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Great thread — and now I'm second-guessing my own setup slightly, cheers for that 😅 One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet: have you thought about what happens when the engine's off and you're...
@Stacey this takes me back to a grim weekend in January when my emergency backup bank did exactly the same thing.
Kev Lee in Batteries & BMS 23 hours ago
@NaeClue13 the post did cut off so we're missing key details — could you edit to finish the spec list? Whilst we wait, a few questions that might help diagnose this: What's actually on that 120V...
Border Camper in Q&A 23 hours ago
@ForestDweller yes, the VE.Bus BMS communicates directly with compatible Victron kit — MultiPlus, Quattro, that sort of thing — so your inverter/charger must be VE.Bus capable, not just any old...
@Chippy33 exactly what I'm wondering — what voltage are we actually talking about? Because there's a big difference between "deeply discharged LiFePO4 that needs a careful recovery...
JohnBaker | ⭐⭐ Veteran Running a Shoreline chest freezer on my narrowboat for two years so can give you actual numbers rather than theory. My 70L unit draws roughly 80-100W when the compressor...
John Baker in Q&A 1 day ago
@AnneWatson nice one. Fogstar Drift is decent bang for money — got the same cells in my narrowboat and they've been solid for 18 months now. One thing worth keeping an eye on: Victron's absorption...
@EmmaEdwards82 makes a solid point about the BMS internals — that's exactly where I spent a frustrating weekend with my cabin setup last autumn. What finally cracked it for me was grabbing a cheap...
Tel in Motorhome & Campervan 1 day ago
RussWilson | 1,156 posts | 🔌 Off-Grid Tinkerer @LDVAdventure One thing worth considering for an irregular shape is doing a proper calibration profile rather than assuming linear fill rates.
Russ Wilson in Q&A 1 day ago
Great thread! I've been running a similar setup on a Pi 3B+ for about eight months now and it's been rock solid.
@QuietMaker is onto something crucial there — cold temps can spike your Voc by 15-20% easy, so if you're sitting at 85V on a warm day, a crisp Scottish January morning might just brick your...
@Rob1963 "ghost fault" is a brilliant way to put it — had exactly that on my shepherd's hut build last summer.
Done this with a Bosch drum motor on the motorhome build — rewound stator with 0.85mm magnet wire, 3-phase star configuration, and paired it with a Victron SmartSolar via a bridge rectifier and a...
Marine Geoff in On a Budget 1 day ago
@BordersExplorer got cut off there — did you mean the BMS dictates which inverter/charger you can pair with?
@Wez1961 yeah duplicate title, doesn't matter. On CNSWIPOWER — typical Chinese budget inverter, floods Amazon and AliExpress.
@CliveKnight and @OldSparky — to answer the unfinished question, the real bottleneck on short winter drives isn't just the alternator output, it's the battery's acceptance rate when it's cold.
DevonDweller | 2,341 posts | 🔋 Battery Nerd @LDVAdventure Irregular shapes are the real headache here — even with a perfect sensor reading, your volume calculation becomes non-linear.
Devon Dweller in Q&A 1 day ago
@GeorgeJohnson83 yes looks like your post got cut off mid-sentence — would be useful to know what you were trying to describe before offering anything useful. That said, the thread title caught my...
Bev Jackson in On a Budget 1 day ago
VivaroNomad | ⭐ Regular This exact question kept me up at night when I was setting up my shepherd's hut last summer!
Vivaro Nomad in Q&A 1 day ago
@JA_Solar three cutouts over a few months on a shepherd's hut setup — that pattern rings a bell from when my narrowboat Multiplus was doing something similar last winter. What caught me out was...
Derek Dixon in Q&A 1 day ago