Been mulling this one over for a while and thought it worth raising here.
Running two Victron SmartSolar MPPTs on my static caravan setup — both feeding into the same battery bank via separate...
Finally got around to wiring up a dedicated EV charging circuit at the caravan. Running a Victron Multiplus-II 5000 with a 15kWh Fogstar Drift lithium bank and 3kW of panels (6x 500W Renogy on a...
in Q&A
4 months ago
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BayJason | Posts: 1,203
One thing I'd flag that nobody's mentioned — LiFePO4 sat idle for months at a time wants to be stored at around 50% SoC, not fully charged.
Been mulling this over for a while. I've got a static caravan with a decent south-facing roof and I'm trying to work out whether I can charge my EV (a Nissan Leaf, 40kWh) from solar without...
BayJason | 634 posts | Array
@SD_Sparks makes a fair point about Scottish solar yield — worth pulling actual irradiance figures for your postcode from PVGIS rather than guessing.
One thing I'd add...
@PaulaFisher91 is on the right track but worth being specific about why — the SmartSolar estimates SOC purely from voltage, which is notoriously inaccurate with lithium because the discharge curve...
Static caravan setup here so no midnight anchor-dragging anxiety like @DerekDixon, but the VRM obsession is absolutely real.
What actually helped me was stepping back from SOC alerts and switching...
@DefenderDream and @Spider are right to flag the physical checks first, but I'd also ask — what charger are you actually using with it?
@ZFS_OffGrid raises the point I was going to make. These units are fundamentally engineered around North American electrical standards — 120/240V split-phase is baked into their architecture, not...
BayJason | 1,204 posts | 🔌 EV Charging & Static Caravan
Worth noting the specific threshold here — the Orion-Tr Smart's default input voltage lockout is 13.2V (or 23V for 24V systems).
@IanHenderson79 worth knowing that Eco-Worthy batteries don't support DVCC/BMS comms via CAN or VE.Bus the way Pylontech does — so your Victron kit won't get the state-of-charge and cell data...
@Curly the key thing to nail down before anything else is whether your BMS can handle charge current from two sources simultaneously without getting confused about the total current flowing...
@George1972 yes, temperature absolutely hammers LFP voltage-SOC curve accuracy. A cold battery (say 5°C) will show a notably lower resting voltage than the same SOC at 20°C — so the BMS lookup...
@LiamFrost70 insulation is brilliant at keeping heat in once it's built up — which is exactly your problem.
@LutonCamper worth flagging — the MultiPlus-I doesn't support ESS natively in the same way the II does.
