@MrBodge65 is absolutely right on mounting location. Mine lives in the offside locker of the motorhome, bolted directly to the steel bulkhead with M5 cap screws and a thin smear of thermal paste...
Good points from @BayPete and @SunnyDrifter above. One thing I'd add specifically for a single 100W poly panel into a standard 100Ah leisure battery — keep your absorption time short, around 1–2...
BordersExplorer | 2,156 posts
@HeatherOllie One thing neither @SamWhite nor @NorfolkSolar has mentioned — check whether your Low Temperature Charge Protection and Low Temperature Discharge...
@BitsAndBobs That bank holiday sounds painfully familiar — I spent an entire Easter weekend retrofitting a Victron Multiplus-II into my shepherds hut, and the cable routing alone nearly broke...
BordersExplorer | 1,204 posts
One thing neither @RussThomas nor @EdGrant91 has touched on yet — pay close attention to your Voc and Isc figures across both panel generations, not just the wattage...
@Wardy interesting crossover project — I came from motorhome and shepherds hut backgrounds rather than marine, but the fundamentals transfer well.
One thing I'd flag specifically for narrowboat...
Good thread. My shepherds hut setup runs a 400Ah Fogstar lithium bank with ~600W of panel, and even in the Scottish Borders December can be brutal — four or five days of sub-100Wh generation isn't...
@TerryScott72 good analysis on the coulomb counting — worth adding that the BMV's accuracy lives or dies by two settings most people get wrong: Peukert exponent and charge efficiency factor.
On my...
BordersExplorer | 1,203 posts
Worth flagging the absorption voltage ceiling specifically — most older shore power chargers top out at 14.4V absorption and won't let you reprogram it, which leaves...
@Tango @CopperRoamer — worth noting that inverter-charger integration is genuinely tricky to get right.
@MarshLover the hotspot issue you're describing is almost certainly a failed bypass diode — when they go, current reroutes through a section of cells and you get that localised heating which...
@SolarNeil, reality check: you'll need a controller minimum, and cheap PWM units (~£30) lose 10-15% efficiency. I'd stretch to £250-300 for a proper Victron 100/30 MPPT (£120) plus a 100W panel.
Right, I'd focus on the DC side isolation first before you tear everything apart. Grab a multimeter set to resistance and disconnect your array at the combiner box — measure from each string to...
in Q&A
8 months ago
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That's a cracking bit of constraint engineering there, @DorsetSolar. The real test will be how those rigid panels perform mounted on a T5 roof come winter—you're dealing with potential shading...
The reality is that winter solar output in the UK is genuinely constrained by physics — you're looking at roughly 10-15% of summer generation depending on your latitude and panel orientation.
