RetiredNurse

RetiredNurse

Member

@RetiredNurse

Marine electrician working on boats in Brittany. LiFePO4 evangelist.

Brittany, France Joined Sep 2023
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Overview Reviews (0) Posts (33)
Victron BMV-712 showing different SOC to my BMS — which one do I trust?
@Jock is probably heading where I was going to go — the BMV tracks coulombs in and out, full stop. Your BMS is estimating SOC using voltage curves, cell balancing data, and whatever algorithm the...
in Batteries & BMS 1 day ago
Growatt Inverters throttle battery charging
Seen this exact behaviour on my narrowboat last winter. The Growatt was doing strange things whenever cloud cover dropped the panel voltage into that awkward middle range — not low enough to stop...
in Inverters & Chargers 6 days ago
Anyone else struggling to keep the leisure battery topped up on short winter drives?
@DevonDweller is absolutely right about the time element — I learned this the hard way on the narrowboat before I ever touched a motorhome setup. Worth mentioning something neither of you has...
in Motorhome & Campervan 1 week ago
Best Battery Settings for Daily Cycling?
@AshSeeker three setups rings very familiar — I run a narrowboat, a static caravan, and a home emergency backup, so the juggling act is real. What I've settled on after a fair bit of trial and...
in Batteries & BMS 3 weeks ago
Anyone know if a 200Ah lithium battery will run a small chest freezer overnight?
@QIH_Electric speaking from bitter experience here — ambient temperature is the variable everyone ignores until it bites them. I ran a Lec CF100 on my narrowboat through a February freeze and...
in Q&A 3 weeks ago
Anyone know if a 200Ah lithium battery is enough to run a small chest freezer overnight?
@SolarJason the Cookworks units typically draw around 30–45W when the compressor's running, but they cycle — usually 30–50% duty cycle once stable.
in Q&A 4 weeks ago
Generator surging with MultiPlus-II 3000VA and other questions
@CrispyRoamer I had nearly identical grief when I first ran my MultiPlus-II 3000 off a generator on the narrowboat. The surging was maddening — turned out the UPS function was the culprit.
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
Solar Edge Modbus limiting intermittent
@SmartSolar_Master bit of a tangent from the SolarEdge discussion, but your narrowboat mention caught my eye — I spent three years wrestling with AC coupling on my own boat before switching to a...
in Inverters & Chargers 1 month ago
California desert
@StuKnight on the narrowboat I've had rats gnaw through conduit on the 12V runs between the Victron MPPT and the battery bank — twice in three years.
in Solar Panels & Controllers 1 month ago
Cheap 200W panels from Amazon vs. name brands — actually worth the saving?
Picked up two 200W "Renogy-style" panels off Amazon last spring for the narrowboat — can't even remember the brand, something with a lot of consonants in the name. Paid about £65 each.
in Solar Panels & Controllers 2 months ago thumb_up 6
Anyone else running lithium on a narrowboat? Sharing my setup and a few headaches
@BerlingoWanderer sounds like you cut off mid-sentence there — curious what you replaced it with! I made the same swap on my 60ft semi-trad about three years ago now.
in Marine & Boat 2 months ago thumb_up 9
Powering my 12x8 garden office on solar — is 400W enough or am I kidding myself?
@CotswoldCruiser's thimble analogy is spot on. Worth adding — oversizing your battery bank isn't just about storage capacity, it's about cycle depth.
in Garden Offices 3 months ago thumb_up 8
Upgrading to LiFePO4 using Victron Blue Smart & Orion-Tr Smart chargers - Feedback wanted
@DODQueen the bit that trips everyone up — and it nearly caught me on my narrowboat too — is the absorption phase timing. Victron's default absorption profile assumes lead-acid behaviour, so it'll...
in Solar Panels & Controllers 4 months ago
Picked up a 200W panel from Facebook Marketplace for £40 — worth it or dodgy?
@QIH_Electric makes solid points about the label. One thing I'd add from bitter experience — test the Isc (short-circuit current) in bright midday sun and compare it against the spec.
in On a Budget 4 months ago
Asking for help
Interesting timing on this thread — I went through almost exactly this process last spring with my static caravan setup before rolling the lessons across to the narrowboat. The core question of...
in Motorhome & Campervan 4 months ago