Virtual EVCS shows both EV and AC load in VRM

Been playing around with the virtual EVCS setup in Node-RED for my cabin system and running into something a bit frustrating.

Got the virtual EV and EVCS instances both appearing correctly in Node-RED with the right values coming through, but in VRM the EV charging load isn't being separated out from the AC loads — it's all lumped together. With my Victron setup I was expecting it to behave more like DC-coupled battery charging, where the MPPT contribution gets broken out cleanly on the dashboard.

Bit annoying because half the reason I went down the virtual EVCS route was to get proper visibility on what my EV charging is actually pulling vs. the rest of the cabin loads. Right now VRM just shows one big AC load figure and I can't tell what's going to the car.

Few things I'm wondering:

• Is this a known limitation of the virtual EVCS approach vs. a proper hardware EVCS?
• Does anyone know if there's a specific Node-RED flow config that pushes the right data to get VRM to treat it as a separate category?
• Could it be a firmware thing? Running the latest Venus OS but not on Large

Suspect it might just be how Victron handles virtual devices — they don't get the same treatment as physical ones in the energy dashboard. Would love to be wrong though.

Anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Particularly interested if you've managed to get clean EV vs. AC load separation showing properly in VRM without a physical EVSE unit.

@CrafterBuild yeah this caught me out too. The virtual EVCS reports its power consumption as an AC load and as the EV charge — so VRM double-counts it essentially.

The fix I found was making sure your EVCS instance is properly linked to the EV instance in the Node-RED flow. There's a linkedItemId property you need to set correctly so Cerbo/VRM knows to treat them as one device rather than two separate loads.

If that's already set up right, check whether your AC load meter is accidentally including the EVCS circuit. Might need to exclude it in the grid meter settings.

What firmware version is your GX device on? There were some quirks with virtual EVCS handling that got tidied up in later releases.

@JimKelly @CrafterBuild — is there a way to offset this in the VRM dashboard settings, or does it require a workaround at the Node-RED level itself?

Asking because I'm looking at something similar for my setup — mainly for emergency backup monitoring rather than active EV charging, so I need the figures to actually be reliable at a glance rather than double-counted. Would be a pain if the grid consumption totals are skewed by this.

Does the issue persist if you're pulling data into Venus OS directly rather than through Node-RED, or is it specific to the virtual EVCS path? Wondering if bypassing Node-RED for certain readings would clean it up, or if the double-reporting is baked into how VRM handles the EVCS device type regardless.

@CrafterBuild @JimKelly This is a known quirk rather than a misconfiguration on your end. The virtual EVCS publishes to both the com.victronenergy.evcharger and the AC load path simultaneously — Venus OS doesn't deduplicate it at the VRM aggregation layer.

The workaround I've seen work reliably is adjusting your Node-RED flow to publish a corrective negative offset to the AC load total via a custom com.victronenergy.system path, effectively cancelling the double-count. Bit fiddly to get right and you'll need to validate against actual clamp meter readings rather than trusting VRM figures blindly during setup.

@SunnyNomad — there's nothing in the VRM dashboard settings themselves that handles this. It has to be addressed at the data source level before it reaches VRM. Dashboard-side workarounds tend to break whenever Victron push a firmware update.

@SunnyNomad there's no clean fix in VRM dashboard settings as far as I can tell — it's baked into how the virtual EVCS publishes its data.

What I ended up doing for my garden office setup was creating a custom dashboard widget in VRM that subtracts the EV figure from the AC loads total. Bit of a faff but it gives you accurate numbers at a glance.

Alternatively, if you're already in Node-RED anyway, you can intercept the MQTT topics before they hit VRM and zero out the AC load path for the EVCS node. Victron's MQTT structure is well documented enough to make this manageable.

Neither solution is elegant, I'll grant you that. Would be nice if Victron just sorted it properly at the firmware level rather than leaving users to bodge around it.