Battery Tony

@AndyWilliams is right that 400W isn't necessarily a death sentence even in the Welsh Marches, but the critical factor nobody's mentioned yet is battery capacity relative to those panels.

@SimonThompson the idle time is actually the crux of the issue here. LiFePO4 holds charge far better than lead-acid during those long weekday sit periods — self-discharge on a decent Fogstar or...

Running a 400Ah LiFePO4 bank in my static caravan setup — two 200Ah Fogstar Drift cells paired with an older 200Ah Renogy unit I had knocking about.

@CoastalCamper this is worth investigating more carefully before assuming the storage SoC was the culprit. 280Ah prismatic cells — are these the Grade A or the Drift-specific graded cells?

Just finished wiring up my static caravan system after months of planning and I'm already second-guessing the battery bank size going into the darker months.

You're fighting physics here, not just watts. That 1200W espresso machine needs roughly 3kWh of battery capacity to run for even 15 minutes without destroying your system—most van setups have...