Solar hardware is set up on installation day and then left to run. Consumption changes, packs age, load-shedding patterns move — the settings do not. We connect hardware the monitoring platforms ignore, and then keep working on it.
REPRESENTATIVE SHAPE — NOT LIVE DATA
THE GAP
These are real findings from sites we monitor. Every one was invisible to the owner, to the installer, and to the hardware's own alarm system.
Nothing alarmed. We cross-check energy in against energy out on every site, every day — and the books stopped balancing. The sensor was failing. The inverter never flagged it, and never would have.
Found by arithmetic, not by an alarmOn a 16-cell lithium bank, the inverter's charge target was 57.00 V — 3.56 V per cell — while the battery's own management system declared a ceiling of 53.8 V. Both cannot be right. It was almost certainly an untouched factory default, sitting on hardware that would have acted on it.
Caught on commissioning dayA USB serial link to the battery stalled in a way that raises no error — the reader simply returns nothing, forever, and the supervisor sees a healthy process. Three days of blind operation. The fix now reopens the port itself and, failing that, exits so the system restarts it.
Fixed fleet-wide, not site by siteWorking and optimised are not the same thing.
And the difference is invisible from inside the house
WHAT WE DO
We are deliberately explicit about which is which. The bridge is in commercial service. The intelligence layer is being validated on live sites before anyone is sold it.
Software on a Victron Cerbo GX that reads your existing hardware over Modbus and republishes it as native Victron equipment. Your inverter, solar chargers and battery appear in the VRM portal with real model names and firmware versions — not register numbers.
Above the data, a controller that decides how deep the battery may go tonight. It reads the weather forecast, your own consumption history and the state of the pack, then holds a reserve sized to the hours of darkness ahead.
THE HARDWARE
Schneider is exiting off-grid solar. The Conext line is discontinued, the Gateway and ComBox have no successor, and owners of perfectly good hardware have lost their support path. We built the third option: keep the system, gain a modern platform, and replace only what actually fails.
Schneider documents the discontinuation itself in its XW8548 product discontinuation notice (PDF).
Deployed, monitored and supported at live sites today.
Not yet supported. Listed because we are asked, and because we would rather say so.
| Modbus unit ID | Device | Published to VRM as |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Conext Gateway / ComBox | — (transport) |
| 10–29 | Conext XW / XW+ / XW Pro | MultiPlus inverter/charger |
| 30–49 | Conext MPPT 60 | SmartSolar MPPT |
| 90–109 | Conext SW | MultiPlus inverter/charger |
| 170–189 | Conext MPPT 80 | SmartSolar MPPT |
HOW IT WORKS
Your inverter stays. Your solar chargers stay. Your Schneider configuration stays. One small network device joins the site, and the rest is software.
A compact Victron device sits alongside your existing hardware and talks to your Gateway or ComBox over the network cable that is already there. No rewiring, no new sensors.
On first start it scans the subnet, works out the word order from a known register, discovers every unit ID and detects parallel stacking. A pre-configured USB stick does the rest unattended; the installer finishes in a browser, on site, in minutes.
Live data, alarms and history on the Victron VRM portal — from any phone, anywhere. Updates are pushed remotely, verified running, and rolled back if anything is wrong.
THE FLEET
kWh
of battery storage under continuous monitoring, across seventeen sites in South Africa — every one of them Schneider hardware that no platform was willing to read.
One card per site. Capacity, chemistry and cell count are real; the curves are representative nightly shapes, not live telemetry. Sites are anonymised — the fleet record names private individuals and stays private. Site C's capacity is operator-estimated rather than nameplate.
FOR INSTALLERS
An orphaned Conext system used to be a full replacement quote the customer would not sign. With the bridge it becomes a Cerbo GX, an afternoon, and a system that is worth supporting again — with a migration path that lets you replace failed components with Victron one at a time.
Every site's logs and health in one place, so you find the fault before the customer calls you about it.
A provisioning stick does access, networking, monitoring and the bridge unattended at first boot. No specialist required.
Charger voltages, current limits, grid support, generator behaviour — changed remotely, read back, and confirmed against the hardware.
WHAT WE DO NOT CLAIM
It is enabled and validated site by site, and it is live on a minority of the fleet. If your system does not qualify, we will say so before you pay for anything.
On parallel-inverter sites the inverter group re-qualifies the AC input regardless of the command. One live test tripped anti-islanding protection and dropped a household for about four hours. We do not offer it there.
The bounds on written values are data-type guards, not electrical limits derived from the Conext manuals. It is a professional's tool, and we position it as one.
Conext RL support requires a Gateway or ComBox carrying the system-level register block — not the newer SunSpec-only gateway.
Schneider Conext and Axpert/Voltronic run today. Everything else on the roadmap above is work we intend to do, not work we have done.
THE GUIDE
A plain-English guide for South African solar owners. Five warning signs you can check today without any technical knowledge, what underperformance actually costs per day, and what proper visibility looks like. Brand-agnostic.
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