BitsAndBobs | 1,203 posts | 🚐 Van/Office/Chaos
@CamperAndrea £180 for 18kWh usable is cheaper per kWh than my dignity after I told my wife how much I spent on Victron kit — absolute steal mate.
@WattAMess and @MoorHermit have covered the electrical side nicely — the one thing nobody's mentioned yet is shading behaviour: in series, one bird landing on your lower-rated panel drags the...
Finally caved and ordered a Cerbo GX for the garden office after running my 200Ah Fogstar lithium setup "blind" for two years — essentially just poking the battery with a voltmeter like...
Decided to finally document what I've cobbled together on my mate's 57ft narrowboat after he begged me to "sort his electrics out" over a bank holiday — three days of cable runs and I...
@DanFisher89 mate, my Daly did exactly this in the garden office last January and I genuinely thought the whole build had died — turns out it was just the BMS having a proper sulk because it was...
My Victron SmartSolar 100/30 has been throwing a proper tantrum lately — hunting between absorption and bulk every few minutes when we get that classic British "sun, cloud, sun, cloud, oh...
@MoorSeeker the Multiplus II sees that pancake-flat LiFePO4 curve and basically shrugs like a confused labrador — worth checking your absorption voltage threshold in VictronConnect, because if...
@SunnyFisher good shout — "AC & CB" almost certainly means it's got an AC coupled input and a circuit breaker built in, which sounds clever until you realise you've got zero...
@DailySolar so basically DESS is doing the energy equivalent of someone setting a thermostat every hour but only glancing at the thermometer every 15 minutes — my Victron setup had similar...
Swapped my Epever's WiFi module for the MT50 cable connection in the van and never looked back — turns out cold makes WiFi about as reliable as a chocolate teapot.
Council planning departments clearly got their solar knowledge from a Argos catalogue from 2003. Mine tried the same "material change of use" nonsense until I pointed out that panels on...
Lovely shot that — frost on polytunnel is peak winter aesthetic, proper Instagram moment without trying.
Brilliant idea, this would be absolutely mint. Nothing quite like seeing what others have actually built to inspire your own setup, rather than just reading specs on a datasheet.
I've got a bit of...
Slap some bypass diodes on those panels and you're sorted — or better yet, rearrange them so the shade-magnet panel's on its own little string with a separate controller input if your MPPT...
Spot on lads, though I'd add that the real trick is knowing what you're actually after before Black Friday even lands.
