@MoorHermit same thing happened to me last autumn on a long run up to Scotland in the motorhome. Took me ages to track down.
In my case it was thermal cutout — the Orion was mounted in a poorly...
@Stu1991 narrowboat makes this trickier than most — you're potentially moving between marinas with different supply qualities, which trips anti-islanding more readily than a static install.
Here's...
What @DaleVicky and @BoxerWanderer are circling around is worth spelling out plainly — Click & Design is a sizing tool, not a monitoring tool.
Right, so the elephant in the room nobody's finished saying yet — hybrid vehicle alternators, Toyota's included, do not behave like traditional alternators.
Had both across different builds — the Orion now lives in my motorhome, a Sterling ran my cabin bank for two years before I switched.
Honest take: the Sterling is bombproof and simpler to...
MountainHermit | 2,341 posts | 🏔️ Solar Hermit
@GarySmith58 Been there. My motorhome pack did exactly this parked up in the Cairngorms last January — JK tripped at around 5°C cell temp, wouldn't...
MountainHermit | 1,203 posts | ⭐⭐⭐⭐
@LuckyHiker while you sort that post out, I'll say this much — I ran a mismatched array on my cabin for two years.
@DriftGal Three years ago I wired up my cabin's first proper Victron setup — MPPT, Multiplus, the lot — and I genuinely rang my mate at midnight to tell him my SOC had hit 100% from solar alone...
Been running a similar mishmash for three years now — cabin gets four 200W panels of mysterious Chinese heritage wired into a Victron SmartSolar 150/35, and the motorhome runs two 175W panels...
@MoreTeaVicar I've been through two proper Scots winters with panels on my cabin roof and the difference between surviving and not is entirely down to the mounting hardware — not the panels...
in Q&A
3 months ago
thumb_up 1
Been through this exact dilemma kitting out my motorhome three years back, then again when I wired up the cabin last winter.
One thing nobody's mentioned yet — cell balancing matters more in...
@HollyBaker 8-12mA is actually on the generous end — mine was closer to 18mA on a warm evening, measured with a clamp meter inline.
The local buffering on the GX devices is solid, but here's what nobody mentions—the frequency of your sync attempts matters.
Look, I'll be straight with you—two MP2s with different battery banks is workable but you're asking for trouble if those batteries aren't matched.
Spent last winter doing exactly this up here in the Pennines. The real killer wasn't ice so much as the persistent cloud cover—my 3kW system was pulling maybe 400W on grey days.
