What's New

Latest posts across all forums

Latest Threads Unanswered
Exactly what @Spud79 said, but the flip side nobody mentions: winter will absolutely humble you, especially up here in Scotland where I'm sometimes getting 2 usable hours of generation on a grey...
Marine Geoff in General Chat 5 months ago
@LiFePO4Nerd makes a fair point but nobody's mentioned the British weather tax — half your "surplus solar" plan evaporates the moment it's February and you've got 0.3kW dribbling in from...
Jake Walker in Q&A 5 months ago
So I'm in a similar boat — got a 24v panel sitting on the roof of my static and a 12v Fogstar lithium under the bed, and I'm trying to work out the best controller setup without spending a...
Had a couple of these on the narrowboat over the years — the £15-£25 units you see plastered all over Amazon and eBay with optimistic specs printed on the side. Honestly?
Scouse in On a Budget 5 months ago
Running a small chest freezer in my static caravan off a 200Ah LiFePO4 (Fogstar Drift) and genuinely not sure if I've got enough capacity to get through the night without killing the battery. The...
SmartSolarNerd in Q&A 5 months ago
@BoxerAdventure that's actually a really good shout — did you get anywhere with them? Curious whether they have any consolidated docs or just point you back to Victron's website anyway. I've got a...
Got caught out exactly the same way in my van — turns out my Victron BMV battery monitor was the most useful £80 I ever spent, showed me I was haemorrhaging power through a cheap Chinese inverter...
Running a small chest freezer on my narrowboat at the mo, and I'm trying to work out if my setup is actually viable before I commit to stocking it with a month's worth of sausages. Got a 200Ah...
RetiredChef in Q&A 5 months ago
@GlenSimon that's exactly what's running through my head — my narrowboat's emergency backup is literally what keeps me from becoming an unlit hazard on the canal at 2am, so I'm not gambling on a...
Sunny Fisher in Batteries & BMS 5 months ago
@LiFePO4Nerd nailed it with the canary thing. My cabin setup runs a 3kW kettle no bother — but it's the combination that gets people. Kettle plus toaster plus someone plugging in a laptop?
Declan Knight in Q&A 5 months ago
@SmartSolarMaster raises a good point about the remote switch — worth checking the two-pin connector on the control board too, not just the switch itself.
JH_Power in Inverters & Chargers 5 months ago
Not really my patch — my experience stops at UK G98/G99 and a pair of Victron Multiplus-II 48/3000s in the cabin. That said, the principle of three-phase balancing with Multiplus-II units is...
@EcoFlow_Gal leaving us all hanging there — classic forum cliffhanger. One thing worth flagging from my narrowboat experience running parallel Victron kit: phase synchronisation timing on startup...
Bit of a tangent but worth flagging — for those of you running shepherd's hut or cabin setups rather than boats, the EG4 Indoor Battery thermal range is something to watch.
Marsh Lover in Batteries & BMS 5 months ago
Ran a mismatched setup in my shepherd's hut for six months and the Victron DVCC settings basically become your best mate — without it coordinating charge limits across both banks you'll have one...
Really worth considering the hull material angle here too, @MistyTinker. Log cabins are hygroscopic by nature — the timber is constantly absorbing and releasing moisture with ambient humidity...
MarineGuru in Off-Grid Cabins 5 months ago
Really interesting thread. @Ozzy your logging approach is exactly the kind of thing that separates gut feeling from actual evidence — I've been meaning to do something similar but have been a bit...
Panel Tina in General Chat 5 months ago
@CallumHobbs curious what you actually noticed on the boat day-to-day — like did your batteries recover better overnight or was it more obvious on charging speed during the day? Running a cheap...
Burn Walker in On a Budget 5 months ago
@IslandOffGrid curious what made you move away from the US5000s after eighteen months — degradation issues or just wanted more capacity? On the actual config: the bit people consistently bodge is...
SolarJunkie in Batteries & BMS 5 months ago
@CaddyProject would love to see those numbers from your tiny house build actually — that's exactly the comparison I'm trying to make right now. For my own tiny house I've been quoted some wildly...