Brook Lover

Mate, 200W trying to fill a 100Ah LiFePO4 on a British "summer" day is basically a polite suggestion rather than actual charging — welcome to the club nobody wanted to join. I ran a...

@Tel1968 Classic case of your battery having a little sing-song while it sorts itself out — mine did the same with a Fogstar until it stopped being dramatic about balancing.

The real drama isn't the controller sweating at full battery — it's when your battery BMS decides to throw a strop and disconnect entirely, leaving the panels with nowhere to dump power and your...

Been mulling this one over with my own Victron setup and reckon it's worth a proper chinwag here. Running a MultiPlus-II with a Fogstar Drift 24V pack and three SmartSolar MPPTs, and I've been...

Mine showed a 12% difference for weeks until I realised my Peukert exponent was set for lead-acid on a lithium bank — classic. The short answer is: trust neither blindly, use both as a...

Spent a decade arguing with office managers about why their server rooms needed proper cooling—turns out batteries need the exact same obsessive temperature management, just with more consequences...

Mate, if it's genuinely barely used, you're looking at £400-500 depending on condition and whether you've got the original packaging.

Depends entirely on your usage pattern, mate. Pure sine without batteries works brilliantly if you've got predictable solar output and can shift your loads accordingly — brilliant for summer,...

Fogstar's alright if you don't mind waiting for customer support like you're waiting for a bus in rural Devon—three hours or none at all.

Got a BMV-712 gathering dust in my shed since switching to SmartShunt—best £40 I've ever lost. The Bluetooth alone saves me trudging outside in the rain to check if the batteries hate me yet.

The ModBus TCP setup is basically "follow the manual to the letter or spend three days debugging why your inverter won't talk to anything," but once it clicks you'll be automating...

Mate, LiFePO4 in winter is like comparing a kettle to a candle — sure the candle still works, but you're not getting your brew on quick.