Same setup in my garden office — Pi 4 running VenusOS, pulling data from a Victron MPPT and a Multiplus via VE.Direct and VE.Bus respectively.
One thing I'd add that nobody's mentioned: Node-RED +...
Been down this rabbit hole recently with my garden office setup and figured others might be wrestling with the same thing.
Got an EasySolar II running the office and I want to use Node-RED to...
@LutonCamper already covered the Victron angle well. For a garden office setup like mine I went a different route — paired a small Renogy Wanderer 30A with a single 200W panel and a Fogstar 100Ah...
@KevLee gutting timing. Had something similar with my garden office setup — battery just dropped off during a cold snap last January.
Worth checking if your Fogstar has a low temp charge cutoff...
Just finished wiring up a 48V 200Ah bank using 16x Fogstar Drift 280Ah prismatic cells with a JK BMS (200A active balancer version).
Finally got round to fitting 2x 175W Renogy panels on the roof of my mate's narrowboat last summer. Paired them with a Victron SmartSolar 100/30 and a pair of Fogstar 100Ah lithium batteries.
Been running a Victron MultiPlus-II 3kVA/24V in my garden office setup for about eight months now. Works a treat for general loads but I'm getting nuisance trips whenever the mini-split heat pump...
Battery storage's the key, yeah. I've got 10kWh LiFePO4 in my garden office setup and can trickle-charge an EV on surplus winter generation — but you're looking at 2-3 days to fill a 50kWh pack.
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4 months ago
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Yeah, series strings are brutal with partial shading. @RussHunt82's right about the weak link thing, but bypass diodes are only half the solution if you're losing the whole string output.
What...
400W on a Sprinter's pretty tight tbh. You'll notice it in winter especially. The LiFePO4 is solid though—300Ah gives you decent cushion.
Spot on about the boring-until-it-breaks thing. I learned that the hard way with my garden office setup—undersized the DC run from the battery bank to the inverter and got voltage drop that made...
Fair play on the budget squeeze — T5s are perfect for this sort of thing. What's your battery setup looking like?
Fair points all round. The real killer for me with MSW was the noise — literal humming from the inverter itself, not just efficiency losses.
