The Busbar

Marine How To published a failure analysis on 18 September built around a 12V LFP pack that split its own steel case open after an MPPT failed. The chain is specific: MOSFETs almost always fail drain-to-source, which turns the controller into a wire; the analog front end that runs the BMS is typically a chip with an 85V absolute maximum; the BMS output FETs are often rated 60V. Rod Collins says ABYC has not addressed it.

The V22 replaces JK's supercapacitor active balancer with a transformer design rated at 0.6A on every current variant. Off-Grid Garage charged a 16S 100Ah pack through it: cell 1 ran to 3.602V, the spread peaked near 170mV, and after one hour fifty-five minutes of balancing it was still 42mV. The V19 does a three-times-larger pack in half an hour.

FarOutRide built a duct, pointed an anemometer down it, and ran both fans at 12.8V. The AirPlus tops out at 495 CFM drawing 22.8W. The Maxxfan reaches 561 CFM — more air than the AirPlus manages flat out — on speed 5 and 12W. The 1,765 CFM on the AirPlus box comes with no test conditions attached.

The SBI20 combines a 2,000W inverter, an 80A mains charger, a 40A MPPT and a 40A alternator booster in one housing; the SBC50 does the charging half alone. Renogy's 4-in-1 makes the same argument in a pre-wired unit. Nobody has published a price, and nobody has said what happens when one quarter of the box dies.

Ben Stein built a multi-page N2K instrument display on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 dev board and had it on the water the same afternoon. It works. It is also unregistered, uncertified and not waterproof, and he says so plainly — which is the part worth reading.

In a 14 August update, Will Prowse said Dragonfly Energy has amended its original complaint, pushing any dismissal ruling out by months. He says he has spent $32,000 of his own money, is refusing viewer donations, and that the forum thread collecting Battle Born failures has passed a hundred posts.

In an 8 August test, Will Prowse pushed EG4, Ruixu and Yixiang large-format 48V batteries to 200A continuous on a new 18kW cycler. The cells were never the limit — an internal fuse running at 220°F and an over-sensitive BMS threshold were.

FarOutRide, the Ford Transit build blog, published the first installment of a reference page it says it will keep updating: real measured power draw for a van's DC and AC appliances, instrumented rather than estimated from spec sheets.

In two videos published 9 and 13 July, Will Prowse capacity-tested twelve Battle Born 100Ah batteries bought in December 2017 and run gently indoors their whole life — all twelve measured between 26.8Ah and 60.2Ah — then tore two down and found most of their parallel cells sitting at 0V. The data lands mid-lawsuit: Dragonfly Energy's trade-libel case against Prowse is still active, and none of these results have been independently verified.

SolarAssistant, the $15 one-time-license Raspberry Pi monitoring layer that sits on top of Deye, Growatt, EG4, Sol-Ark, and Voltronic-clone inverters, released v0.2.0 of an official Home Assistant integration on 2 July alongside a beta firmware build adding REST, WebSocket, and Cloud APIs — replacing a lot of the MQTT workarounds and custom decoders DIY builders have been hand-rolling for years.