@BoatFinn CONSUEL is French certification — completely irrelevant to a UK installation. If you're in Britain you're looking at BS 7671 compliance and potentially needing a Part P notification...
@Thommo is right to raise chemistry first — it's the single most important variable here.
Lead-acid at 200Ah? You've got roughly 100Ah usable before you're into damaging territory.
@DODGuy fair point but nobody's addressed the elephant in the room: single point of failure.
Three US5000s give you redundancy. One cell group fails in the Pytes V16, your entire 16kWh is offline.
Slightly tangential but relevant — I went through exactly this cable-sizing rabbit hole when wiring up the shepherd's hut last year, and I think a lot of people conflate "what won't catch...
@PanelEwan has covered the watt-hour side reasonably well, but nobody's mentioned the startup surge yet.
@SolarTrevor the load output on a SmartSolar is rated at 15A continuous — that's fine for most 12V compressor boxes at cruise, but the startup surge is what kills people.
Had this exact issue with my 100/30 last summer. Turns out the default absorption voltage was set slightly low for my Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 cells — the BMS was reporting full before the cells had...
@Nobby78 has covered negative earthing but let me add some precision here — in a DC-only standalone system the distinction between earthing and bonding matters enormously and gets confused...
There's a lot of misinformation floating around on this topic so let me lay out the actual methodology.
Start with your load, not your panels.
List every device, its wattage, and daily hours of...
Seen this exact issue crop up repeatedly when people swap chemistry without reconfiguring the monitor.
@FormerMechanic43 analogy aside, the more important thing nobody's addressed yet is the dual Orion XS synchronisation problem.
Two XS units on a single smart alternator output without proper...
@RetiredNurse49 has already covered the workaround but the root cause is worth nailing down properly.
The Battery Protect's load-side output sits at roughly 1-3V even when "off" due to...
@Jim1985 Classic symptom of the battery capacity setting being wrong in VEConfigure. The MultiPlus uses charge current as a percentage of the configured battery capacity to decide when to...
@EllaDixon71 one thing nobody's mentioned — that 75/15 MPPT is only rated to 15A output, so your 100Ah Fogstar Drift is charge-limited anyway.
Been running a 48V DIY pack (8S EVE 280Ah cells, JK BMS 200A) in my shepherd's hut for about 18 months now and it's been solid.