What's New

Latest posts across all forums

Latest Threads Unanswered
Interesting combo to consider — ECO-WORTHY gear tends to get overlooked in favour of the usual Victron or Growatt setups, but for budget-conscious builds it's worth a proper look. On the...
@SimonKelly yeah the sizing side is what I keep coming back to too. Running a garden office here and honestly the hardest bit wasn't buying kit — it was right-sizing it before spending £££ on...
This is something I've been thinking about more lately, particularly as OEM lithium auxiliary batteries start appearing in newer vehicles and people try to use quality chargers like Victron's IP65...
Camper Shaun in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Had almost identical behaviour with my cabin setup last spring — Victron SmartSolar 100/30 was hammering into float after maybe 90 minutes of bulk, with 200Ah Fogstar Drift cells sitting at around...
@Mark1978 the Orion-Tr Smart is a solid shout — I ran one into my garden office setup for a while before switching the whole thing to shore power.
Good points from @MarineGeoff and @DodgyRoamer on the ESS side of things. One thing worth checking that often gets overlooked — if you're running VE.Bus alongside VE.Can, the export limiting logic...
@ThingamyBob62 This hit me right in the solar plexus last autumn when I was trying to monitor my garden office system remotely from a mate's older laptop. VRM just flatly refused to play ball —...
@BatteryRay @ZoeRoss solid points on phase rotation — worth confirming with a clamp meter or the Cerbo's grid meter readings before pulling anything apart. One thing nobody's mentioned yet: on the...
Running a Victron Multiplus in my cabin alongside a couple of plug-in balcony panels and honestly it's a more interesting combo than I expected — the Multiplus doesn't care where the AC power...
Had this exact headache when I first wired up my cabin setup. That initial spark when you connect a big LFP bank to an inverter is genuinely alarming — even when everything is technically...
@Chris1973 garden office here rather than a cabin, but same nightmare. Had a log burner running constantly last January and still couldn't get the temperature stable — turns out I had about 40mm...
@LazyWarden the "world's first 12V solid state" claims are almost certainly referring to small-capacity demo units, not anything that'll meaningfully replace your LiFePO4 bank.
Daily Solar in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Been thinking about this exact thing for my static caravan setup, and it's genuinely tricky to plan ahead for. Started with a single Victron Multiplus-II 48/3000 and it's been solid, but I always...
Honestly the pie chart chat is making me laugh but it's also kind of depressing. This is exactly why I went down the off-grid route for the garden office — once the Victron/Fogstar setup was paid...
CE_Builds in General Chat 1 month ago
@GrumpySkipper all valid, but there's another layer nobody's touched on yet — battery capacity accuracy. Your SmartShunt is doing coulomb counting against whatever capacity figure you manually...
Cliff Gazer in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Bit late to this party but wanted to get the collective wisdom of this lot before I do something daft with my motorhome build. So Battle Born — always felt they were suspiciously American in their...
FormerCop in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
@Pete1994 had this with my garden office setup — Fogstar battery was full and the controller was just loafing about in float doing absolutely nothing, which VictronConnect helpfully displays as...
Had one on my garden office build for about six months. Solid enough unit for the price, but the BMS communication is basic — no proper CAN bus integration if you're running a smart lithium bank...
OffGridJulie | 🚤 Liveaboard Lunatic | Posts: 412 Mine's been logging Fogstar battery data since last spring and the only "complex" bit was explaining to my boat neighbours why there's a...
Not a cabin build myself but we dealt with chronic condensation issues on the narrowboat over a couple of winters, and a lot of the same principles apply with timber frames honestly. The thing...