{Music}
I will explain in a moment why I am in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.
Hello, thanks very much for watching. This is a canal but I'm not
in the British Isles. I'm in the Netherlands and more importantly I am in
the city of Almere, which is the home of Victron headquarters.
After seeing a load of my videos on batteries and MultiPlus
and battery monitors and things, they got in contact, they flew me out here
today. I've had a really nice lunch with the managing director of Victron and
his dad, the founder and I'm really pleased to say, I am working for Victron.
I'm going to be doing a series of videos for them, helping them with a new
communications platform. I will be carrying on doing Journey with Jono
don't you worry but whilst I'm here, I thought I might as well nose around
their headquarters! So lets go and have a look.
As you know I have many Victron items on my narrowboat and heavily rely upon
them to provide my day-to-day power. The company has around 90 staff and that
includes 35 research and development engineers, with some of them based here.
They're currently working on a brand new Phoenix Inverter Smart which will be
formally announced to the public in November. It's in a new slimline box and
you can see all of its settings on your mobile, using Bluetooth. Being an off-grid
company they of course have a large solar array on their roof and 24x 2 volt
batteries to store the energy. They use the power for their buildings general
needs as well as Cindy here, who monitors how the distributor's orders around the
world are being dealt with. As I have my system connected to the Internet,
one of the engineers here was able to log in to Alice and not only see the
equipment I'm using and how the system is currently running, but also diagnose
issues if needed and all remotely from this office. I'm really pleased to report,
everything is fine with my setup whilst I'm away. If anything should go wrong
with Victrons equipment it will usually end up here, in the service area.
A handful of engineers will diagnose the problem and not only fix it but liaised
with the R&D department upstairs to ensure future kit doesn't suffer the same fault.
Then it was time to corner the boss and ask him some questions
about the future of Victron.
In the immediate future we need to make things
simpler. So by next year I hope that lots of things you now do with VEConfigure
and VEFlash are done with Victron Connect and that will take, that will make
it a lot easier to work with our equipment. Both for installers
and for ourselves too to help people. [Jono] Will there be any intelligent things
coming in? Yes, yes we're keen especially on VRM to do
more monitoring of what's the expected solar yield versus the yield that's
coming out of the system, which on a, in a battery based system is not that easy.
The solar production depends on the load. If there's no load in your boat, the
production will also be lower so that requires some intelligence. [Jono] A couple of
viewers have asked me to ask you, what colour I should paint Alice. Yeah Alice
your boat. Yeah well our boat is white and has a blue Victron is written on it
in blue. I don't know if I'd get another boat, I'd do white. Dark blue. On a sailing
boat I like dark blue, that's nice and get a sailing boat, a boat sailing [Jono] A proper boat?
Yes with sails!
And now I'm back on the lovely Ashby Canal. I've come up this far because I'm
quite close by to the carpenter, one of my viewers that has offered to help
me with inside Alice. I've got another friend that has come up from London
he's a viewer that has decided to buy a narrowboat. His name is Steve he's helping
me with inside the boat and he's got a Rottweiler, Millie. Now Molly and Millie
get on like a house on fire, really, really well. Really pleased to see and
earlier on in the summer, when he came up Molly taught Millie how to swim in
the in the cut which was good. So I'll stay on the Ashby Canal for a little bit
longer and crack on with some of these jobs. It was really, really great going to
to the Netherlands and now it's time to do lots of videos for them, up my game
again with Journey with Jono and get Alice sorted, including painting her. So I've
got all loads and loads of stuff to come. So thanks very much for watching and I
will see you very soon.