Victron Energy SmartSolar MPPT 100V 30 amp 12/24-Volt Solar Charge Controller (Bluetooth)

After using it, I am extremely impressed. If I can give 5+1 stars, this is the item that gets it because of the ease of use and mostly because of the results. With a typical good 12v PWM controller without tilting toward the sun, I get around 38w from a 100w solar panel (12v 3.1a). With this MPPT, I get an immedately 50% increase. YES 50% increase in solar power to 58w!!! (19v 3.1a). If the solar panel is tilted toward the sun, I get 75w (19v 3.9a) which is close to the best solar efficiency for my 100w solar panel. It kept all the voltage that the PWN controller would lose and maximized my wattage gain by a significant range. Even when under cloudy days, it still generates more wattage than a 12v PWM. I HIGHLY recommend anyone who is planning / upgrading their own solar panel system to get this or any one of their MPPT controller. The wattage gain is so significant that youll get your money worth much sooner that youll expect. This is excluding the potential ability to upgrade of your solar system in series and in parallel compare to a 12v PWM which can at most only be connected in parallel. In short, GET IT for your solar panel system.

So far working fine on my 480 watt 48 volt panel

12V Solar Generator project up and running with this Victron 100/30 MPPT Solar Charge Controller. This item was a little pricey but you get what you pay for. Good investment for my project. Range on bluetooth is limited but app works great when in range.

Worked for a few days and I disconnected it to try a different solar panel and now VictronConnect can’t find my 100/30 at all. Tried all the suggestions on Victron’s site but still no luck. I’m going to try the Bluetooth dongle. If that doesn’t work then I give up and buy another brand. Update: The Bluetooth dongle worked. The 100/30 can now be seen as a devise in VictronConnect. I am upgrading my stars, but because of the extra cost for the dongle, I’m only adding two. I needed the Bluetooth to work in order to configure the charge controller correctly for lithium batteries. Update: An amazing thing has happened. After the 100/30 Bluetooth quit working, I contacted Victron and asked how to apply for warranty service. I was told to go thru Amazon, where I purchased it. Not really expecting much, I was very happy to receive a totally new 100/30 yesterday, 9/16/20. I have now installed it and it works perfectly. This changes everything! I’ve never had such excellent warranty response. Thanks very much. This earns full stars as well.

I had a Victron 75/15 MPPT controller that worked well but failed after 3 years. I replaced it with this, and I get more out of my 300 watt panel than I ever have before. It also has pre-sets for LiFePO4 batteries that I migrated to from AGMs in my Sprinter van. Works perfectly.

This is my 3rd Victron unit, but my first with the LOAD terminals. I am thrilled with it. Very pleased. Easy installation. The only thing I noticed is that I couldnt find in the software where to select a battery type (I remember having done this with my previous units, but it is the same software.) However, it does have the ability to fully configure whatever battery settings you would like.

This solar charge controller comes with Bluetooth and is a bit higher in price than the competition, but for good reason. Victron makes high quality products and backs them up with a 5-year warranty and support. You can adjust the amount of power it delivers to your batteries too. I have 800w of panels in a somewhat low light area and Im able to bring in a solid 430w of power at the 15A charge setting (max for this controller) even in low light. Just dont go over the Voltage rating. 100V is a HARD limit, meaning if you surpass it, it will damage the controller. Ill need to upgrade it soon so I can get all the available power from my panels. I also love the integration between the different products and the open source nature of the company. The fact I can use a Raspberry Pi to run Victrons Venus OS and any good quality USB to TTY serial adapter to connect it all is a HUGE win for Victron. The phone app is also well designed and they even offer free logging of your data to their VRM web portal. Ill be coming back to Victron for more stuff in the near future.

These charge controllers are awesome. Im using 4 of them currently with the bmv712 shunt monitor and I love that they all connect via Bluetooth and share data. I love that the chargers synchronize to work with each other. The ability to check on your system and set your charge parameters from your phone is definitely worth it. The MPPT tracking is fast. Their efficiency is phenomenal. Being able to use the VE port as a relay controller rather than load terminals is preferred in my opinion for dump load options. However the app isnt as polished as the controllers themselves. Sometimes the Bluetooth is laggy and glitches. I wish the app showed a little more useful data that it is capable of showing, but it doesnt because if you buy all victron stuff a different product will show you. For example power being used. If the shunt monitor is showing how much power is going into the batteries and the charge controllers show your total network power, you can simply subtract the total power from battery power to show power consumption. Whats annoying is you must first select the charge controller, then it connects via Bluetooth to one single controller. You can only monitor one single device via Bluetooth at a time. It takes 10-30 seconds each time you select a device. This makes it difficult to compare data manually. Sure it shows your average discharge and deepest discharge, but if you dont check right before the sun comes up, theres no way to see what you used last night. No way to see how much power you used that day, week, etc... once again you could do it all manually. The app should just have a system overview showing all the data available and atleast a months worth of history. Or have the app store some data on your phone and synchronize every couple hours if your within range. I realize if you buy a Victron brand inverter or some other fancy expensive data logger it shows a lot of this data. I did not though. Its annoying when it is capable of showing data, but to really be able to use these devices to their potential you need to buy all Victron... I wish the programs for the relay function were a little more flexible. Great for most situations, but not the best. Maybe add some time delay options? Select sun up/down triggers along with voltage triggers. Temperature triggers would also be cool too. There stuff is good, but a some extra lines of code is all you need to make this stuff a little more friendly for the experimenters or budget conscious DIYers.

The 75-15 units work great and stay cool under full load. They work as advertised. That said, the 15A output limit doesnt give you much at 12V (200W) or 24V (400W) (my battery system is 24V LFP), and I made the mistake of undersizing the charge controller against my solar which runs 500W+ in full sun. Hence why I was able to make the comment about them staying cool under full load :-). So I recommend buying the SmartSolar MPPT 100-20 instead of the 75-15. The price point is still very good and those 5 extra amps can make a difference. Plus the 75-15 is limited to 24V battery systems while the 100-20 gives you the flexibility to move to a more powerful 48V battery system in the future. I also have two 100-20s. When maxed out at 20A they generally clock in at 60C and dont go much higher, so not as cool as the 75-15s. But the 100-20s are far more capable, and can handle 12/24/48V without issue. A low speed fan is all it takes to keep them in a nice comfort zone while pushing 20A to the battery. Im running 70V VOC and 80V VOC (roughly) strings with no issues into these controllers, so the input amps and losses are very low. Thus the charge controllers are limited only by the output amps. The control and programming features are great. Ive used the load output directly and the virtual load output (basically a relay control output) as well. There are a few quirks with the direct load output, it cant handle surges at all really, even short ones. The battery profile is completely customizable and output amps can be limited. I actually used one of my 75-15 charge controllers as a high-efficiency level shifter going from a 24V battery to a small 12V battery at one point using the customization to limit the current. -- It would be nice if the load output could handle more current and capacitive inflow currents on start. I have used the load output on 24V systems at around 15A without issue driving resistive loads. But just like the Victron battery-protect stuff, these FET-switched load outputs cheap-out on components and just arent very capable despite the rating. It would be nice if Victron could improve on them but I wont subtract a star since it isnt really the primary function for the charge controller and the virtual-load output works quite well. In fact, one can use the actual load output to switch certain other FET power switches, (or relays, or contactors) very quickly since they are capable of decent gate currents verses VE TX port. So there is versatility here that I like.

Due to the wiring nightmare to make it work between the trailer and truck.