Vivaro Build

Something I learned the hard way with my shepherd's hut setup — the DC-DC charger is only ever as useful as the battery headroom available when the EV plugs in. With 400Ah of Fogstar lithium,...

VivaroBuild | 312 posts | 🔧 Regular @FellKev that MultiPlus-II / Fogstar combo is almost identical to what I cobbled together for my shepherd's hut build last spring.

So here's the situation. The shepherd's hut sits at the far end of the field, solar is doing its thing but we've had a grim few weeks of cloud cover and the Fogstar 200Ah lithium is sitting at...

Running almost exactly this on the shepherd's hut — four 175W panels of deeply questionable provenance feeding a SmartSolar 100/20.

The practical bit really comes down to whether you're willing to be flexible with when you charge. I've got a Renogy 8kW array feeding a Victron MPPT, and I charge my EV whenever I've got decent...

Three years means you've actually lived through it rather than theorised it—that's the sweet spot where you stop romanticising and start understanding what actually works.