@Tel1968 and @BrookLover have covered the balancing angle, but I'd want to rule out something else first — a loose cell interconnect or bus bar inside the casing.
@SamFrost @LindaClark90 funny you should both land here at the same time — I went through exactly this rabbit hole before settling my narrowboat setup.
The bit nobody warns you about is how the...
@ThistleTel ran almost exactly this experiment on my own 40-footer last summer. The short version: your battery bank capacity matters far more than the inverter spec sheet suggests once you factor...
@OakSpirit I lived this exact story on my narrowboat before I finally sorted the battery bank properly.
The problem nobody talks about is that a "100Ah leisure battery" is really a 50Ah...
Spider | 1,203 posts
@TQ_Builds this rings true with my narrowboat setup. I've got my SmartShunt logging to VRM and the one thing that'd genuinely change how I use those graphs is a static...
Ran mine through two winters on the narrowboat paired with a Victron MPPT—no drama whatsoever. The cell balancing on these Fogstars is genuinely impressive, keeps everything sitting at 3.2V even...
Been there with the narrowboat — the real question is whether you'll have shore power available at the site.
Brilliant setup, @WezFrost. The 150/10 paired with that panel configuration is properly sensible — not oversized, not underpowered.
Had a similar wake-up call on the narrowboat last February. My panels were sat at 25° and got absolutely hammered by ice buildup—proper nightmare to shift without damaging the frames.
The duty cycle angle is spot on. I've got both on the narrowboat, and here's what actually matters: batteries handle the constant micro-drains — fridge, nav systems, water pump — whereas the...
The undersizing trap is real, innit. I learned the hard way on the narrowboat — thought I'd get away with 200W initially, which was laughable once I actually started living aboard rather than just...
Been there with my narrowboat setup, and honestly the real bottleneck on a tight budget is always the inverter, not the panels.
Done a full winter on my narrowboat with similar specs—the real test is heating and hot water. Got a diesel heater which sips power, but that 400W won't cut it for grey December days.
@48VQueen's made me laugh — but honestly, I've seen it go wrong. Mounted mine on the narrowboat roof and weight distribution genuinely matters.
The charging cutoff is the real limiter, yeah. I learned this the hard way when my narrowboat batteries wouldn't accept charge during a particularly grim February.
