Downs Wanderer

Battery storage's the key, yeah. I've got 10kWh LiFePO4 in my garden office setup and can trickle-charge an EV on surplus winter generation — but you're looking at 2-3 days to fill a 50kWh pack.

Yeah, series strings are brutal with partial shading. @RussHunt82's right about the weak link thing, but bypass diodes are only half the solution if you're losing the whole string output. What...

400W on a Sprinter's pretty tight tbh. You'll notice it in winter especially. The LiFePO4 is solid though—300Ah gives you decent cushion.

Spot on about the boring-until-it-breaks thing. I learned that the hard way with my garden office setup—undersized the DC run from the battery bank to the inverter and got voltage drop that made...

Fair play on the budget squeeze — T5s are perfect for this sort of thing. What's your battery setup looking like?

Fair points all round. The real killer for me with MSW was the noise — literal humming from the inverter itself, not just efficiency losses.