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Self laminated labels for cable marking. It's the little touches that make for a professional installation.

I have 3 Battleborn 100ah batteries in parallel. I just received 4 new CALB cells (12v, 100ah) that I built. Can I, strike that, SHOULD I add the CALB to the Battleborn stack? Is that okay? The CALB will have a BMS on it. Top end balancing at the moment.

Orders CALB cells from China 2 months ago. Goes camping over weekend to include one weekday. Batteries arrive on the one weekday I'm not home.:)

I thought this was a good idea. I have a LOT, I repeat, A LOT of Internet of things computers, arduinos, raspberry pi's laptops, etc. It's hard to remember the IP address of everything. I do have a computer it is bookmarked on however I use many devices not to mention I'm trying to teach my...

And was supposed to stay that way. But it didn't. Just added my 3rd Battleborn. And a Samlex 2000 watt inverter just before that. It has a 12v to 5v converter feeding a Raspberry Pi with Victron VRM firmware which was the mod before the inverter swap out. Am I done? Probably not.

I have 400 watts of panels pointed 5 degrees south of south :) I hit max output about 2 PM. On a cloudless day I'm tossing in just over 400 watts into 2 Battleborn 100ah and soon to be 3 as soon as the FedEx guy shows up with it in a couple days. I top off almost every day before noon when I'm...

Makes for a nice touch.

400 watts of panels and 200ah (2 x Battleborn 100 ah in parallel) Every night I consume about 25% of the battery. Seemingly no matter how horrible the weather I almost always top off to 100% SOC or darn close to it. Is it problematic to low discharge and recharge over and over and over in...

Put the cells and BMS in a Group 31 box, installed the plastic divider and used the free space on the left for a Battery Disconnect switch. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00445KFZ2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Turned out nice. Easy to move around and having a...

I have the Samlex PST-2000-12 inverter and the remote panel does not come with the inverter. Separate purchase. $40 or so. The "problem" I have is that the inverter is close to the floor and I have to bend my 57 year old body around and contort it to turn the inverter on or off. The Samlex...

I've really been around and around trying to figure out how to have a relatively noise free environment while running a solar inverter and shortwave radios at the same time. The first conclusion I have come to is for small radios with their own aerial in the same or next room as the...

Got a Samlex PST-2000-12v inverter to reduce EMI on ham radio. It isn't really much better than the 2000 watt inverter I had before although it doesn't spray higher up the band. The spray stops about 5-6 MHz and the Giandel sprayed pretty much everything. Stupid me just ordered the remote...

I got DIY cells from China. They are not new. They are 200ah cells. They do top off at 14.6v but balancing brings them down every single time to around 3.325 volts which is 13.3 volts as a beginning full charge. Just curious whether this seems normal or not to most. On another system I...

Put my DIY battery in a Group 31 box and will add a disconnect switch later. Kind of a rip off of Will's video with same terminals and such. Works great. I did add a 200amp fuse to the battery after I made the video for all you eagle eyed guys out there. Clip starts with Cocoa, the World's...

I've kind of got the DIY battery bug and looking for something perfect for my small camper. My solar panel situation is this: I have a 100 watt solar suitcase and/or a 100 watt flexible panel. I just built a 200ah battery with cells I got from Alibaba. Battery is working okay. One thing I...

I bought these from Alibaba. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/CATL-3-2V-rated-Lifepo4-200Ah_62338480895.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.0.0.59173f37ojp5Fk I'm convinced they are not new batteries. The Specs say normal voltage is 3.2 (12.8v) and Charging Voltage is 3.65 (14.6v). The...

Took two months to get the cells (kind of expected that). They came with a couple dings in them but work fine. Shipper forgot to pack the busbars so I had to make my own. Other than that I was pleasantly surprised to see the data from the BMS on bluetooth. (Thank goodness I still had an old...

I bought these from Deligreen (Alibaba) https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/CATL-3-2V-rated-Lifepo4-200Ah_62338480895.html?spm=a2700.details.deiletai6.2.71747802EfogWk Never do that again. They came dented up, don't really look brand new and came without the bus bars I ordered. Will have...

Got a 2nd VE.Direct USB cable. One hooked to BMV-712 Battery Monitor and the other hooked to the MPPT 100/50 SCC

Since I'm teleworking (cough, cough) I decided to build a Raspberry Pi 3 with the Victron CCGX software following the directions from here: https://github.com/victronenergy/venus/wiki/raspberrypi-install-venus-image Works like a champ. Have it hooked to my BMV-712 Battery Monitor only...

Added a shunt that I got from eBay. It was one of those 50A in the title, 100A stated everywhere else. Took a chance. Lost. At some point I'll get a 100amp one.

Solution costs a few bucks but interesting reading. https://www.rtl-sdr.com/demonstrating-solar-inverter-noise-cancelling-with-a-timewave-anc-4-and-airspy-hf/

If you had 400 watts of panels and a 100/50 SCC and two Battleborn batteries (100ah ea) would you add a 3rd battery if you had the money. Also 2200 watt inverter. And my current power needs are being met. But expanding is good right?

Took my spare parts and made a "Minimalist". This may not make sense to some but makes perfect sense to me. Here goes. I have a Rockwood A122 A Frame Pop Up Camper. It's also very much a minimalist :) It has a distribution system that I think is not very great and will not fully charge a...

I have Battleborn 100 ah (2 in parallel). Battleborn recommends absorption time at 20-30 mins per 100 ah battery. My absorption times are set to adaptive and generally fall around the 6-10 minute mark. Should I change my absorption rate to fixed and set for 1 hour? Or is adaptive setting ok...

Messing around trying to clean up the build.

I have a Group 27 AGM battery and I installed a battery switch on my camper in a Group 31 box. Perfect fit. If I were to upgrade to the Vmaxtanks SLR125 ah battery it is a Group 31 battery. Anyone know of a box large enough to do what's in the pic below? Battery boxes seem to top off at...

Upgraded to Giandel 2200 watt inverter.

My other hobby. Downloading satellite images from NOAA GOES satellites. No sun for me for a while. Satellite dish in the background

I have two Battleborn 100 ah batteries wired in parallel. We're having a run of sunless days here in NC. Could be that in a day or two I need to charge with shore power with my PD9130L charger. I want to permanently attach the charger to the batteries and only plug in when I need to. When I...

Got my last two panels. Four Renogy 100 watt panels. I briefly considered getting larger panels but for what I'm doing heck, this may be overkill. Anyway I'm kind of proud of this. Pushed the wires into the master bedroom closet where the panel is. Sorry I didn't clean up the mess first :)

Dug my true RMS meter out today and noticed it was a tiny bit off of what the Victron was saying. Did the calibration procedure which was easy but after I did it I thought I'd throw together a quick video to explain the steps. Heck it's really 3 steps. Remove load. Calibrate by pushing a...

I have 2 Battelborn batteries wired in parallel and run a few items off of the system, most notably a TV and a 12v portable refrigerator (Alpicool C20). We had a stretch of almost no sunshine for 3 days and I was still around 68% SOC going into last night. Weatherman said we were going to get...

I'm in a bit of a dilemma here. I had enough left over parts from my build and upgrade to slap another system together. I'm going the DIY battery route this time and I've run into some non-technical issues. First and foremost the battery cells all come out of China. That's fine however I've...

This sickness started about a month ago when I decided to add a super simple solar system to my camper so I can boon dock camp instead of hitting the campgrounds all the time. Got a Renogy 100 watt suitcase with a charge controller. That exposed that my RV camper battery wasn't that great so...