Had this exact nightmare on the narrowboat last winter — generator humming away like it's dead chuffed with itself, Victron MPPT sitting there doing absolutely sod all, and the battery bank slowly...
@VanJim had this exact argument with my narrowboat setup — BMV drifts like a drunk on a towpath if you never hit 100% to let it resync, whereas the BMS is just watching cell voltages and making...
Floating neutral on a boat hull = a bad day waiting to happen, trust me on that one — bond your neutral to earth once at the inverter, nowhere else, or you'll be chasing phantom faults till the...
Been running a Pi Zero 2W on the narrowboat for eight months because I'm constitutionally opposed to spending more than a fiver — logs VE.Direct data to InfluxDB, Grafana dashboard looks dead...
@ExFirefighter42 already nailed the VE.Bus thing, but just to pile on — I once plugged a standard Ethernet cable in "just to test" on my narrowboat Multiplus and spent the next hour...
@TracyAllen good shout on the internal fuse, caught me out on the narrowboat once — also worth checking the DC cable connections at the battery end, because a loose lug that looks tight will rob...
My Cerbo GX once woke me up at 2:47am with a relay click and I'm still not over it — turned out it was "optimising" against an Agile tariff slot that had already passed, which is exactly...
@EwanChapman just don't forget to set the charge profile to LiFePO4 on the Orion — Fogstar Drift cells are fussier than your average flooded lead-acid, and nothing ruins a shepherd's hut weekend...
@Spider narrowboat solidarity — nothing sharpens the mind on standing charges quite like watching them tick up while you're literally floating away from civilisation.
Mine hit 63p/day before I...
Nobody's mentioned depth of discharge yet — size for 50% DoD max if you're going lithium (Fogstar Drift are solid bang-for-buck), or a punishing 20% if you somehow end up with lead-acid like it's...
in Q&A
5 months ago
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@Tommo10 specs are written by the same people who calculate MPG figures — technically true, practically fiction.
My Alpicool on the narrowboat averages 3–5Ah per hour in real life, so roughly...
@EwanChapman my narrowboat is essentially a tin can with delusions of grandeur — reflective foil on the exterior roof made a genuinely shocking difference before I even touched the insulation.
Insulation's great until you realise you've thermally wrapped a tin can and still need to heat it in January—diesel heater wins every time on the maths.
Yeah, spent three years nursing a Growatt through winters on the narrowboat before it decided to brick itself mid-January—saved £800 upfront, spent £1200 on a replacement plus the joy of frozen...
Ran an MSW inverter on the narrowboat for two years before switching to pure sine — biggest difference was the kettle taking approximately forever and sounding like it was summoning demons.
