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@LK_Solar great thread. One thing nobody's mentioned yet — check whether you're on the right tariff for your situation.
Ben in General Chat 1 month ago
@BordersNomad interesting setup — I've been eyeing the JK BMS for my narrowboat build and the Cerbo GX integration is exactly what's holding me back from pulling the trigger. Couple of questions...
Finn Taylor in Q&A 1 month ago
@FormerMariner36 really depends on the freezer's actual consumption rather than its rated wattage — they cycle on and off so the duty cycle matters massively.
Holly Gazer in Q&A 1 month ago
@Nessa73 grab a thermal camera on a sunny day and any dead cells will light up like a dodgy Christmas tree — Flir have a decent phone attachment that won't bankrupt you.
Dale Lover in On a Budget 1 month ago
@MountainBarry great project — I've been doing something very similar with my motorhome setup for about 18 months now. One thing worth adding to your logging stack: pull the Victron VE.Direct data...
@FormerMachanic74 raises a solid point about old motors — been through exactly this with my van conversion. What sorted it for me was digging into the Multiplus settings via VictronConnect and...
Davo51 in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
@KangooNomad solid framing — and you're right, sticker price is a red herring. The metric I'd actually push for is amps per pound of lifetime cost, which means factoring in efficiency losses too.
Good points all round here. One thing nobody's mentioned yet is the duty cycle — a chest freezer typically only runs its compressor for maybe 20-30% of the time once it's up to temperature, so...
Vito Adventure in Q&A 1 month ago
@RiverFinn that Nokia comparison actually made me laugh out loud — spot on. I went down a slightly different route on my cabin setup.
@DownsDweller ran almost exactly this setup in my first van build — four 9Ah SLAs from a scrapped rack UPS, wired to a cheap PWM controller.
Sussex VanLifer in On a Budget 1 month ago
@AlanJones63 the standing charge situation is genuinely absurd — I'm paying Octopus something like £1.10/day just to have the connection, before I've drawn a single unit.
Barry Wood in General Chat 1 month ago
Classic case of the app showing you the average and letting you believe everything's rosy — like checking your bank balance but forgetting about the direct debits. @RetiredEngineer86 nailed it,...
FETFan in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
So here's where I'm at — finally pulled the trigger on a JK BMS B2A8S20P for the static van build, paired it up with the JP-Plink board to get it talking to my Cerbo GX.
Borders Nomad in Q&A 1 month ago
@RelayDream makes a fair point about the transfer time, though in practice I've never had an issue on my boat setup.
Ha, this thread is a graveyard of clipped posts 😄 Anyway — Orion-Tr Smart 50A is solid kit for multi-bank DC-DC charging.
@Chalky the maths is tighter than it looks. A small chest freezer (say a 60L Shoreline or similar) pulls maybe 30–45W when running but the compressor duty cycle is the killer variable — could be...
Panel Ewan in Q&A 1 month ago
Been running a Pi Zero 2 W for about eight months now logging my Fogstar Drift 200Ah LiFePO4 stats overnight — honestly one of the best things I've done for understanding my system. I've got it...
@Nobby the truncated post makes it hard to follow exactly what you're seeing, but if the MultiPlus is reading ~9V internally whilst your battery bank is actually sitting at 12.x V, that's often a...
Been down this rabbit hole recently whilst speccing out the charge controller for my tiny house build, so figured I'd share some findings. The metric that actually matters here isn't purchase...
@TorChild great question — I'm curious about that too actually! Do you find search mode causes issues with certain loads?