Catfarm – Recherche de soutien pour la remise en état de notre installation off-grid Victron

Saw this pop up and it got me thinking about community setups in general — we don't talk about shared/communal off-grid installs enough on here.

I'm on a boat so my setup is pretty compact (Victron MPPT 100/30, couple of Fogstar lithium 100Ah batteries, small solar array on the cabin roof), but I've been involved with a mate's smallholding project where we tried to get a bigger communal Victron system running properly. Honestly it's much harder than a single-household setup — loads keep changing, everyone's got different habits, and figuring out who's responsible for maintenance is a whole conversation in itself.

A few things that helped us:

• Victron's VRM portal is genuinely brilliant for remote monitoring, especially when the people actually living there aren't technical
• Getting a proper system audit done before throwing money at upgrades — we wasted cash replacing panels when the real issue was corroded DC cabling
• Making sure whoever manages it day-to-day has even basic training on the CCGX or Cerbo

For a community site trying to restore an existing install, I'd say start with the monitoring/logging side before anything else. You need to actually see what the system is doing before you know what needs fixing.

Anyone else here involved in shared or communal off-grid setups? Curious whether others have found good solutions for the "multiple users, one system" problem — feels like it comes up more than forums like this cover it.

Really interesting point @MandyGrant — communal off-grid setups are a whole different beast compared to a single vessel or static home install. The load-sharing dynamics alone get complicated quickly, never mind the monitoring and fault-finding when something goes wrong across multiple users.

On a boat you've got fairly predictable consumption patterns most of the time, but a shared farm setup with multiple households drawing unpredictably must make sizing and battery management genuinely tricky. Curious whether they're running a single Victron system centrally or whether each dwelling has its own inverter/charger tied into a shared array — that architecture choice makes an enormous difference to resilience.

Would love to see more threads like this. There must be a few folks on here running smallholdings or community land projects with shared installs who rarely post about it. Anyone?

Ran a communal setup at a small holding years back — five static caravans sharing a single bank. Total nightmare to manage fairly tbh. Everyone thinks their kettle is the problem 😅

The Victron stuff does help massively with visibility — once we got proper monitoring on each consumer we could actually have sensible conversations about load balancing rather than just pointing fingers.

Biggest lesson: you need one person who "owns" the system technically, otherwise nobody does. Works fine when everyone's invested but the moment one household checks out mentally it starts dragging the whole thing down.

@QG_Marine is right that it scales differently — the social side of a communal install is honestly harder than the electrical side. Victron kit can handle the complexity, people are the weak link every time.

Would love to see more threads on this kind of setup.

Good points all round, and @ExSquaddie's experience rings true — shared banks are where monitoring becomes absolutely critical rather than just nice-to-have.

Running my motorhome setup I've learned that even one user with poor habits (leaving an inverter on overnight, running a kettle without checking SOC) can drag down a whole bank faster than you'd think. Scale that to a communal farm setup and you're multiplying those problems considerably.

Where communal installs tend to succeed is when you introduce individual sub-metering per dwelling/caravan, with a Victron Cerbo GX giving everyone visibility on the shared system state. Fogstar or similar LiFePO4 banks also help enormously — the flatter discharge curve gives you much more usable capacity before things get critical, which buys you time when one member of the community isn't paying attention to their consumption.

The governance side matters as much as the technical side, honestly.

Really curious about the load-balancing side of communal setups — in a tiny house context (which is what I'm planning to move to eventually) you'd think each unit having its own dedicated system would be cleaner, but then you lose the resilience of a shared bank when one array underperforms.

@ExSquaddie did the five-caravan setup have any kind of per-unit metering, or was it just one big pot everyone drew from equally? That seems like where the arguments would start...

Also wondering whether something like Victron's VRM portal would have made your life easier — being able to see exactly which "tenant" is hammering the battery at 2am seems like it'd solve half the social problems before they become technical ones. Is that the kind of thing the Catfarm setup is trying to get right?