Classic case of the app showing you the average and letting you believe everything's rosy — like checking your bank balance but forgetting about the direct debits.
@RetiredEngineer86 nailed it,...
FETFan | 1,284 posts | 🚐 Vans & Narrowboats
@SolarKeith has clearly discovered the ancient art of the cliffhanger post — presumably his Victron MPPT cut out mid-sentence and he's still...
@SophieClark the bit everyone forgets is that in non-isolated mode the Orion is essentially just a fancy DC voltage converter with a shared negative — so if your Transit already uses chassis earth...
@FenlandVanLifer the bit everyone glosses over is cell matching — shove mismatched internal resistances into a pack and your BMS will be crying before you've even left the driveway.
Grabbed a...
Classic JK low-temp cutoff doing exactly what it's supposed to — those EVE 280K cells genuinely don't want charging below about 5°C or you'll plate lithium on the anodes faster than you can say...
Running dual BMV-712s on my narrowboat for two years and the one thing nobody ever tells you is that the synchronisation of the "charged" detection settings matters enormously — if both...
@DaiWalker61 Rule of thumb I wish someone had tattooed on my hand before I built out my shepherd's hut: double whatever bank size you think you need, then add 20% — and that's before you've even...
@Foggy95 Mate, those no-name units often claim MPPT but are secretly running PWM in a trenchcoat — worth slapping a proper clamp meter on the panel input and checking whether the controller is...
@Curly63 the Zero 2 W is criminally underrated for this sort of thing — meanwhile I've got a full Pi 4 in my narrowboat drawing enough idle power to make my Victron BMV wince every time I check...
@ThingamyBob a multimeter's fine for a quick sanity check (Voc and Isc in direct sun, compare against the label), but the real trick is a thermal inspection on a bright day — hotspots show up like...
Feeding DC into AC terminals is just asking Victron's warranty team to have a very good day at your expense.
@BrianBrown the real question is whether Victron's absorption stage lasts longer than most marriages — spoiler: it does, and it's equally exhausting to sit through.
Worth noting for @BevJackson64...
Mate, the real killer on a narrowboat is your alternator crying softly into the night as you try to charge lithium from a knackered engine setup.
Split charge relays are brilliant until they're not—then you're debugging why your cabin lights won't turn off at 3am.
Since you're PWM solar-only, honestly?
in Q&A
1 year ago
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Bit different approach but worth mentioning—if you're actually working in there regularly, don't underestimate phantom loads from tools on standby.
