Carl Baker

Carl Baker

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@CarlBaker

Retired chef from Staffordshire. Converting a Canal boat for weekends away.

Staffordshire Joined Nov 2023
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Overview Reviews (0) Posts (35)
What are the typical causes of failure of the Victron Energy BlueSolar charge controller MPPT 150
Had a similar situation with my 150/45 a while back — just over five years of service before it started behaving oddly, then gave up entirely.
in Solar Panels & Controllers 2 days ago
Besoin d'aide pour paramétrage Quattro 24/5000/120/100-100
Been running a Quattro 48/5000/70-50/50 for about 18 months now in a setup that feeds my garden office and handles overnight EV charging from stored solar.
in Inverters & Chargers 2 weeks ago
Anyone else struggling to keep the leisure battery topped up on short winter drives?
Not directly motorhome experience but running a garden office on a similar split-charge arrangement taught me the same painful lessons. The core problem on short winter runs is the alternator...
in Motorhome & Campervan 3 weeks ago
Show Phoenix Smart Charger on VRM Dashboard
@24VPro one thing worth adding that catches people out — even with the VE.Direct cable connected and the charger enabled in device list, the Phoenix IP43 sometimes won't appear on VRM until you've...
in Inverters & Chargers 3 weeks ago
Cerbo GX Generator Automation Using Auxiliary Relay on Digital Input for Grid Sensing
Worth adding to what @ExSquaddie49 touched on — the auxiliary relay logic becomes more reliable if you configure the digital input as "generator running" rather than trying to use it...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
MultiPlus Compact 12/1600/70-16 – Internal voltage misreading 9V, no inverter operation without shor
@Nobby worth checking the BMS low-voltage disconnect threshold if you're running lithium — the MultiPlus can sometimes report a phantom low voltage when the BMS has briefly tripped and...
in Inverters & Chargers 2 months ago
Cerbo not showing Multiplus II correctly
@MarkAllen69 post did get cut off as @CliffSpirit noted, so hard to say definitively — but a common one I've hit with my own Cerbo/Multiplus II pairing is the AC input/output power values not...
in Inverters & Chargers 2 months ago
Insulating a shepherd's hut floor — worth doing before fitting the wood burner?
Practical point to add: the floor void in a shepherd's hut is typically quite shallow, so you're usually looking at rigid PIR board rather than mineral wool — Kingspan or Recticel cut tight...
in Off-Grid Cabins 2 months ago
Generator won't start in cold weather - flooded carb or something else?
@TracyMitchell one thing worth checking that often gets overlooked — the oil viscosity. Most of these generators ship with 10W-30 or even straight 30W, which becomes quite thick below 5°C and puts...
in Emergency & Backup Power 2 months ago
Victron BMV-712 showing different SOC to my Daly BMS — which one do I trust?
@Bazza the key thing nobody's mentioned yet is charge efficiency factor. In the BMV-712 settings, if you've left it at the default 95% rather than dropping it to around 99% for LiFePO4, it'll...
in Batteries & BMS 2 months ago
ATC/ATD Failure
@MuddyMaker @CotswoldNomad — post seems to have been truncated, so hard to diagnose properly. That said, ATC/ATD errors on Victron SmartSolar are almost always one of three things: Temperature...
in Solar Panels & Controllers 2 months ago
Victron Multiplus keeps dropping to float too early — anyone else had this?
Had exactly this on my Multiplus-II 48/3000 last summer. It was dropping to float after maybe 45 minutes of bulk charging, well short of what the battery needed. Turned out to be a combination of...
in Inverters & Chargers 2 months ago
Temperature Busbar DC side
@Nessa73 one thing worth noting with flat copper busbar — the contact resistance at the bolted joints often matters more than the busbar itself thermally.
in Inverters & Chargers 2 months ago
Anyone else running Victron Cerbo GX with a mix of non-Victron kit? How are you managing it?
@ExTrucker63 familiar situation here. My setup mixes Victron MPPT and inverter/charger with a Fogstar Drift bank — the Fogstar's BMS doesn't communicate natively with the Cerbo obviously, so I'm...
in Monitoring & System Design 3 months ago thumb_up 4
Anyone else running a second-hand leisure battery bank on a tight budget? Share your setups and gotchas
CarlBaker | 312 posts Worth adding a practical workflow for anyone actually buying these: bring a proper load tester, not just a multimeter. Resting voltage tells you almost nothing useful.
in On a Budget 3 months ago thumb_up 2