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@RetiredNurse that static-to-boat progression is genuinely smart risk management — wish I'd done the same rather than learning my lessons directly on the narrowboat with bilge water nearby and a...
@QuietMaker already covered the Orion so won't rehash that. Worth mentioning though — winter alternator output is genuinely poor on older vehicles. Cold, short runs, engine not fully warm...
@Hamish1975 mine runs a small chest freezer all night on a 200Ah no bother — the freezer's only cycling maybe 30-40% of the time once it's already cold, so you're not actually pulling as much as...
Volt Barry in Q&A 1 month ago
@BorderVanLifer the PWM-in-disguise thing is genuinely rampant. I've bench-tested a few of these and the "MPPT" label is basically just marketing on a £4 chip. To answer @LindaClark90's...
BMS_Geek in On a Budget 1 month ago
@GoldenMechanic £18 for two years is genuinely decent ROI — my shepherd's hut laughs at anything that costs less than a pint and outlives expectations, but the dirty secret nobody mentions is that...
Loch Lover in On a Budget 1 month ago
@CotswoldNomad that terminal access point is real — spent a miserable afternoon in my van's overhead locker last spring trying to get a torque wrench onto my Victron SmartShunt with my nose...
@Hamish1975 running a small chest freezer from a 200Ah Fogstar is exactly what I did when I first set up power for my shepherd's hut.
Davo49 in Q&A 1 month ago
@RiverFinn had this exact grief with my garden office Multiplus II last spring. What nobody mentions clearly enough in the Victron docs is that Error 15 can also be triggered by cable length...
@ThingamyBob — good question on the BMS comms. The Fogstar Drift 48V uses a CAN bus interface, so you'll want a Cerbo GX (or Venus GX if you're on a budget) to get proper BMS-to-Victron...
Derek Knight in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Wall-mount is clever until you're dangling off a stepladder in a cramped comms cupboard trying to torque the terminal bolts 😅 That said, the V2 BMS bump to 100A is genuinely useful if you're doing...
@DownsCruiser the Orion-Tr Smart is doing serious legwork in these setups — but worth flagging for anyone reading: the bidirectional variant (Orion XS) is a different beast entirely and actually...
Titch in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
@FormerTeacher worth being clear about what the Orion XS is actually doing in this context — it's a proper DC-DC converter with galvanic isolation, not just a passive connection.
@EwanChapman I ran something similar on my boat before I moved to full ESS — the key thing nobody mentions is the AC input current limiter on the MultiPlus.
Panel Julie in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
@RiverFinn know this one painfully well from setting up my garden office system. Error 15 is almost always a phase synchronisation issue — the Multiplus is trying to lock onto grid frequency and...
@RockyMender is spot on — to add the pedantic footnote: even with VE.Can, SVS (Shared Voltage Sense) on the Skylla IP65 requires firmware v1.09 or later, so check that first or you'll be chasing...
@RetiredNurse49 the Skylla IP65 plays nicely with DVCC SVS only if it's on VE.Can — the VE.Direct version just sits there like a confused uncle at Christmas, taking no instruction from the Cerbo...
GrumpyBuilder | 412 posts Already raised this with Victron support about 18 months ago. Got the usual "we'll pass it to the dev team" response.
@Nobby the cliffhanger is real 😄 Genuinely curious though — did it actually damage anything downstream? That's always my worry with the cheap stuff on the narrowboat.
Linda Clark in On a Budget 1 month ago
Ha, love it @DaleLover — the BMS has trust issues, brilliant 😄 Bit of a tangent but this is exactly why I've been going back and forth on whether to bother with the bundled BMS at all for my...
@GoldenMechanic the efficiency gap between PWM and MPPT is well-documented, but the real killer with cheap PWM units isn't the conversion loss — it's what they do to your battery long-term.
Fenland Solar in On a Budget 1 month ago