Initial Settings¶
After Connecting to the Regulator you have the dashboard open in a browser or in the app. This page walks the whole first-boot sequence the way you will actually experience it: one required form, then a short guided chain of screens that ends by handing you to Automatic System Characterization, then a pass through the remaining Setup tabs. Plan on 15–30 minutes plus a characterization run.
The screenshots below come from an example installation — a 42-foot monohull with a 400 Ah 12 V LiFePO4 bank and an 80 A alternator. Your values will differ; the screens will not.
1. What you see on arrival¶
The permanent header is always at the top: live voltage, state of charge, alternator and battery current, temperatures, RPM, and the master Alternator Enable toggle. The dot at the far left is teal whenever live data is actually arriving — see The connection dot.
Everything is readable while locked — you can watch every gauge and plot without unlocking anything. Two things are special about a brand-new device:
- Settings are locked. The Unlock Settings padlock button at the bottom of the header is the only locked-state indication there is.
- You land on Setup → Vessel Info, and every tab outside Setup stays blocked until Vessel Info is saved. The cloud features (forecasts, leaderboards, charging analytics) need to know your boat and battery to be useful, so this form comes first.
2. Unlock Settings¶
Click Unlock Settings. There is no password — anyone on the regulator's WiFi network is already trusted, so the button is an acknowledgment ("I'm about to change settings"), not a login. Unlocking opens a 30-minute window on the device itself during which settings changes are accepted from any connected device. After 30 minutes, after a reboot, or when you press Lock Settings (Setup → System), the device locks again and rejects every settings change until the next unlock. Turning the alternator off never requires unlocking. (With the header minimized, the button becomes a small Unlock chip inside the collapsed strip, so a locked-and-minimized session is never a dead end.)
3. Setup → Vessel Info (required)¶
Three sections. Fill in all of them.
Vessel Information — the boat itself:
Charging Equipment — the electrical system:
Nominal Battery Voltage deserves care. It is the sole source of the system voltage class (12 / 24 / 36 / 48 V), and changing it later rescales the charge profile, the over-voltage margins, the duty limits and the hard-shutdown voltage to the new class — the dashboard warns you before applying. A later class change also wipes the learned tachometer keep-alive floor table back to its flat default, because floors learned against the old limits can sit above the new ones, and you would have to re-run that commissioning step. Set the class correctly here rather than relying on a later change.
Physical Regulator Installation — how the device is mounted:
Pick the card matching your mounting orientation — the built-in accelerometer (IMU) uses it as its reference for heel, pitch, and passage-comfort metrics. With the boat sitting level, press Zero Now to capture the small residual tilt. It is stored as the Level offsets shown on that row, and heel and pitch then read zero at that attitude — so take it with the boat at rest, because whatever tilt the device is in at that moment is baked in until you zero it again. The mounting-location and position-in-vessel fields improve battery-temperature approximation and motion analysis; approximate positions are fine.
Click Save.
4. The guided chain after Save¶
On a first save the app does not drop you back into the tabs — it walks you through a short chain of screens that ends at characterization. Each screen can be skipped; anything you skip stays editable later under Setup.
4a. Recommended Battery Settings¶
The regulator derives a full set of chemistry-matched charge, protection, and alarm values from the bank you just described, and shows every one next to its current value. Rows already matching are highlighted; untick anything you want to keep, then Apply Defaults.
The proposals lean gentle for lithium: bulk and absorption at 13.9 V is already a high-90s% state of charge, and holding a LiFePO4 bank higher buys very little capacity for a lot of extra cell stress, so float is disabled outright. AGM and flooded banks get their conventional higher targets (flooded highest, because its dominant killer is undercharge). If you set Battery Type to Other, no proposal is made — you set every charge-stage value by hand against your battery's datasheet, and the Prerequisites screen below collects the critical ones.
4b. State of charge starting estimate¶
The regulator estimates state of charge from resting voltage and shows its work. Voltage-based estimates on LiFePO4 are coarse across the flat middle of the curve — if you know the true state of charge, type it in and press Set SOC. Don't agonize: the first detected full charge re-anchors the counter to 100 % and it is self-correcting from there.
