![]() I put together a complete comparison matrix between the 3 top units and I ended up ordering the Victron Energy BMV-702 for a few reasons that I’ll explain. Otherwise it’s nearly identical to the BMV-702 ![]() Victron Energy BMV-700 – Only supported 1 bank so the start battery could not be monitored.Xantrex LinkLite – Looked good at first but does not compensate for CEF and also has no stored history.BlueSea VSM-422 – eliminated because I could find no reference to Peukerts or CEF in their documentation.While the BMV-702 compensates for CEF like the others, the CEF value is manually set by the user. Victron Energy BMV-702 – Basically it’s nearly identical totheLinkPro but lacks automatic CEF calculations.MasterVolt BTM-III – Very powerful, attempts to estimate state of charge for aux banks without a shunt.Xantrex LinkPro – Very powerful, seems to be sort of the gold standard.So with the above list I pulled together a short list of candidate units (6 models to be exact, that was quickly reduced to 3 models) Reasonable cost – another requirement needing little explanation.Auto-sync with charge cycles – If I have to push a button to tell the monitor the batteries have been charged, it will never know.# of cycles – tracking history of the batteries.Aux battery voltage – primarily want to be able to do some simple monitoring of the engine start battery.% state of charge – assuming this is accurate, it would make it easier to know when to charge.Ampere-Hours used – pretty much the primary thing I want to know for planning upgrades.Charge efficiency factor (CEF) – compensates for losses related to charging.Peukerts exponent – compensates for effects on battery capacity due to different rates of discharge.Important features for a battery monitor: I also was able to put together a list of features that would make a battery monitor both useful and accurate. As I did some my research I came across a few other options including units from Blue Sea Systems, MasterVolt, and Victron Energy. When looking for a digital battery monitor, obviously there’s the venerable Xantrex Link line of monitors starting with the now discontinued Link 10 to the also discontinued Link 10 and 20, and now the current LinkLite and LinkPro offerings. Unfortunately the single analog amp-meter was not cutting it for that, so a more sophisticated digital amp-hour meter was needed. But before I can really make any concrete plans, I need a way to measure our capacity consumption. Having to charge batteries 2-3 times a day was not ideal so I’m looking at ways to both increase the capacity of the house bank and decrease the electrical loads. Since our trip through the San Juan’s in August I’ve been reviewing all the systems onboard and researching energy efficiency options.
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