When I bought my Trail Kitchens power and water cabinet it came with a very nice Balmar SG200 battery monitor. This uses a shunt to measure all the input and output power consumption to give you various readings on the status of your battery. But over the last 2 years I have made many changes to my electrical system such as a bluetooth controlled lithium battery and a bluetooth controlled DC-DC charger. This meant that I didn’t need many of the features of the Balmar. All I really needed was a simple display showing me the basic info about my battery for those times when I am not using the battery and charger app.
I decided to go with a Renogy 500 amp shunt battery monitor. Its a simple design, easy to install, and doesn’t complicate my system yet it does everything I need it to do. I rarely downgrade my gear but sometimes it is better to have simple gear that does only what you need it to do versus having gear with all the bells and whistles yet falls sort on some of the basics. In the case of the Balmar where it fell sort for me was that to see all of the stats you care about you need to flip through various screens versus the Renogy that shows all the important stats on a single screen.