4c. Automatic maintenance restarts¶
A one-time notice: the regulator periodically reboots itself for housekeeping, and it explains the escalation schedule it uses to find a harmless moment. Nothing is lost across these restarts. Read it and press Got it.
4d. Commissioning Prerequisites¶
Use a laptop or tablet if you can. Setup and Commissioning works on a phone, but it's a worse UX on a small screen. The screen says the same thing when it opens.
A few measurement-path facts the characterization run depends on: which temperature probe you installed (digital or thermistor), the alternator temperature limit, the minimum charge temperature (lithium only), and whether the battery shunt (INA228) is installed, with its resistance. A table of common shunt values is built in — Victron shunts are the 50 mV family. Without a shunt, state of charge, the battery-current limit, and float charging are unavailable, so the shunt question is worth getting right first.
The temperature limit is a case temperature, not a winding temperature — see the Temperature Settings section below for how to choose it.
4e. Charge Rate Limits¶
The maximum alternator current at each of 10 engine speeds, in two independent tables: High is your system's full capability; Low is a gentler everyday rate (a third of High is a good start). Between the speeds you enter the limit follows a straight line; below the first and above the last it holds flat. The Continue button you pick sets which table is active, and characterization runs against it.
Start conservative. Raise the numbers once you have confirmed the alternator sustains them at each speed without overheating — the per-RPM overheat counters on the RPM Table tab (below) tell you exactly that over time.
4f. Tachometer Calibration¶
Start the engine (idle is fine — no field is driven here) and adjust the scaling-factor slider until the live reading matches your tachometer. Then enter the pulley ratio: crankshaft pulley diameter divided by alternator pulley diameter — a ruler estimate is fine. Extreme precision is not needed for either.
Both values remain editable later under Setup → Engine → Engine & Alternator Parameters.
4g. Automatic System Characterization¶
The chain ends by opening the characterization wizard, which measures your alternator and battery and sets the control-loop gains, filters, and protection thresholds from those measurements — the whole reason manual tuning is not part of this page. See Automatic System Characterization for the full walkthrough of its nine steps.
If you skipped it, start it any time from Setup → Alternator → Commissioning, the first tab in the Alternator row. When it has finished, that tab reads Commissioned with every step marked DONE:
5. The rest of Setup, tab by tab¶
Characterization sets the measured things. What follows is what it deliberately leaves to you, tab by tab through Setup. One tab is skipped here — Integrations — because its features (NMEA 2000 transmit, charge-limit follow) ship switched off and mostly matter on a networked boat; they are covered in External Interfaces. None of it blocks charging; treat it as a first-day pass you can refine later.
Setup → Alternator: Temperature Settings¶
Open the Basic sub-tab's Temperature Settings accordion.
Alternator Temp Limit is the ceiling the thermal loop derates against. Set it as a case temperature, not a winding temperature: the probe mounts to the alternator case, which runs roughly 40–50 °F cooler than the windings inside. A 220 °F continuous winding rating — typical for marine alternators — corresponds to something near 170–180 °F at the case, which is where the shipped default comes from. Entering the winding number directly would run the machine far hotter than its rating. Too low and you never reach rated output; too high and you cook the alternator.
Cold-Charge Lockout blocks charging when the regulator's board temperature falls below the Min Charge Temp threshold. It ships on, for lithium — charging LiFePO4 below freezing plates the cells permanently. The board sensor is an optimistic proxy for battery temperature, and lead-acid banks charge cold just fine — the caveats are on Safeties and Protections.
Setup → Alternator: RPM Table¶
The tables you seeded in the Charge Rate Limits screen live here, with more detail per row.
