Power Management
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Power management sensors read the system that keeps everything else running: your solar and battery setup. They’re sensors like any other in OGLAS — they measure something off the world and report it — but what they measure is power production, battery state, and load, and they make it available to your hubs, your dashboards, and your smart switches.
The first of these reads a Victron MPPT.
Victron MPPT
If your power comes from solar — most off-grid sites — the Victron power-management sensor pulls production data into the same dataset as everything else.
- Reads from a Victron MPPT — incoming watts, battery state, and load — without touching the Victron app or VRM cloud.
- Logs locally alongside every other sensor reading, so production and consumption sit in the same dataset — your data, your dashboards, no VRM subscription.
- Shares its data with other OGLAS devices — particularly Smart Switches — so they can react to it. “Battery above 80 %, watts above 600” becomes a trigger anywhere on the site, not just next to the MPPT.
- Shows it on screen — pair with a large display to see solar production, battery state, and load alongside your sensor readings.
Source, not actor
Earlier OGLAS Victron units drove a relay directly when solar surplus was stable — running an immersion heater, a pump, or another opportunistic load. That role has moved to the Smart Switch, which can take power-management data as one of several inputs (alongside other sensors, web APIs, and weather). The power-management sensor is now the source of the data; the Smart Switch is the actor.
This split means you can:
- Put the power-management sensor next to the MPPT (where the link is reliable) and the Smart Switches near the loads they’re driving.
- Have one power-management sensor inform any number of Smart Switches around the site.
- Run rules that combine power data with other inputs (“solar surplus and tank not full and between 9am and 5pm”).
Why your data, not VRM
Victron’s own VRM cloud is a fine product — but it’s a cloud product. With OGLAS power management:
- No VRM account required. No subscription tier, no internet dependency.
- All MPPT history lives on your local storage in plain formats — see Your data is your data.
- No telco link between the MPPT and your hub. The connection is local. See No telco dependency.
Pairs well with
- Smart Switch — the active counterpart. Power management produces the data; the Smart Switch decides whether to switch a load on the back of it.
- Large display — show MPPT watts, battery voltage, and Smart Switch state on the same screen as everything else.
- Tank level and Water Trough — the classic “is there enough sun to run the pump?” combination.
- Other power systems — Victron is first; if you run a different MPPT, inverter, or BMS, that’s a custom build.