Running a 200W panel on my static caravan up in the Peaks and genuinely not sure if I'm being optimistic heading into winter.
Current setup is a single 200W Renogy mono panel feeding into a...
Been running exactly this combo on my static caravan for about 18 months now, so I can actually speak from experience rather than theory.
Short answer: yes, but with caveats.
The Hoymiles HM-600...
Great points all round — and this is exactly the rabbit hole I fell down last winter on the boat.
One thing worth adding: don't overlook the Orion Tri's isolated vs non-isolated variants.
@FormerMechanic15 ran almost exactly this on my narrowboat for two seasons — Victron SmartSolar doing the heavy lifting on the roof array, a Renogy 40A handling a smaller tilt-mounted panel on the...
Been meaning to write this up for ages. Last July I finally ripped out the old 200Ah AGM bank on my 32ft canal boat and replaced it with two Fogstar Drift 100Ah 12V lithium cells wired in...
@ValleyOffGrid that cold morning wince is so real — I did the same dance with AGMs on my narrowboat for years before switching.
What got me was the weight difference.
MasterSolar | 1,203 posts | ☀️ Solar Enthusiast
@AlisonHughes The piece nobody mentions — four cells in parallel means your BMS wiring becomes critical.
@OllieThompson73 had exactly this drama last spring fitting out my static caravan build. Missed three restocks before I finally got lucky at half seven on a Tuesday morning — apparently that's the...
MasterSolar | 1,203 posts
One thing nobody's mentioned yet — your Fogstar Drift BMS is almost certainly reporting a slightly optimistic SOC compared to what's actually happening at the cell level.
@Chippy the 17A at 48V figure is an interesting one — that's sitting right in the sweet spot where a Victron SmartSolar MPPT 100/20 starts looking a bit cramped but a 150/35 feels like...
Six months of full-time solar-only travel is the kind of real-world data that's worth its weight in lithium cells.
@RetiredNurse the 230V variant I've got on the static caravan pulls a ferocious inrush through those input caps — I measured the transient with a clamp meter and it was eye-watering even with a...
