Advice
Procedures, in the order they are done
Every page here follows one job through from first measurement to last check, and names the step that everything downstream depends on. Products appear only where a procedure genuinely needs one. Where the answer turns on your vehicle, your building or a limit the maker sets, the page hands over to the documentation and to the rules where you live.
Getting started
The first hours with a station, a battery or a balcony kit — what to check before anything is plugged in.
- The first hours with a power station: in the order that matters A power station works the moment it comes out of the box, which is exactly why most people never find out what it actually does until the evening they depend on it. An hour spent deliberately is worth more than the manual.
- Setting up a monitor: the settings that make it true A battery monitor is easy to install in a way that produces confident, wrong numbers for years. The difference is one wiring rule and four settings, none of which the default values get right.
Sizing a system
Adding up a real load in watts and watt-hours, then choosing the battery, the inverter and the panel that fit it.
- Sizing a system: start with a measured load list Every off-grid system is designed from one number: the energy consumed in a day. Everything else — battery, inverter, panels, cable — follows from it, and a system designed without it is a guess with a receipt.
- Falling behind: find the shortfall before buying anything A system that used to last the weekend and now does not has changed in one of four ways, and only one of them is solved by a bigger battery. The monitor usually already holds the evidence.
Solar setup
Orientation, shade, series against parallel, and matching a panel to the controller or station that will charge from it.
- Solar setup: shade, angle and the controller window Most disappointing solar installations are not underpowered. They are shaded, badly angled, or wired into a controller whose input window they never enter — three problems that are free to avoid on paper and expensive to fix on a roof.
- Extending an array: what the controller will accept Adding a panel to an array is not the same as buying one, because the new module has to coexist electrically with the old ones and with a controller that was chosen for a smaller array.
Wiring & safety
Cable sizes, fuses at the battery, isolators, earthing — and where the maker’s instructions and the local rules take over.
- Wiring and protection: size the cable, protect the cable At 12 V, a modest appliance draws a current that would be alarming at mains voltage, and current is what heats cable and joints. That single fact is behind nearly every rule on this page.
- Bad joints: they announce themselves as heat Joints do not fail suddenly. They gain resistance over months, warm under load, oxidise faster because they are warm, and only then fail — which leaves a long window in which they can be found.
Off-grid living
Vans, boats and cabins: charging from three sources, running a fridge, and surviving a week of cloud.
- Off-grid living: three sources, one battery Nobody lives off-grid on solar alone. A van that works in November runs on three charging sources that take turns, and the design question is which one carries the load in the worst week rather than the best.
- The bad week: plan for it rather than hope past it Every off-grid installation eventually meets a week where solar contributes almost nothing. The systems that cope were not bigger — they had a plan for which loads matter and which charging source takes over.
Buying
How to spread a budget between the battery, the inverter and the cable, and which upgrade can wait until the first one is understood.
- Buying: spend on the parts that cannot be changed later A power system is not one purchase, and the parts differ enormously in how easily they can be revisited. Spending in the order of permanence rather than in the order of excitement is what keeps an installation from being rebuilt twice.
- Specification sheets: the qualifiers are the specification Almost every headline number on this shelf is true and incomplete. The qualifier that makes it comparable — a duration, a depth, a distance, a load — is the part that gets left off, and its absence is itself a piece of information.
Care & maintenance
Storage charge, winter, cleaning panels, checking torque on terminals, and the annual look at what has loosened.
- Care and maintenance: the checks that catch things early A battery system has very little to maintain and a small number of things that fail slowly enough to be caught. Nearly all of them announce themselves as heat, a drifting reading, or a state of charge that never quite returns to full.
- Once a year: the list that takes an afternoon A fixed installation asks for very little, and what it asks for is an afternoon once a year with a meter and a notebook. Nearly everything that fails gives a year of warning to anyone who looks.