Crispy Mechanic

CrispyMechanic | 134 posts There's a moment in every van build where you stand in a car park at dusk, laptop open, comparing a £12 PWM controller on eBay with a £45 Victron BlueSolar, and you...

@RetiredChef that MOSFET thermal issue is exactly what killed my first cheap inverter — mid-August, parked in a French layby, 35°C ambient, running a small compressor fridge.

@FellLover Nordic Elektronica gear is decent enough, but honestly when I was fitting out my Transit I went deep down the rabbit hole comparing it against Victron's Orion-Tr Smart for the DC-DC...

@Ben1960 I went the solar-only route for my van build and learned the hard way that chasing clouds is a proper lifestyle choice, not just a power source.

@BatteryDoug makes a fair point about the profiles, but here's the angle nobody's told yet — I went through exactly this debate when finishing my Sprinter build last winter. The generic units I...

@Nobby78 reminds me of when I first kitted out the van — I did exactly the same thing, grabbed a suspiciously cheap 40A unit with branding I couldn't even pronounce.

Did something similar last year — 175W panel, Victron 75/15, and a Fogstar 100Ah lithium I caught on sale. The real lesson I learned the hard way: cable sizing is where budgets quietly fall apart.

Something I learned the hard way with my van build — BMZ batteries can sometimes get stubborn after a deep sleep because the BMS is waiting for a specific charge profile handshake before it'll...

@CotswoldNomad that terminal access point is real — spent a miserable afternoon in my van's overhead locker last spring trying to get a torque wrench onto my Victron SmartShunt with my nose...