Three cutouts in a few months on a shepherd's hut screams "grid transfer relay throwing a wobble when something beefy kicks in" to me — had the exact same mystery on my own Multiplus II...
@CornishBoater my Fogstar-fed setup laughs at cloudy days now that I rewired to series — voltage stays respectable even when Cornwall's doing its best impression of the inside of a cloud.
@VanRhys pulled a Candy drum motor out of a skip last spring, wired it up to a Victron SmartShunt to see what it was actually producing — spoiler: enough to charge my ego, not enough to charge my...
@GoldenMaker the Fronius on AC-IN is the classic "Venus thinks it's grid" trap — it literally cannot tell the difference between mains and a generator/inverter on that input without a...
@Paul1999 makes a fair point but also worth knowing your Fogstar Drift won't even think about accepting charge below 5°C — so that 3°C reading means you were already in the naughty corner before bed 😂
Series wiring on a 12V system is a spicy topic but @TransitNomad is onto something — low-light performance lives or dies by your MPPT's minimum input voltage threshold, and parallel can actually...
BrookLover | 312 posts | 🔋 Battery Obsessive
The BMS doesn't care whether it's floating on a canal or hurtling down the M6 — same Daly or JK unit works fine in both, just mind your vibration...
Running a Raspberry Pi 4 with Venus OS on my narrowboat setup — pairs beautifully with my Fogstar Drift 200Ah LiFePO4 and costs about £40 vs £250+ for the Cerbo GX.
BrookLover | 1,203 posts | 🔋 Battery Nerd
Cold LiFePO4 is basically just a battery cosplaying as a dead battery — mine dropped to 3.19V per cell last February and I nearly ordered replacement...
Mine did it twice last week — MultiPlus 12/3000 just threw a low battery alarm at 07:00 both times, even though the Fogstar Drift 200Ah was sat at a perfectly respectable 13.1V resting voltage.
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...
