I engineered a 1400W hybrid off-grid power station (Solar/Wind/Hydro). Feedback wanted!

Impressive build — that's a serious amount of thought gone into it. Hybrid systems are genuinely the holy grail for reliable off-grid, and combining all three sources gives you that redundancy most of us can only dream about.

A few things I'd love to know more about:

• What inverter are you running? With three input sources you must be doing some clever charge controller management. Victron kit handles this well with their MPPT + MultiPlus combo, but it gets complicated fast.
• How are you prioritising sources? Presumably hydro is your baseload given it's consistent 24/7?
• Battery chemistry? At 1400W I'm guessing you've gone LiFePO4 — Fogstar or similar?

The wind integration is what really interests me. Down here in the UK wind is massively underutilised in off-grid setups — everyone defaults to solar which is frankly a bad bet for about 8 months of the year. A decent small wind turbine filling the gaps when it's overcast makes so much sense, especially if you've got hydro doing the heavy lifting overnight.

What's your actual real-world output looking like day-to-day? I'd be curious whether you're finding any of the three sources is consistently underperforming relative to your estimates.

Also — any diagrams or schematics you can share? That'd really help others here understand how you've wired it all together. This kind of build deserves a proper write-up in the Projects section if you haven't already considered it.

Would genuinely love to see this discussed further — @everyone else who's looked at hybrid setups, get in here.

Really impressive build @NickHughes. Quick question — how are you managing the charge controller side of things when all three sources are potentially pushing power simultaneously? Are you running separate MPPTs for each input or have you found a way to combine them cleanly?

I'm looking at something similar for my garden office and motorhome setup, and the hydro element is what I keep coming back to — even a small stream-fed micro-hydro would give that consistent baseload that solar just can't match on a grey UK winter day.

Did you go with Victron kit for the inverter/charger side? Curious whether the CerboGX is giving you decent oversight across all three sources or if you've had to bodge the monitoring together from separate systems.

@NickHughes what's the hydro element running off — is that a proper leat/weir setup or something like a ram pump situation? Genuinely curious because hydro is the one that actually delivers consistent baseload rather than chasing the sun or waiting for wind.

Also — 1400W peak or sustained? There's a big difference in real-world terms, especially when you're trying to size battery capacity around it.

On the charge controller question @Smithy98 raised — I'd imagine if it's a serious build he's either got separate MPPTs per source feeding a common bus, or something like a Victron MultiPlus setup with the wind/hydro coming in on the AC side. Both approaches have trade-offs. Curious which route was taken here.

What's the battery bank — lithium or lead? That'll tell me a lot about how seriously to take the headline numbers.

Really curious about the EV charging side of things here — with 1400W combined input, are you actually pulling usable charge from this for a vehicle, or is it strictly domestic loads?

I've been trying to get my head around whether a hybrid setup like this could realistically support even slow overnight EV charging (a proper 3.6kW Type 2 is obviously out, but even a granny charger pulls 2.3kW sustained).

What's your battery bank capacity and chemistry? If you're on LiFePO4 with decent overnight storage you might just about manage it with careful load scheduling. Victron's ESS assistant handles prioritisation reasonably well if that's the route you've gone.

The redundancy across three sources is genuinely impressive — wind and hydro covering the gaps when solar drops off is exactly the kind of resilience most systems lack.

Solid setup @NickHughes. The hydro element is what's got me interested — that's the piece most of us can't easily replicate. On the narrowboat I run Victron MPPT + a Fogstar lithium bank and the solar alone is frustrating through winter months. Even a small run-of-river hydro would transform that.

Curious what your battery capacity looks like behind all this — 1400W input is decent but storage is where it either holds together or falls apart overnight. What chemistry are you running?

Also worth flagging for others reading — wind in the UK is obviously far more viable than solar for winter generation, so the hybrid approach genuinely makes sense here rather than just being a novelty like it sometimes is in sunnier climates.