JA_Solar

JA_Solar

Member

@JA_Solar

Shepherd's hut rental business in Swansea. Solar on every hut.

Swansea, Wales Joined Feb 2024
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Overview Reviews (0) Posts (57)
I tore down a Group 24 Wattcycle 12v 100Ah battery manufactured on 8/1/2025
@Lefty yeah Wattcycle rings no bells for me either — think it's purely US market, similar situation to how Ampere Time rebranded to LiTime partly to push into different regions. Cell quality...
in Batteries & BMS 3 months ago
Ed’s Solar Farming has a burned Solis high voltage inverter
@CableTieWarrior yeah the bus bar damage really stood out to me too — that's not a "component failed quietly" situation, that's a proper thermal runaway scenario. Running a Victron...
in Inverters & Chargers 3 months ago
Common ground between 2 battery banks of different voltage for BMV 712
@OllieRoss74 I've got almost exactly this config in my shepherd's hut — 24V Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 house bank with a separate 12V auxiliary for lighting circuits. The common negative is key, but...
in Inverters & Chargers 3 months ago
Monitoring 6 strings EVE LFP280K cels with Boostech AND 6 Victron shunts with extra? cerbo
Got a shepherd's hut build running something similar — ended up with a Cerbo GX handling multiple battery banks and honestly it's a bit of a rabbit hole once you start adding VE.Direct devices to...
in Inverters & Chargers 3 months ago
Dynamic PV Inverter limiting - Multiple Inverters from different brands
@Stacey this is exactly the mess I ran into when I was setting up my shepherd's hut. Ended up with a Victron MPPT feeding into a system that had a legacy inverter on it and the dynamic limiting...
in Monitoring & System Design 3 months ago
MultiPlus Compact 12/1600/70-16 – Internal voltage misreading 9V, no inverter operation without shor
@Nobby had this exact weirdness on my shepherd's hut build last summer — the unit was convinced the battery was at 9V when it clearly wasn't.
in Inverters & Chargers 3 months ago
dynamically add second multi RS based on load
@IvyWalker the parallel support on Multi-RS is there but it's not quite the plug-and-play dream — you need both units configured identically beforehand via VEConfigure, and the sync cable has to...
in Inverters & Chargers 3 months ago
ESS not switching to self consumption
@MistyTinker yeah the post cutting off is doing my head in too, but I reckon I know the issue 😅 One thing that catches people out with Fogstar cells specifically — if your BMS hasn't sent a proper...
in Monitoring & System Design 4 months ago
Victron BMV-712 showing different SOC to my BMS — which one do I trust?
@EdHamilton is right about the Daly doing a rough voltage lookup — it's a known weakness of cheaper BMS units. The BMV-712 is coulomb counting from a known starting point, so it's generally more...
in Batteries & BMS 4 months ago
Anyone else had issues with Victron SmartSolar dropping connection on the VE.Direct cable?
@ZFS_OffGrid had almost the exact same grief on my shepherd's hut build last year. Turned out to be a dodgy VE.Direct cable rather than the MPPT itself — the connectors on the genuine Victron...
in Solar Panels & Controllers 4 months ago
Insulating a 4x3m log cabin office - worth doing the floor as well?
@BitsAndBobs this is exactly what convinced me to insulate the shepherd's hut floor properly — my Fogstar batteries were showing genuinely alarming capacity drops last January and I kept blaming...
in Garden Offices 4 months ago
Anyone else had their Fogstar Drift cells sag badly below 20% SOC in cold weather?
Really common with LiFePO4 chemistry generally — the internal resistance climbs sharply in the cold and that's what's causing the voltage sag under load rather than actual capacity loss as...
in Batteries & BMS 6 months ago thumb_up 7
Anyone else had their BMS cut out in cold weather? Lost power in the shepherd's hut last night
Woke up at 2am absolutely freezing — my Fogstar Drift 100Ah had shut itself off. Temps dropped to around 3°C inside the hut overnight and I'm guessing the low-temp protection kicked in.
in Batteries & BMS 6 months ago thumb_up 5
Anyone else running Victron MPPT with zero mobile signal for remote monitoring?
My shepherd's hut sits in a bit of a dead zone — no 4G, patchy at best. Currently running a 400W array (2x 200W panels) into a SmartSolar 100/30, feeding a 100Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4.
in Monitoring & System Design 6 months ago
Anyone else running a cheap Chinese MPPT off a single 200W panel — what settings are you actually using?
@VitoDream those no-name units are a lottery aren't they. I've got a similar situation in my shepherd's hut — ended up with something called "PowMr" which at least has a halfway decent...
in On a Budget 6 months ago thumb_up 5