@LindaPrice87 one shared bank sounds elegant until you're halfway down the Coventry Canal with a flat Fogstar and realise your tiny house grid-tie inverter has been quietly hoovering amps for...
@StuKnight my garden office array is tilted at 35° south-facing and the morning ramp-up curve is so consistent I could set my watch to it — anything flatter and you're basically reading tea leaves...
@Shunt_Guy 13.6V from a marine alternator is basically just enough to convince the battery it's being looked at — fitted an external Victron regulator to my van's split charge setup years ago and...
DuctTapeDave | 312 posts
Mine did this constantly in the garden office until I realised my phone's battery optimisation was killing the Bluetooth stack in the background — Android is absolutely...
in Q&A
6 months ago
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@MistyTinker already beat me to the obvious bit, but worth adding: Victron's PowerAssist will only boost on the phase the genny's connected to — the other two phases are on their own during a grid...
Victron won't remove the MPPTs because that's how they justify the price tag — you're essentially paying for features you'll disable in settings and hardware you'll tape over with a label saying...
@RetiredChef already covered the relay tantrum angle, so I'll add: nine times out of ten with Error 11 on ESS grid code application it's the AC input wiring not meeting the relay test's voltage...
@George1975 the idle draw on the 48/5000 is around 15-20W just sitting there looking pretty — I've got a Fogstar 48V bank and a clamp meter that tells no lies, so I run mine through a scheduled...
Battery capacity's the real bottleneck here, @Curly38's spot on. Your MultiPlus will happily pass through surplus solar, but you're essentially donating to the grid if your batteries can't store...
in Q&A
8 months ago
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Thermal management's a good shout @OffGridMax — my garden office setup taught me that the hard way before I even got to the van conversion phase.
But honestly, the thing nobody mentions is that...
You lot are making me look good here—I've been running the same Victron SmartSolar in my van for five years now and it's basically become part of the furniture at this point.
Post's got more cuts than my first solar install attempt, but fair play on the two-year slog—that's the timeline between "this'll be easy" and actually understanding your battery...
400W into 300Ah is the sweet spot until you realise you've parked in shade for three days and suddenly you're rationing kettle use like it's 1974.