The Charge Rate: Low / High toggle both selects which table you are editing and switches the one the regulator runs against — flip it here whenever you want the relaxed or the aggressive schedule. Limit by: Amps / kW is not a display choice — it selects which ceiling the regulator actually enforces. In Amps mode the numbers you type are a fixed current ceiling; in kW mode they are a power ceiling, and a separate kW table is divided by the live battery voltage on every control tick to derive the amp ceiling, so belt and shaft load stay constant as the bus sags or rises. The Keep-Alive (%) column is the per-speed tachometer keep-alive floor, learned automatically during characterization and afterwards — leave it on auto. Between the rows, the regulator accumulates per-speed overheat counts and safe hours: the evidence to look at before raising a limit.
Setup → Battery: charge phases¶
The Charge Settings panel's Phase Definitions accordion holds the per-phase voltages and criteria the defaults populator just filled in.
If you applied the recommended defaults, there is normally nothing to do here — but this is where bulk / absorption / float voltages and the rebulk criteria live when you want to check them against your battery's datasheet. The neighboring accordions (Safety, SoC Integration, Measurement Sources) hold the battery-side protection thresholds and the shunt configuration; the How It Works accordion at the bottom explains the whole charge cycle in prose. For the deeper story see Charging Control.
Setup → Battery: Battery Monitor¶
Switch the inner panel from Charge Settings to Battery Monitor. Two things matter on day one.
Full Charge Detection — battery capacity and the full-charge criteria:
Battery Capacity (Amp hr) drives the charge counter (coulomb counter) — get it wrong and the state-of-charge display drifts. Match the bank's rated 20-hour capacity. Max Charge Detection Voltage must sit slightly below your bulk voltage so the bank actually reaches it during absorption — with the recommended defaults it already does (13.8 V against a 13.9 V bulk in the example). When voltage is above it and tail current below the threshold for the configured time, the counter re-anchors to 100 %.
Other Settings — the manual override:
Same control as the popup in step 4b, available any time. The remaining accordions (Efficiency Parameters, SOC Correction) were set chemistry-appropriate by the defaults populator — the Peukert exponent is near 1.05 for lithium, 1.1 for AGM, 1.25 for flooded.
Setup → Solar¶
If the boat has solar, the regulator can look up the solar forecast for your position (GPS, or home port as fallback) and skip alternator charging when the sun will do the job. A two-of-three forecast-day vote against your harvest threshold decides when it takes over — see Defer to Solar. While it holds the alternator off, the dashboard says resting — solar forecast is strong, so a quiet alternator on a sunny day is never a mystery.
Defer to Solar ships disabled — no solar, nothing to do here. If you have solar, turn it on; the default thresholds err on the side of charging whenever conditions are at all uncertain.
Two things worth knowing before you switch it on. The forecast comes straight from Open-Meteo, a public weather service, and that request carries your latitude and longitude — it does not travel through our servers, so the Cloud Features switch does not govern it. And the forecast block is replaced by an offline note when the regulator is running its own hotspot (Access Point mode), because there is no internet behind it to fetch a forecast with — the position and array settings on the tab still save. A pause left over from the last fetch releases itself once the forecast goes stale, so charging always comes back on its own.
Two more switches on this tab ask nothing of you. Learn Performance Ratio lets the regulator correct the array's performance ratio from what the panels actually deliver each day, so the forecast fits your boat rather than a typical one. Size Threshold from Consumption swaps the fixed harvest threshold for what the boat has really been using, plus a margin, once a few days of history exist; until then the threshold you set stands in. The day-by-day record of what was predicted and what happened is on Live Data → Weather, under Solar Energy Ledger. Seeing the harvest needs a Victron charger on VE.Direct; seeing consumption also needs the battery shunt.
Setup → Alarms¶
Personal-preference territory: every row here only decides when the buzzer sounds, never how the regulator charges. Walk through each threshold once and match it to your tolerance.
Alarm Enable is the master arm. Alarm Latch Mode decides whether an alarm keeps sounding after the condition clears (until Reset Latch); Test Buzzer proves the hardware. A few conditions sound the same buzzer without a threshold row here — battery too cold to charge, a temperature sensor failure, and the hardware over-voltage latch among them — and the alternator current pulse-pattern fault has its own Sound Alarm on Fault toggle under Setup → Alternator → Diag, shipped off.
