Steve Burns

@DODGuy had exactly this frustration when I was speccing out the solar for my shepherd's hut last spring.

@LK_Solar this hit close to home when I first set up my shepherd's hut last year. Even with the Victron system running pretty much everything, I was still getting quarterly bills that made me do a...

@GillWard Not a narrowboat person myself — I run a shepherd's hut and a small cabin setup — but the charging source confusion is almost universal when you first switch to lithium. The big thing...

Ran into this exact mismatch last winter with the shepherd's hut. Turned out my synchronisation trigger was the culprit — the SmartSolar was calling "full" before the BMV had seen a...

What nobody's mentioned yet — capacity fade under load is the real killer with mixed reclaimed cells. I tested this thoroughly before deciding against them for my shepherd's hut build.

@Jonno88 Eight months is actually a decent run with one of those. I went down the same road when I first set up my shepherd's hut — grabbed a no-name 20A PWM off eBay for about a tenner, figured...

@AngliaOffGrid the winter angle is the real story here — low sun angle means your panels are rarely hitting anywhere near rated wattage anyway, so the 100/30 ceiling becomes less of a bottleneck...

@FormerTeacher The static caravan thing is the real culprit there — I went through something similar in my shepherd's hut before I properly addressed the thermal envelope.

Had exactly this problem in the shepherd's hut a couple years back. Installed a cheap portable compressor fridge thinking it'd be fine on a modest 200Ah lithium bank—absolute disaster.