Swallow Catalina 270 · Lake Lewisville
Live from the boat

Ship's Systems

When the Victron installation is finished, this page will show what Swallow is doing right now — batteries, charging, and whether anyone should be worried.

Coming, once the wiring is done

Part of the electrical rebuild is a Victron monitoring system: a Cerbo GX at the nav station, a shunt watching every amp in and out of the house battery, and a cellular modem so the boat can report in when nobody is aboard.

Victron publish that data to their own portal, and an installation can be shared as a read-only dashboard. When ours is commissioned, it will appear here — so you can see the state of the batteries, what the charger is doing, and how much sun the boat is getting, from anywhere.

Not yet wired up

The live dashboard will appear here once the Victron system is commissioned and the VRM installation is set to public.

What it will be watching

House bank
Epoch 105 Ah LiFePO₄
Start battery
Odyssey AGM
Charger
Victron Phoenix Smart IP43
Monitoring
Cerbo GX MK2 + SmartShunt
Connectivity
Victron GX LTE 4G
Shore supply
20 A / 120 V

Beyond the batteries, the same system has five spare digital inputs, and two of them have obvious jobs. One goes to a high-water float switch in the bilge, so that if Swallow ever starts taking on water while nobody is aboard, my phone finds out about it. The other goes to a cabin temperature sensor, which is a less dramatic way of learning that the air conditioning has stopped.