DaveInDenver
Rising Sun Ham Guru
I've been real happy with my Orion 18A DC-DC so far. Victron does seem to be a top end brand in the segment. About the only question in my mind is it runs fairly hot at full tilt. Never hit shut down but the heat sink gets upper 40s, lower 50s °C, uncomfortable to touch.
I like my Morningstar solar controller a whole lot but the monitoring isn't nearly slick what Victron is doing. I first encountered them working, you see them pretty often in telecom and oil & gas (like the Tristar MPPT, but it's a $1,000 solar controller). They're bulletproof and powerful if you persist, though. You get complete visibility of the internal variables and can customize the algorithm however you want (like turning off float completely). But they don't make nearly the range of devices as Victron, pretty much just solar controllers and inverters, and assume you're putting your device on a network so probably developed a custom interface solution.
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