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January is genuinely the hardest month for this lifestyle, no question. The combination of short days hammering your solar yield and the psychological drag of darkness by 4pm is a proper double...
Keith in General Chat 2 months ago
Been running a Pi 4 with Node-RED and a Victron Venus OS setup for about 18 months now across my shepherd's hut and garden office — honestly it's less "simpler option" and more...
@MarineGaz beat me to the BMS point, so I'll add the practical angle nobody's touched yet — cable sizing and fusing. Run the numbers on that 166A continuous draw and you'll realise your cabling...
Tor Jake in Q&A 2 months ago
Had this exact saga with my MultiPlus-II 48/3000 last summer. Drove me absolutely mental for weeks. The culprit in my case was the tail current setting being too aggressive.
@ExJoiner32 oh I need to know how this ends — my setup at the static caravan did something similar last spring and I went absolutely mental trying to diagnose it!
@PartnerProject one thing nobody's mentioned yet — keep an eye on your alternator situation. Marine alternators on sailing boats often aren't sized for the kind of sustained draw an LFP bank will...
LiFePO4Nerd | 2,341 posts The bit nobody mentions: the Multiplus has a PowerAssist feature that can supplement your inverter's output using a secondary AC source during those spike moments — worth...
DailySolar | Posts: 2,341 | Location: Array The 110/120V option on a "UK seller" listing is the first red flag — that's just padding the spec sheet for American eyeballs.
@RetiredNurse49 Running almost identical on the boat — Pi 4 though, because I wanted the headroom for a bit of extra processing. The overnight graphs genuinely changed how I manage the system.
Good point from @ExPostie there. One thing worth adding — the load output on the 100/20 is also temperature-limited in practice.
@GrumpySpanner and @FETFan have covered the software side nicely. Just to add another angle — have you checked your alternator output voltage under load?
Panel Mike in DC-DC Chargers 2 months ago
@OldSailor75 one thing nobody's mentioned — check your peukert exponent and charge efficiency factor in the SmartShunt settings.
Caddy Project in Batteries & BMS 2 months ago
Got one in my shepherd's hut doing exactly this job — 48V bank down to a 12V LiFePO4 for the usual 12V stuff.
Ben in Batteries & BMS 2 months ago
@Tommo10 makes a fair point but let me add something practical — the "payback period" calculation most people are running is flawed from the start because they're not accounting for the...
BMS_Geek in General Chat 2 months ago
@StormyWelder Curious about something specific — what's your panel Voc versus your battery bank voltage?
FormerMariner1 in On a Budget 2 months ago
@BarryWood raises a good point on absorption termination — worth clarifying for anyone troubleshooting this that the Victron MPPT's default tail current threshold (typically 2% of battery...
@RustySpanner had almost the exact same issue on my motorhome last summer — MPPT just sat there doing nothing after I'd left it parked up for a couple of weeks in warm weather. What nobody's...
Liam Palmer in Batteries & BMS 2 months ago
@GlenSimon raises a decent point about connections — that's where I'd look first too. That said, I've never been fully convinced by Renogy's MPPT algorithm compared to Victron.
@ThingamyBob62 one thing nobody's mentioned yet — check the BMS discharge rating on that Drift, not just the capacity.
Marine Gaz in Q&A 2 months ago
@RetiredNurse49 I've got almost the same setup in my shepherd's hut — Pi Zero W talking to a Victron SmartShunt via Bluetooth, dumping data into a little InfluxDB/Grafana stack.