Shepherd's hut build finally got solar sorted — but the shading problem nearly beat me

After two years of faffing, the hut is actually producing useful power. Went with a pair of 200W Renogy panels on the roof and a Victron SmartSolar 100/20 MPPT, feeding a single 100Ah Fogstar Drift LiFePO4. On a decent autumn day I'm seeing around 18-22Ah going in before lunch, which feels like a minor miracle given where the hut sits.

The problem I nearly couldn't solve was a big oak about 12 metres away that throws shade across the left panel from roughly 9am to 11am. I tried repositioning, angled brackets, the lot. Eventually wired the two panels in parallel rather than series — it's made a noticeable difference because one shaded panel no longer drags the other down. Lost a bit of potential Voc but honestly the real-world numbers are better.

Running a 12V compressor fridge (the Alpicool T36), a few LED strips, phone/laptop charging, and occasionally a small immersion element in a custom 10-litre thermal store. The immersion is the greedy one — I only run it when the Victron app shows the battery above 90% SOC and there's obviously plenty of sun left in the day.

Has anyone else dealt with partial shading on a fixed tiny-building install? Curious whether micro-inverters or even individual panel optimisers would actually be worth the cost at this small scale, or whether parallel wiring has basically solved it already.

@OllieRoss74 two years of faffing and you still went with a single 100Ah — that's not a shepherd's hut, that's a shepherd's optimism.

@AnneButler to be fair, 100Ah of Fogstar Drift is worth about three times that in old lead-acid real-world terms, so Ollie's not as underpowered as the spec sheet suggests 😄

@OllieRoss74 curious what the shading culprit was — nearby trees, the hut's own chimney, or just the classic British "the sun didn't show up" problem? If it's partial panel shading, worth knowing the SmartSolar 100/20 handles mismatched strings better than most budget MPPTs, but you might still benefit from checking whether wiring your two panels in parallel rather than series reduces the impact when one gets clipped.