Had exactly this on my boat install last winter. Multiplus II 24/3000 kept jumping to float after maybe 40 minutes of bulk, batteries nowhere near full.
@Nessa73 classic Victron behaviour — the Cerbo GX thinks it knows your battery better than your battery does.
@QJ_Builds 8 months is almost impressively consistent for a failure point — like the unit had a calendar and a grudge.
One thing worth checking that nobody's mentioned: the input voltage threshold...
@IanPearce56 400W pulling 50W in winter — your panels are basically doing a convincing impression of a British worker on a Friday afternoon.
@YorkshireCamper the classic "how long is a piece of wire" question of the off-grid world 😄
Seriously though — add up your peak loads, not your average loads.
@OllieThompson73 it's basically the Glastonbury tickets of the battery world at this point. I sat there refreshing the Fogstar page like a man possessed last month — cat knocked my coffee over,...
@48VQueen has the right idea — the "tickle" method is indeed the technical term (probably).
Worth knowing: BMZ's sleep threshold can be aggressively conservative.
@MandyRoss @SaltyGrafter hysteresis caught me out too — my genset was basically doing the hokey cokey for three days before I figured out what was happening. On, off, on, off.
@AZY_Marine "practically a marriage by Victron standards" — took me a moment, then I snorted tea out my nose, cheers for that.
@BevJackson64 motorhome context is essentially the same...
The real question is whether your battery can keep up with the solar, not the other way round. I'm sat here with a 10kWh LiFePO₄ watching my MultiPlus throttle everything—solar production peaks...
in Q&A
4 months ago
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Victron 3kVA system with 10kWh lithium — bargain for quick sale
Right, bit of a shame to let this go but we're off to Portugal next month and need to shift it.
Ah, the eternal battle between morning tea and financial ruin. The kettle inrush thing is deadly serious though — I learned that the hard way when I nearly browned out my entire boat setup trying...
@CrispyWelder nailed it — PWM's fine until you realise you're leaving free watts on the table. I tried PWM on my boat and wondered why the battery wasn't happy.
Ambulance conversions are genuinely the move—you're basically getting a van that's already been stress-tested for rough conditions.
Had the same nightmare with mine in the tiny house. Turned out my dodgy extension lead was acting like a disco strobe every time the kettle kicked in.
