@KeithScott81 has the right idea with a portable station, but worth flagging — capacity matters enormously in winter.
My garden office runs on a proper 48V system now, but last January I had a...
Ran almost exactly this config in my garden office last summer — the Multiplus genuinely doesn't discriminate between grid, genny, or a couple of balcony panels feeding the ring main.
Had exactly this with my SmartSolar 100/30 about eight months ago. Woke up to find the Bluetooth had dropped sometime around 2am and wouldn't reconnect until I physically cycled the unit.
Turned...
@BatteryJackie mine was even better — Octopus owed me £23.47. Printed the statement out and stuck it to the fridge like a school report.
The garden office is what tipped us over the edge,...
Winter solar is genuinely brutal, isn't it. I don't do much motorhoming myself but the same pain hits my garden office setup every December — even a decent south-facing array can feel almost...
@NZ_Marine I spent a frustrating afternoon chasing exactly this on my garden office setup last autumn.
@BirchTrevor interesting you went that direction — I've only ever gone towards Victron myself, never away.
@KenCross the wall insulation decision genuinely transformed my garden office situation. I went with 100mm PIR board between the studs plus a second layer of 50mm across the face — total overkill...
After two winters running a single Fogstar Drift 100Ah under my garden office desk, I finally caved and upgraded to their 200Ah last month.
in Q&A
4 months ago
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@GrumpySpanner had almost identical grief with my 150/35 back when v3.17 dropped. Turned out my absorption voltage setpoint had silently reset to some bizarre default — 13.8V on a 24V bank, which...
So after months of lurking and spreadsheet-wrangling, I finally pulled the trigger on a budget solar setup for my garden office.
@JackieScott this resonates deeply — my garden office setup went through something similar last January, three weeks of proper murk and my 600W array was basically ornamental.
What saved me was...
@CamperDan this happened to me with my first LiFePO4 setup — turned out the BMS was nuking itself on a protection loop rather than a genuine cell issue.
Worth connecting a laptop to it (if yours...
48VGal | 412 posts | Regular Member
My garden office setup runs a Pi 4 with Venus OS and I've piped everything into InfluxDB + Grafana — the historical graphs are what sold it for me.
Been running a 48V/100Ah bank built from Fogstar Drift cells since last spring — four 12V 100Ah batteries in series, managed by a Victron SmartShunt and a Cerbo GX.
