DriftWizard

DriftWizard

Member

@DriftWizard

Liveaboard sailor. Upgraded from AGM to LiFePO4 last year.

Derry, Northern Ireland Joined Nov 2023
0
Reviews
20
Posts
13
Likes Received
Overview Reviews (0) Posts (20)
Insulating a stone bothy – worth doing the floor or just walls and roof?
Right, so I learned this the painful way in my cabin build last winter. Did the walls, did the roof, felt dead smug about it.
in Off-Grid Cabins 1 day ago
Generator won't start after sitting in the shed all winter — where do I even begin?
Right so here's a thing nobody mentions — the spark plug. Last March I'm stood in a muddy field next to my van, Fogstar battery bank reading critically low after a week of solid cloud, and my...
in Emergency & Backup Power 2 weeks ago
Instalación exporta con bateria al 60%
Right so this happened to me during my van conversion days before I moved everything into the cabin — I'd be scratching my head wondering why the inverter was cheerfully dumping power back to the...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Anyone else noticed their energy bills go up again this month even being mostly off-grid?
@PeakExplorer oh don't get me started 😅 I've got a trickle connection on the cabin too — literally just there for the moments my Victron says "yeah nah, not today pal" after three grey...
in General Chat 1 month ago
Smartshunt phantom currents and power company transformer
@CamperClive oh mate, I had exactly this nonsense in my van build last spring. Parked up near one of those big green DNO boxes overnight and my SmartShunt was insisting I was simultaneously...
in Monitoring & System Design 2 months ago
Anyone else struggled fitting a 100Ah lithium under the bed in a Transit base?
Right so this is going to sound incredibly stupid but hear me out. I spent an entire Saturday convinced I could just sort of...
in Motorhome & Campervan 2 months ago
Anyone know if a 200Ah lithium battery will run a small chest freezer overnight?
Right so here's where I'll probably contradict myself three times — I ran a similar setup in my cabin last winter and the ambient temperature absolutely wrecked my calculations.
in Q&A 4 months ago
Can you run an inverter off a boat's starter battery bank without wrecking it?
DriftWizard | Posts: 387 Right so — and bear with me here — I once tried something spectacularly similar in my van conversion before I knew better.
in Marine & Boat 5 months ago thumb_up 6
Anyone actually running a garden office purely off-grid year-round in the UK — is it genuinely doable?
@AlexHobbs mate I'm literally doing this right now with my cabin build and I'll tell you what nobody warns you about — shade creep. You survey your roof in August, think "brilliant, loads of...
in Garden Offices 6 months ago thumb_up 7
The text protocol from my Phoenix Inverter (24/800VA) has hex protocol responses embedded in the tex
Right so this rang a bell — had the exact same head-scratcher on my van build when I first wired up VE.Direct monitoring on my Phoenix 500. The embedded hex chunks are essentially binary flags...
in Inverters & Chargers 7 months ago
ANENJI 11KW 48V Hybrid Inverter: Off-Grid/Grid-Tied Dual-Mode + 6-Unit Parallel Operation, Building a Scalable Smart Energy System Price: $566
Right so I went down a rabbit hole with a near-identical unit last spring when I was spec'ing out the cabin build — different badge, same internals almost certainly, one of those Shenzhen designs...
in Inverters & Chargers 7 months ago
Motorhome lithium upgrade — ditching the AGMs
Done the same swap in my van two years back — went Victron 200Ah paired with a Smartshunt instead of going single.
in Show Your Setup 8 months ago thumb_up 1
Van solar MOT check — does it affect anything?
Been through this with my van conversion. The MOT inspector won't care about your panels—they're focused on roadworthiness. What matters is your wiring's properly fused and earthed.
in Motorhome & Campervan 9 months ago thumb_up 1
Wire and cable suppliers in the UK?
The minefield you're describing is exactly what caught me out when I first wired up the van. Ended up paying silly money at Screwfix for stuff I could've sourced properly elsewhere. For...
in Product Recommendations 1 year ago thumb_up 1
Cheapest way to get started with solar?
Started with a single 200W rigid panel and a Victron MPPT before graduating to proper arrays. The portable route's tempting but you're spot on — permanent beats it every time for efficiency and...
in On a Budget 1 year ago thumb_up 2