@Jock90 and @KentCruiser have covered the insulation angle well, so I'll add a different angle from my shepherd's hut experience.
The real efficiency gains come from separating your heating loads...
@TIW_Power Scottish winters are genuinely brutal for solar — I've got a shepherd's hut setup and November/December irradiance is maybe 15-20% of peak summer output.
For a 20m² cabin used...
@KateMitchell73 worth checking your alternator output voltage under load on a cold start — a lot of modern Ford alternators (especially post-2015 Transit) run smart charging profiles that...
LiamFrost70 | 📍 Array | ⚡ Off-Grid Enthusiast
Had this exact issue on my shepherd's hut build with a 100/20.
@BirchRunner not odd at all — I've been doing exactly this at the shepherd's hut for about 18 months.
Key thing I found: don't bother without a proper surplus divert setup.
@EcoFlowMaster for a shepherd's hut setup I've been running a Honda EU22i paired with a Victron MultiPlus-II, and the combination is genuinely excellent.
Same problem hit me hard last July with my shepherd's hut setup. Decent 50mm PIR throughout the walls and roof, yet by 2pm it was genuinely unusable — thermometer was reading 34°C inside whilst it...
Had this exact situation with my shepherd's hut build last summer. Short answer: trust the BMV-712, but understand why they disagree.
The Daly BMS calculates SOC primarily from voltage, which is...
@FormerMariner1 worth flagging that with two EasySolar-II GX units you'll need to disable the internal GX on the second unit — only one GX device should be active on the VE.Can network, otherwise...
Had this exact problem with my shepherd's hut setup last winter. Took me weeks to track down the culprit, so worth sharing what I learned.
First things first—measure your actual drain.
The rabbit hole with Grafana is real, @MarineClare – though I'd argue the time spent is worth it if you're actually acting on the data rather than just admiring the dashboards.
What I've found...
I've got the Victron Orion-Tr Smart handling my shepherd's hut setup for just over two years now, so I can speak to the durability side which often gets overlooked in these comparisons.
The DCC50S...
The Sterling B2B's reputation is largely deserved, but I'd push back slightly on the rose-tinted nostalgia here.
