the SOC figures were consistent.

One thing worth flagging that nobody's mentioned: the historical data view is considerably more useful now for diagnosing overnight discharge patterns. Running a backup setup here so I need confidence that the batteries will actually deliver when grid fails. Being able to pull up a proper discharge curve rather than just snapshot readings has been genuinely useful for validating my Fogstar cells under load.

That said, I'd still not rely solely on the app — the physical BMV display stays mounted where I can see it. Software dashboards are only as reliable as the Bluetooth connection holding up.

Narrowboat here too, @AshWalker, so this thread is rather directly relevant to my setup.

One detail I'd gently push back on — or at least complicate — is treating the dashboard as a straightforward improvement across the board. When I'm managing EV charging from the boat's bank (a Fogstar Drift 200Ah pair feeding a Victron Multiplus-II), the power flow visualisation becomes genuinely ambiguous during split charging states. The card layout presents a tidy narrative that doesn't always reflect what's actually happening electrically.

It's not that the rebuild is worse — it clearly isn't — but I'd caution against reading it as authoritative without cross-referencing the Cerbo GX's raw data pages. The dashboard tells a story. Whether it's the correct story depends rather heavily on your topology.

The @CoveMick and @HY_OffGrid experiences are interesting but a dynamic propulsion load does change the picture considerably.