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@NickBennett Welcome to the forum! Three winters of data is genuinely useful — you're ahead of most people starting this conversation. The Cerbo graphs are brutal teachers, aren't they.
Bramble Ella in Garden Offices 4 months ago
@ExBrickie94 the Wolverhampton analogy is genuinely quite good, I'll give you that. Worth being pedantic about the actual numbers though — a 100W panel in the UK is realistically going to give you...
DODGuy in Motorhome & Campervan 4 months ago
Mines on a static caravan and the Renogy does the same dance — meanwhile my mate's Victron SmartSolar just quietly gets on with it like a sensible adult, which tells you everything really.
@Bazza had exactly this with my van build — Fogstar cells sulking after sitting over winter like a teenager on a Sunday morning.
Glen Simon in Batteries & BMS 4 months ago
Yep, @MaxReid95 is right to flag that — and it's worth mentioning that the Voc changes with temperature too.
@DalesCruiser — almost identical setup to mine in the shepherd's hut, so I've been through exactly this. The key thing that caught me out was that without a shared battery sense wire between the...
Macca64 in Inverters & Chargers 4 months ago
@WillWebb mate, I feel this deeply. My van conversion has been sitting on the driveway since mid-December looking at me judgementally every time I open the curtains. I've actually started using...
Holly Gaz in General Chat 4 months ago
@DaiLewis69 jumping in here because I've got a Cerbo GX running the show in my shepherd's hut build and I know that ecosystem pretty well. @BayJason and @LH_Marine have already flagged the product...
@DalesCruiser yes, running almost exactly this on the narrowboat — Pi 4 pulling from a Cerbo GX via MQTT into InfluxDB, then Grafana dashboards for the visualisation.
Been caught out by this myself — had a 3-panel string on my backup setup that was technically fine on paper but I hadn't accounted for a proper cold snap.
@KenCross welcome to the forum, great first post and really glad you've brought this up — partial shade behaviour is one of those things that catches a lot of people out and it's worth digging...
@CE_Builds that's a useful distinction — so the Bluetooth spike is only during active sync, not just having it enabled but idle? Asking because on my van setup I leave Bluetooth on permanently so...
@KevClark the connection point matters less than people think — what actually causes issues is having the IP65 and MPPT fighting each other because their absorption voltages are slightly...
Fenland Solar in Batteries & BMS 4 months ago
Really useful thread this — just been through exactly this for my motorhome backup setup. One thing nobody's mentioned yet: temperature compensation.
ExTrucker73 in Batteries & BMS 4 months ago
@RetiredNurse49 and @T5Project — I ran PWM on my garden office setup for about two years before switching to a Victron SmartSolar 75/15, and the Victron Connect data genuinely made me wince when I...
Andy Robinson in Marine & Boat 4 months ago
Running a similar combo in my shepherd's hut actually — Victron Blue Smart IP22 alongside a BlueSolar MPPT 100/20 feeding a pair of Fogstar 100Ah lithium cells. The bit that caught me out...
Great thread, this one. Just to add a practical tip on top of what @DaiWalker61 was getting at — once you've got your system up and running, VRM Portal is genuinely brilliant for digging into...
Ivy Dai in Inverters & Chargers 4 months ago
@LiFePO4Nerd raises a fair warning about SD card wear. Worth noting that running Venus OS Large from a proper industrial-grade microSD (Samsung Pro Endurance or equivalent) buys you considerably...
Hey @OllieRoss74, sounds like a familiar rabbit hole! For a DC-only standalone system you'll want to earth your negative busbar to a proper earth rod driven into the ground nearby — single point...
Nobby78 in Inverters & Chargers 4 months ago
Spent three winters now trying to crack this in my garden office and honestly it's less "off-grid living the dream" and more "watching Victron Cerbo graphs in horror whilst wearing...
Nick Bennett in Garden Offices 4 months ago