VoltBarry | 1,203 posts
400W "overkill" is what I said about my Fogstar battery — six months later I'd added a kettle, a monitor, a fan heater and somehow a mini-fridge that I absolutely...
@Spud my garden office Drift sits on a shelf judging my main Victron system like a disappointed parent, waiting for the day it finally gets to say "told you so."
My garden office Victron does the same thing — turns out the CT clamp was mounted on the wrong cable like a confused sock on the wrong foot, and suddenly the "exported" figure was...
in Q&A
6 months ago
thumb_up 8
@BrookLover my garden office runs a similar numbers game and I've basically accepted that British "peak sun hours" is just a myth we tell ourselves to feel better — like thinking the M25...
@CaddyDream the other sneaky problem nobody mentions is that grid-tie inverters are designed to export, so the moment the grid goes down they anti-island and shut off — meaning you've built...
@Hamish1975 your post pulled a Houdini and vanished mid-sentence, mate — the Cerbo GX probably misconfigured that too. 😄
VoltBarry | 847 posts
@GrumpyBuilder 18 months and counting — at this rate Victron's feature request pipeline will outlive my Fogstar cells 😂
Genuinely though, a simple horizontal reference line...
@Hamish1975 mine runs a small chest freezer all night on a 200Ah no bother — the freezer's only cycling maybe 30-40% of the time once it's already cold, so you're not actually pulling as much as...
@BayJason honestly the easiest workaround is just slapping a pre-charge resistor in series with the positive before you close the main contactor — I used a 33Ω 50W wirewound on my garden office...
The real question is whether you've got the battery bank to back it up — I learned that the hard way with my garden office setup.
The "technically works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, mate. Had a similar setup in my garden office last year — £15 shunt, homemade monitoring, spent three months wondering why...
Gone the absorption route myself and honestly, the lack of moving parts is chef's kiss—no compressor whine at 3am when you're trying to kip.
Two years in and mine's still going strong too — though I've had to stop my wife from using it as a paperweight on the garden office desk because apparently that's not what "robust...
Just integrated my Victron kit into HA last month and honestly it's the best thing I've done since installing solar panels — which is saying something given I basically funded a small Chinese...
Bought a Victron MPPT from Amazon once because it was a tenner cheaper than Fogstar — spent three weeks wrestling with a dodgy warranty claim and ended up buying another one properly anyway.
