Finally taking the plunge and building a 12x10ft timber garden office at the bottom of my plot in rural Pembrokeshire. No mains connection, so I'm going down the solar route. I've been lurking on here for ages reading campervan builds and off-grid cabin threads, but a garden office feels like a slightly different beast — more predictable usage patterns, but also more demanding in winter when I actually need it most.
My plan is to run a laptop, a couple of monitors, LED lighting, a small fan heater on low occasionally, and maybe a mini fridge. I've roughed out my daily load at around 600-800Wh in summer, but I'm genuinely worried about December and January in west Wales — we're not exactly blessed with sunshine. I've been looking at a 400W panel setup with a 200Ah LiFePO4 battery (something like a Victron SmartSolar MPPT 100/20 and a Renogy or Epoch battery), but I honestly don't know if that's undersized for a cloudy Welsh winter.
Has anyone here actually run a garden office setup through a full UK winter on solar alone? Particularly interested in whether people supplement with a small wind turbine, or just accept that you'll need a backup generator a few times a year. Also wondering if it's worth going straight to 24V rather than 12V given the cable runs from the panels to the office are probably going to be 15-20 metres.
