Camel

contact @Camel he is man with best price for BMV

Bought one from Ryne great price and service.

I can confirm great service and he stays in contact until you have your shipment.

For BMV 702 contact @Camel his price was not so pricy when I bought from him.

Hey I got some of those , quite lekker to have a quick reference when walking into the batt room  

Talking about monitoring batteries,look what arrived today 

I like. I used a similar idea for my exterior lights and bought cheap casings, gut everything out and then added the 1.5 and 3watt strips and they work a treat. 
Also consider mounting a prism type object at the base of the light on the inside, you'd be surprised how much more light it now reflects to the sides.  

I am always thinks of ways to save power.  Then it dawned on me  my gate motor have a 1 amp charger, charging the battery 24/7. So I came up with this idea, 12v LED on a 12v day night switch on to the gate battery,  added few more around the fence, then put a few in a ball.
As you can see wife was playing too. 

The Victron balancer only balances at up to 0,7A, so adding more in parallel, should increase the balancing current and rate. As per the datasheet they can be operated in parallel. 
Besides the fact that it is a bad idea to have parallel strings in the first place, it is even worse to link any of the batteries within strings together, not even midpoints, because if one cell in one battery fails and shorts, the drop in voltage will be absorbed by all the batteries in the string and the fault current will be much less than when some or all the batteries or midpoints are linked, because then only one battery will have to absorb the voltage drop if a cell in a parallel battery fails. The fault currents will be higher if the number of cells per battery is lower and if you connect 2V cells in parallel and one of them fails, just imagine what the other parallel cells will try to do and what amounts of current will flow.
So if you can avoid it, never connect battery strings in parallel, if you have no other option, add a serial fuse per string (discussion somewhere else on the forum) and never connect / link batteries in parallel strings directly - if you have to, in order to do balancing or to monitor the midpoint, then add fuses between the points where you tie the batteries, as per the diagram below - almost as if you are adding more bus-bars and fuses to each string connected to the bus-bars.
Please note - parallel battery strings:
Keep the total length of cable per string equal and use the same wire gauge in each string, preferably terminated onto bus-bars for positive and negative. If you are tying midpoints, for example, ensure that the total cable length between the midpoint and the positive bus-bar needs to be the same as the total cable length between the midpoint and the negative bus-bar, otherwise you will also create an unbalanced system with unbalanced batteries and even with a battery balancer installed, it will continuously try to balance the batteries without success - again refer to the diagram below and note that the total cable length on each string on each side of the midpoint is equal and that the midpoints are connected via fuses to a midpoint (bus-bar) e.g. for BMV midpoint connection.
If you are only monitoring the midpoint, e.g. with a BMV, then use fuses with low ratings, e.g. 5A. If you are making use of battery balancers, adjust the fuse ratings of the midpoint fuses according to the balancer used, e.g. the HA02 balances at up to 10A, so add 15A fuses.
The Victron battery balancer balances at up to 0,7A, so the 5A fuses should be fine.

The replacement unit has been ordered, soon you will have a better display 

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@ebrsa, this is not really true, there is ways to use the 702 in a "spanners and coal" way that proves to be very reliable. The 702 comes with its own contact as you know, the AICC is not developed for my Inverter yet, and still I am using the 702 to protect my batteries in conjunction with 1 internal setting to protect my batteries perfectly. I feel that statement of yours might mislead inexperienced guys on the forum into believing that if you don't have AICC that a 702 is a waste, and that is not at all true.
Wingman, if you are interested in a way to make the 702 work on your setup, I will be more that willing to send you a drawing of what you can do. I would also like some software to control my system,but its not available yet, so I did it the normal electrical way. Old relay Logic.

Hi Ebrsa, I never thought that you will intentionally mislead the guys, I just needed to clarify that the BMV can still be of great use without the AICC part. 
Not at all, the Axpert looks at volts, and the BMV looks at the true State Of Charge or Dept of Discharge. It is constantly looking at what current goes into and out of the battery bank, adding and subtracting the readings to give you a true reflection of your batteries strength at that time. @Coulomb and @plonkster gave great explanations about it in this thread.
With the Axperts and Infini's, they only look at volts. If you for example draw a 2kw load from the inverter, running on batteries only,  you might get a reading of 48.5volts, if you then switch off some of the load and use only 200watt, you will see that the battery volt reading increases without being charged. (hope this makes sense). So to use the inverter to protect the batteries using the Volt reading only, will not be accurate at all. @Chris Hobson and @plonksteralso talks about this a bit earlier in this thread.
In my opinion, the cost of the  BMV will never be unnecessary. It is the best investment you can make towards protecting your batteries.
It is so accurate and trusted that all the software developers uses the BMV's readings in their software.
I will use some drawing software to draw the circuit I am using, dont think anybody on the forum will be able to, or even want to try and read my hand writing. Will try to do it this weekend.

Hey Jaco,
Glad you happy with your 702 
Yes you can't go wrong with a BMW 702. I have about 20 odd happy customers on here.

@Wingman, that will make a difference, please keep us updated on the performance. I have learned this the hard way, the only way to know the condition of your batteries is by using a battery monitor. Most guys stick to the Victron BMV 700 or 702. The benefits in installing one  outweighs the price by far. It gives you valuable info about the Discharge/Charge of the banks, and the installation is very easy.  Please Consider buying one, it can really prevent you from damaging your battery bank.
 
EDIT: I got mine from a forum member @Camel, he had the best prices at that stage, and I think another member @The Terrible Triplett also sells them. To my knowledge, there is no shop that will beat their prices. (When I was in the market for one, no shop came close to their prices)

Thank you for that helpful table. So I wasn't far out with my calculation.

Good evening 
After spending some odd two weeks of reading through the masses of info here I am almost ready to jump info the off grid world. My inisial planning was to go with the Axpert 5kva but due to budget constraints I am considering the 3 kva Plus - 24v will lower my initial capital outlay.
Some questions with regards to this:
1) I understand that I will have 2kva less power to work with and will most likely be able to compensate through sequential usage but I went through the speck sheet and it seems like I will only be able to draw 1.5kw from my panels is that correct?
2) As my Cash flow gets better what would be better 1 - to increase my storage capacity 2 - Increase the PV panels or 3 a bit of both ( I see that the Chager can handel up to 60 A) 
3) Will I be able to add another 3kva unit in parallel and will this then dubble the charging capacity?    
I though I had it all figured out but after a quick chat with TTT made reconsider my thinking - BTW thank for the info TTT !! 
I hope this all make sense!
 

The 24v Axpert is a plus  no point doing it now with 8 panels. Still have not had the time to install the balances  I sometimes wonder why I built my house...work just never stops... But jumping from project to project make it worst!!!

My HA02 will do 6v but it isn't blue in colour

/subscribing as I also want to put battery balancers on my 6V / 48V battery bank

Surely someone has done it on 6v batteries. I am just going to act like two batteries are 1 12v battery.....