Decoding Your LFP’s BMS: Why It Trips and How to Wake It Up

Understanding how your BMS monitors temperature, voltage, and current can help you avoid and recover from an unexpected LFP shutdown at sea.

By
Stephen Burnage
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The Victron Smart BMS 12/200 is designed to work with Victron Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LiFePO4) Smart Batteries in a 12 V system.
The Victron Smart BMS 12/200 is designed to work with Victron Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LiFePO4) Smart Batteries in a 12 V system.

If you are contemplating installing or operating an LFP installation, you will need to become familiar with Battery Management Systems (BMSs), as they will have effective control over your new system. Especially inconvenient are BMS shutdown events, which happen when the LFP is disconnected due to the BMS detecting a condition that it considers to be potentially damaging to the LFP. To avoid these, and potentially recover from such events, it is necessary that you invest some time in understanding how your BMS operates.

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Stephen Burnage
Stephen Burnage
Stephen Burnage is a full-time cruiser, having retired in 2017. He left Vancouver, Canada and headed south for warmer climates, on his 1975 Cal 34 sailboat “Moonrise”, in 2018. Since then, Stephen, Moonrise and occasionally his wife Anita, have cruised the West Coast of North and Central America. They are presently in Boca Chica, Panama. Stephen originally trained in the UK as an Electrical Technician Engineer and then proceeded to have a forty-year career, managing high voltage electrical systems around the world. Career highlights include building new power infrastructure on six continents; writing a comprehensive paper on how the North American Power Grid operates (and needs to be rebuilt) and; later, owning and operating his own renewable energy business. Stephen is a joint Canadian and British national and a resident of Chile, with an extended family across the world.

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