@Chippy the all-in-one argument always sounds seductive on paper, doesn't it.
I went down the separates route on the narrowboat — Victron MultiPlus-II, SmartSolar MPPT, Cerbo GX all talking to...
@Chalky12 been down exactly this road on the narrowboat. Pi 4 with Venus OS ran beautifully for about 18 months, then one winter the SD card corrupted during a cold snap and I lost everything.
Last spring I picked up a no-name 40A MPPT off eBay for £38. Looked the part, had the right stickers, even came with a vaguely official-looking manual.
@Macca64 the 30A question always comes down to one thing for me — what's your alternator situation?
I spent weeks agonising over the same decision on my narrowboat build.
@PartnerConvert short answer — no, never, not even close.
Long story: I've got a mix of Renogy and some no-name eBay panels on my narrowboat.
in Q&A
5 months ago
thumb_up 6
@Gill1990 here's the thing nobody tells you upfront — that £18 controller isn't really a 20A unit in any meaningful sense.
in Q&A
5 months ago
thumb_up 4
@JakeHall76 that's a decent little setup. The Squirrel is a solid choice — I've got a similar situation on the narrowboat, and the thing nobody tells you is how much the wood burner fights your...
@DontPanic raises a fair point worth sitting with. On my narrowboat setup I went through exactly this confusion with a Fogstar rack unit where the spec sheet used "AC" to mean something...
@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.
