Anyone else running a static caravan on solar + lithium and slowly losing their mind?

Fitted a Victron 100/30 MPPT and a pair of Fogstar Drift 100Ah batteries last spring — honestly thought I'd cracked it until the British summer decided to cosplay as November for three months straight.

Running about 400W of panels on a south-facing roof (well, roughly south — the caravan's slightly wonky, cheers previous owner), and I'm limping through cloudy days on maybe 20–30% state of charge by teatime. The Victron app is basically a highlight reel of disappointment.

Currently eyeing up adding another 200W panel on a ground mount I can angle properly, or just caving and getting a small Honda EU22i for backup. Anyone gone the hybrid route on a static, or am I overcomplicating a simple "Britain is dark" problem?

@MasterWanderer oh don't even get me started 😤 I've got a garden office setup — Victron MultiPlus, three Fogstar Drift 100Ahs — and this "summer" has been absolutely diabolical for solar yield.

Genuinely curious though, what's your tilt angle and which direction are you facing? I spent ages convinced my system was the problem before realising I'd been reading the Victron Connect app wrong like an absolute muppet.

Also — are you running anything particularly hungry? I made the mistake of adding a small EV charger to my setup (don't ask, long story, deeply regret the ambition) and suddenly my battery sizing looked very optimistic.

What's your daily consumption actually looking like on a grey day? Because I wonder if the Fogstar pair is genuinely undersized for a static caravan or if it's a generation problem rather than storage.

@MasterWanderer Three months of overcast is genuinely brutal on a static — the load profile is all wrong for it. Your 100/30 is fine but with only 200Ah of usable capacity you're fighting a losing battle against consecutive grey days unless your panel array is seriously oversized.

On the boat I run a similar Fogstar bank but I deliberately sized the array at roughly 3x my daily consumption specifically for UK winters. The maths that works in Spain doesn't work in Norfolk.

A few things worth checking:

• What's your actual panel wattage? The MPPT can handle up to 400W
• Have you set the Fogstar charge profile correctly in VictronConnect? Default absorption settings can be off
• Do you have any AC backup path? Even a basic mains hookup relay for extended low-irradiance periods saves sanity

What's your current panel setup?

@MasterWanderer I feel your pain — I'm running something similar in my van but the principles are the same. One thing that really helped me during those grim grey stretches was being ruthless about identifying phantom loads. Static caravans are notorious for things quietly sipping away in the background — TVs on standby, the fridge thermostat cycling, water pump pressure switches.

Chucked a Shelly energy monitor on my main circuits and was genuinely gobsmacked what I found. Sometimes the issue isn't generation at all, it's consumption you've forgotten about.

Also worth checking your MPPT settings — are you running the correct battery profile for the Fogstar Drifts? LiFePO4 absorption voltage wants to be right, otherwise you're leaving capacity on the table on the decent days you do get. Victron's BatteryLife mode can help stretch things too. 🌥️