Steve Burns

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.