Anyone managed to get a decent 12v setup going for under £300?

Managed to put together a reasonably capable 12v system for around £280 a couple of years back, though prices have shifted since then so your mileage may vary.

The core of it was a 200W Renogy panel picked up on sale, paired with a Victron SmartSolar 100/20 MPPT controller — yes, the Victron feels like a splurge at that budget level, but the Bluetooth monitoring alone saves you so much guesswork it's worth the premium over a cheap PWM unit. Battery was a single 100Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4, which I'd recommend over AGM every time if you can stretch to it.

Rough breakdown at the time:

• Renogy 200W panel: ~£90
• Victron SmartSolar 100/20: ~£85
• Fogstar 100Ah Drift: ~£99
• Cabling, fuses, connectors: ~£15

Tight, but doable.

The honest caveat: that single 100Ah gives you maybe 50-60Ah of usable capacity in real-world conditions, which is fine for lighting, phone charging, a 12v fridge overnight at a push — but don't expect to run a kettle off it.

Where people blow the budget unnecessarily is on oversized inverters they don't need yet, or buying a BMS-less battery to save £20 and then regretting it. Start lean and expand.

Curious what others managed — did anyone go down the used panel route? Seen some decent secondhand panels on eBay locally collected, but never quite trusted them enough myself.

@BrookRunner solid foundation with the Renogy panel — they're decent value for money.

One thing worth adding for anyone replicating this on a tight budget: don't skimp on the cable sizing. Undersized DC wiring is where cheap builds quietly lose 10-15% of their capacity through resistance losses, and it costs almost nothing to upsize at the point of installation versus retrofitting later.

I ran a similar spec setup in my shepherds hut before upgrading — the component costs were manageable but I genuinely wasted £40 replacing cables I'd initially bought too light.

Also worth checking Fogstar for budget lithium cells if the build includes a battery upgrade down the line. Their 12v 100Ah Drift sits around £150 periodically on sale, which transforms what a 200W panel can realistically achieve day-to-day.

@BrookRunner decent starting point but I'd push back slightly on one thing — at that budget, battery choice is where people consistently make or break the build.

Spent three years watching folk drop £60-80 on a leisure battery, only to replace it twice before they'd have broken even on a proper LiFePO4. The maths isn't complicated.

Fogstar do their 100Ah LiFePO4 cells for around £150-170 when on offer — pair that with a halfway decent MPPT controller (even a basic Renogy one does the job), and you've still got headroom in a £300 budget for a fused bus bar and decent cabling.

The chemistry genuinely changes what you can do off-grid. I ran my motorhome for four days in Wales off a similar setup without mains once.

@LiFePO4Nerd is right that battery choice matters, but worth being precise about why — a 100Ah lead-acid is effectively ~50Ah usable if you want decent cycle life. A 100Ah LiFePO4 gives you ~90-95Ah usable. Completely different proposition.

For the garden office I run off a Fogstar Drift 100Ah and the usable capacity difference vs my old AGM is substantial. Not subtle.

That said, at £280 total budget you're probably not fitting LiFePO4 without compromising elsewhere — panel size, MPPT quality, cabling. False economy if your controller's rubbish.

Minimum I'd say: don't cheap out on the MPPT. A Victron SmartSolar 75/15 is worth the premium even on a tight budget. The Renogy equivalent works but the Victron data logging alone has saved me from two faults I'd have otherwise missed.

@GlenDoug is correct on the usable capacity point, but there's another consideration nobody's mentioned — internal resistance.

Even within LiFePO4, cheap cells vary wildly. A budget 100Ah from an unknown brand might sag badly under load, especially in cold weather. Narrowboat life taught me this the hard way — my first budget cells would drop below the Victron MPPT's reconnect threshold on a cold morning just from the fridge kicking in.

If you're going budget LiFePO4, at least check the discharge curve specs. Fogstar's Drift range publishes decent specs and holds up reasonably well for the price point.

Also — don't forget your fusing. Seen too many threads where someone spends £280 on components and then runs unfused cable. That's how vans burn.