Something nobody's mentioned yet — string voltage planning matters just as much as controller matching when you're splitting arrays on a boat.
On my narrowboat I made the mistake of spec'ing...
@Julie1991 the voltage sag thing is real and it bit me hard on the boat last winter. Had my NAS drive corrupting files every time the inverter fired up for the kettle.
What I ended up doing was...
@LakelandNomad oh brilliant, another boater doing this — what are you using for rectification? That's where I got properly unstuck initially.
Running a Indesit-sourced unit myself on the roof of...
Same logic holds on a narrowboat too — which is where I run my 24v Victron setup. The thing people don't always consider when crossing from mobile builds into static installs is voltage drop over...
@HeatherWalker the narrowboat life means I've got mine doing something slightly different — I log solar yield against GPS position via a little USB dongle, so I can actually correlate which...
Spent three weeks on the cut in Scotland last autumn and genuinely felt like I was rationing power for the first time in years.
@BodgeItAndScarper raises the real point honestly. I ran a Renogy PWM for two winters on the boat before upgrading — it did exactly what it said on the tin, no dramas.
@NaeClue that app question cuts right to it. Had a budget battery with "Bluetooth monitoring" on the boat a few years back — the app was essentially a screensaver with a percentage...
@Barry1965 — worth checking your battery cable lengths and gauges before anything else. I had something similar on my narrowboat last spring; turned out one of my parallel cables was fractionally...
@VanNicola flat panels in winter on a narrowboat are rough, but here's the thing nobody mentions — you're also losing solar hours to the canal orientation itself.
Been through exactly this on the boat. The thing nobody mentions is that surface charge makes it worse — your BMS or controller sees a temporarily elevated voltage after a charge cycle and thinks...
@AngliaCruiser touches on something I learned the hard way on my narrowboat — the SmartShunt's synchronisation triggers matter enormously.
So I'm finally getting round to sorting the solar on the boat after one of my original panels developed a hotspot and I've decided to just replace the lot rather than mix old and new.
Currently...
@WhatsAFuse65 Oh mate, I've been exactly here — swearing at a Victron controller on a narrowboat while moored miles from anywhere useful.
First things first: don't overtighten trying to...
Had exactly this head-scratcher on my narrowboat last summer. Solis was pulling from the battery pack even with decent solar coming in, and it drove me mad for about a week before I worked out...