Setup → Engine: Fuel Consumption¶
Fuel burn at each RPM breakpoint, for your engine — this drives the fuel-burn estimate and the per-charge fuel totals in Cloud Features. The column is in US gallons per hour or litres per hour, following the Fuel Volume Units preference under Setup → System → Display Preferences (US gallons as shipped); the figures below are gallons.
Sources, best to worst:
- Manufacturer's propeller curve — read GPH at each RPM off the datasheet.
- Your own data — a fuel-flow sensor or hand-calculated burn from past trips beats the datasheet because it reflects your actual loaded prop.
- Crude estimate — a naturally-aspirated diesel burns roughly 0.05 GPH per rated horsepower at cruise; a loaded 50 HP engine is about 2.5 GPH. A placeholder until real data exists.
On the Boat tab, the Performance Learning section drives the sailing/motoring speed learner — leave its Tuning accordion at defaults on day one.
Setup → Boat: Motion Events¶
How violent a roll, pitch, or impact has to be before the inertial sensor (IMU) logs it as an event.
Defaults are reasonable; revisit only if events log too readily — or never — after some real sea time.
Setup → Engine, and Setup → System: relocking¶
The Engine sub-tab's Engine & Alternator Parameters accordion holds the two values from the Tachometer Calibration screen, editable by hand:
To touch up the scaling factor manually: run the engine at a known steady speed, compare the dashboard's reading to the tachometer, and multiply the current factor by (tach ÷ dashboard). Two iterations usually nail it; within 50 RPM is fine. The pulley ratio only feeds the alternator-lifetime physics model — the control loop uses measured engine speed directly.
When you are done making changes, Security & Maintenance under Setup → System has the button that ends the settings window immediately instead of waiting out the 30-minute auto-lock:
The other System accordions (Data & Communication, Display Preferences) are fine-tuning for advanced users — skip on day one.
6. Start the engine¶
With settings done and characterization run, start the engine and open Live Data → Alternator: current flowing, field duty tracking, temperature climbing gently, voltage rising toward bulk. The header strip shows the same numbers from anywhere on the boat.
Two more things worth doing while you are aboard:
- Register for Cloud Features in the Cloud Features tab — history upload, firmware updates (OTA), leaderboards.
- If anything misbehaves, Live Data → Console streams the firmware's own status messages live — usually the fastest way to see what it is unhappy about. See Troubleshooting for the common failure modes.
Common Settings gotchas¶
Dashboard refuses to leave Setup. All tabs outside Setup are blocked until Vessel Info is complete. Fill in all required fields and click Save.
Lost WiFi password. Ground the GPIO45 recovery wire at boot to re-enter configuration mode with default credentials. See Connecting to the Regulator → Override wires. (The settings unlock has no password to lose — it's a button.)
SoC drifts noticeably after a day. The most common cause is wrong Battery Capacity (Amp hr) in Setup → Battery → Battery Monitor. Second most common is full-charge detection never firing — verify Max Charge Detection Voltage sits slightly below your bulk voltage so the bank actually reaches it during absorption.
A high-voltage alternator with a 12 V field winding. Manufacturers commonly reuse one 12 V field winding across their 24 V and 48 V models, so a 48 V machine can hold a part that is still rated for 12 V. Max Field Volts in Setup → Alternator → Basic caps the field in the units the alternator datasheet uses; the shipped default is deliberately loose, so it does nothing until you enter the winding's rating. What it protects against, and what it does not, is on Charging Control → The field ceiling.
Skipped part of the guided chain and want it back. Everything the chain sets lives under Setup (this page says where, screen by screen), and the characterization wizard re-runs any time from Setup → Alternator → Commissioning — its prerequisites screen included.
Cross-references¶
- Connecting to the Regulator — Previous step in the installation flow.
- Automatic System Characterization — The guided measurement run this page hands off to.
- Alternator Type and Power & Field Wiring — hardware wiring and fusing.
- Charging Control — what the charge phases and maintenance behaviors do.
- Troubleshooting — Common failure modes.