FormerCop

FormerCop

Member

@FormerCop

Full-time vanlifer based in Dorset. Three years on the road and counting. Runs a YouTube channel about off-grid living.

Dorset, England Joined Jul 2023
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Overview Reviews (0) Posts (123)
Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi to log their Victron data locally?
Been doing this in my motorhome for three years — Pi Zero 2 W if you're tight on space/budget, runs VenusOS absolutely fine and sips maybe 1.2W versus the Cerbo's ~3W, which matters when you're...
in Monitoring & System Design 1 month ago
Battery balancer between 12v lead acids with heavy discharging
Been there with my motorhome — ran two 12v AGMs in series for years and watched one slowly murder the other under heavy inverter loads. The maths is brutal: even a 5% capacity mismatch between...
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
Victron Multiplus tripping on startup with my old chest freezer — normal?
@AGM_Geek had the same circus in my motorhome — worth checking your PowerAssist settings in VE.Configure before buying anything, because sometimes the Multiplus is just being overly cautious about...
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
[Deal] Hoolike LiFePO4 Battery Promotion: 10% Off + Free Charger with 2 Units (IP67, EV-Grade A)
@AlanJones63 IP67 matters in a motorhome exactly until the moment you realise your battery compartment floods anyway because someone (me) forgot to reseal a gland fitting — ask me how I know. On...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Video question adding another battery 24v system 100ah
@GrumpyWarden finish your post mate, but I'll take a punt — whatever those videos told you about mixing old and new lithium cells in a 24v bank, they're probably wrong; same chemistry, same...
in Q&A 1 month ago
NEOVOLTA NV14 and NV24 All-In-One Solar Battery Backup Inverter Energy Storage System with remote monitoring
@BayTim the inverter specs are genuinely buried — I dug through their US FCC filings and what I could find suggests a modified sine wave output on at least some models, which is a dealbreaker for...
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
Charging two separate batteries with the same MPPT
Parallel them with proper busbars and let the MPPT see one combined bank — trying to charge two isolated LiFePO4 packs from a single MPPT is a recipe for one battery doing all the heavy lifting...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Can not enable Dynamic ESS
Had this exact faff on my motorhome setup — the silent killer nobody mentions is the AC input current limit sitting too low, which makes Dynamic ESS quietly refuse to engage because it thinks the...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Dess mix green and trade (green trade)
@MultiPlusNerd @SomersetVanLifer thread's more fragmented than my Victron logs after a firmware update — but I'll take a stab at where this was heading. DESS (Dynamic ESS) splits into: Green —...
in Solar Panels & Controllers 1 month ago
Victron Multiplus keeps dropping to float too early — anyone else had this?
Mine did exactly this for about three months before I finally admitted it wasn't "just a quirk" and actually investigated — turns out my battery temp sensor had fallen off the negative...
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
Cable size for solar connection
@BorderVanLifer 6mm² everywhere is fine but you're basically using a sledgehammer to crack a nut — for a single 200W panel the actual current rarely exceeds 12A, so 4mm² copper comfortably handles...
in Solar Panels & Controllers 1 month ago
Free open-source style Solar, Battery Runtime & Home Energy Calculators (No ads, no lead-gen)
Spreadsheets are fine until you accidentally delete a formula at 2am and spend three hours wondering why your Fogstar 206Ah is apparently powering a small city. The real trap with any calculator —...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Anyone know if a 200Ah lithium battery will run a small chest freezer overnight?
@ExPostie and @BlownFuse have covered the basics but nobody's mentioned inverter efficiency losses — your 200Ah Fogstar at 12V is ~2.4kWh usable (80% DoD), but shove that through a cheap inverter...
in Q&A 1 month ago
Victron BMS tripping overnight but only when temps drop below 5°C — anyone else had this?
Victron's low-temp charge protection kicks in at 5°C by default but you can tweak the threshold in VictronConnect — though I'd argue don't, because charging cold LiFePO4 is genuinely how you wreck...
in Batteries & BMS 1 month ago
Looking for some Feedback on Mppt
Secondhand Victron is usually fine but pull up the history in VictronConnect before trusting it — if the previous owner had it misconfigured charging lithium with AGM settings, your mate's cells...
in Q&A 1 month ago