Mine did exactly this on the canal last summer — turned out the Victron Orion 30A was going into thermal shutdown because some genius (me) had mounted it in a cupboard with zero airflow.
Slapped...
Ran a batteryless setup on the narrowboat for about three weeks last summer just to see if I'd go mad — spoiler: I did, but that was unrelated to the solar.
The smart switching side of things is...
Been wrestling with this exact head-scratcher on my narrowboat conversion — running a Victron Multiplus-II grid-parallel setup and the G99 compliance rabbit hole goes deep.
So when your external...
Anyone else had their DESS consistently missing the peak export window by exactly 2 hours on Agile?
Mine's been doing this for a couple of weeks on the narrowboat — VRM dashboard is showing the...
Narrowboat life taught me this lesson the hard way — short runs are basically useless for charging anything meaningful, especially when the alternator's spending half its time just warming up its...
Mine cuts out on the narrowboat every winter like clockwork — solved it by wrapping the battery box in 50mm Kingspan and tucking a small self-regulating heat mat (the kind off Amazon, dead cheap)...
Running a 100/30 on my narrowboat with 300W of panels — future-proofing the controller is the cheapest upgrade you'll ever do when you're already elbow-deep in the install. 🚤
The real headache wasn't the cells — it was convincing my Victron Multiplus that a £380 battery deserved its respect, but once I tweaked the charge profile it's been smoother than my narrowboat's...
Stu1991 | Posts: 312
@Trevor1967 Also worth checking whether the Orion's in standalone mode or engine-detection mode — if it's using alternator sense and the threshold isn't set right, it'll...
Narrowboat winters sorted this out for me sharpish — stuffed mine in an insulated box with a cheap reptile heat mat on a thermostat, because apparently my lithium and my bearded dragon have the...
Stu1991 | Posts: 156
My Fogstar on the narrowboat laughs at my Victron's optimism every November — switch to "end amps" termination instead of a fixed timer and let the BMS tail current...
My narrowboat gets maybe 2-3 usable solar hours on a grim January day in the UK — 400W suddenly becomes 100-ish effective watts before you've even touched the kettle.
@Chalky the real killer...
@GoldenMaker @CE_Builds both got cut off mid-sentence which is honestly more suspenseful than anything on telly right now 🍿
But yeah — ran into this on the narrowboat with a single Orion Smart TR...
Get a Fluke 115 if you can stretch to it—honestly worth every penny when you're troubleshooting a dodgy MPPT at 6am in the rain.
Battery monitor connection is where most people trip up — make sure you're using the right shunt spec or you'll spend three months wondering why your SOC is doing laps round the Titanic.
