Anyone else struggling to keep a 100Ah lithium topped up on a cloudy week in Scotland?

Mate, I thought my tiny house setup was rough during a grey November but Scotland in winter is basically living inside a cloud with wheels.

My Victron MPPT logs from last week were genuinely upsetting — three days of 8W peak is not solar power, that's a suggestion of solar power.

A few things that've actually helped me drag through the murky weeks:

• Shore power top-up whenever a site hookup is within reach — even a few hours makes a dent
• Reducing parasitic loads mercilessly (looking at you, always-on inverter standby draw)
• A second 100Ah Fogstar Drift wired in parallel — doubles your buffer, same miserable charge rate, but at least you're not bouncing off low-voltage cutoff every morning
• Driving more — the B2B charger from the alternator is genuinely the unsung hero of gloomy weeks

The uncomfortable truth nobody wants to hear is that 100Ah + Scotland + November is a maths problem with no clean solution. You either add battery, add panels (good luck finding roof space), or you add a petrol generator and accept the noise complaints from your neighbours on the pitch.

What panel wattage are you running? And is this a fixed roof setup or portable panels you can angle-chase the sun with? That angle-chasing makes a shocking difference when the sun does briefly remember it exists — even a flat winter sun at 15° above the horizon rewards a tilted panel generously.

Anyone else running a wind turbine as a supplement up that way? Seems like Scotland would be ideal for that particular solution...

@PhilJackson I feel this, though I'm not on wheels — my static caravan setup had a horrible stretch last month where I pulled maybe 0.3kWh over three days from the panels. Completely pathetic.

Honest question though — are you running any shore power hookup option at all? Even a small mains trickle when you're parked somewhere with a hook-up point changes everything in winter.

The other thing that genuinely helped me was switching to a Fogstar Drift 100Ah — the improved low-temperature performance means at least I'm not losing usable capacity on top of the generation problem.

If you're off-grid hard with zero backup, Scotland in November is basically just "manage your expectations aggressively" season. What's your actual daily consumption looking like? Sometimes the consumption side is the easier problem to fix than chasing solar hours.

@PhilJackson mate, Scotland in November isn't "off-grid living," it's just punishment — I've got a static caravan in a similarly cursed location and my Fogstar 100Ah spent most of last month looking at me like a disappointed parent.

Couple of things that actually helped my setup:

• Bump to 200Ah minimum if you're serious about surviving a grey week
• Victron's load output scheduling — stop haemorrhaging power overnight on things you don't need
• A small wind turbine paired with the MPPT genuinely saved my bacon (sun's optional in the UK, wind is basically guaranteed)

Scotland specifically — tilt your panels steeper than you think, low winter sun angle means flat-mounted panels are basically decorative at that latitude.

@GemmaCooper86 static caravan solidarity, we suffer together.

@PhilJackson my narrowboat spent a fortnight in Inverness last autumn and my Fogstar 100Ah basically became an expensive paperweight with a Victron sticker on it.

@PhilJackson mate I've got a shepherd's hut in the Peaks and even we get more sun than Scotland in November — and we're basically underneath a permanently angry cloud ourselves.

Honestly at that point your 100Ah lithium isn't a battery, it's just a very expensive way to watch your Victron app go red.