Archive

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.

Victron announced the Nucleo GX on 3 July — a lower-cost, faster GX communication centre ($266 MSRP) built for ESS and off-grid installations around the Multi RS. It's explicitly not for boats: no VE.Bus, tank, or temperature inputs. A faster Cerbo MK3 aimed at marine installs is coming later this year.

ARCO Marine announced the Zeus Omega on 24 June — a new alternator control system that splits the traditional single-box regulator into a lightweight Control Module near the battery and a sealed Alternator Drive Module bolted directly to each alternator. One Control Module runs up to six ADMs. Pricing starts at $889 for a complete single-alternator system.

On 12 June, Renogy rolled out a new line of N-Type (TOPCon) bifacial solar panels in 100W, 200W and 400W ratings, sitting alongside its existing 250W and 590W bifacial models. The pitch is higher cell efficiency — around 25%, on 16-busbar cells — plus rear-side generation, with Renogy claiming up to roughly 14% extra energy from the back of the panel versus conventional PERC and an 80% bifaciality factor. It's aimed squarely at off-grid, RV and overland users. How much of that rear-side gain you actually see, though, depends entirely on how the panel is mounted — which is the subject of this week's Background.

On 2 June 2026, Dragonfly Energy — the maker of Battle Born Batteries — filed a trade-libel suit against YouTuber William Prowse in Nevada's Second Judicial District Court, alleging his monetised videos misrepresented the design and safety of Battle Born's 100Ah LiFePO4 battery. The complaint claims Prowse removed internal structural parts and tested damaged units outside specification, that he praised the same product before disparaging it, and that he took more than $200,000 in affiliate and advertising payments from Dragonfly over the years before publicly denying the relationship. Dragonfly seeks damages and an injunction. These are unproven allegations in a civil complaint, and the suit escalates the terminal-failure dispute we covered in April into a courtroom.

Rod Collins (MaineSail / Marine How To) reports that the DIY LiFePO4 house bank he built from GBS prismatic cells in 2009 — date-stamped May 2009, in service on his boat since early 2010 — has just turned 17 and still meets roughly 100% of its original rated capacity on a calibrated capacity test. By his earlier accounting the bank had passed 2,500 cycles, most around 80% depth of discharge, by 2023. It's one documented bank, not a study — but it's a rare long-horizon data point on LFP calendar life, and the practices Collins credits are the usual unglamorous ones: never park it full, no float, conservative voltages.

Venus OS v3.73 landed on 19 May. The headline fix for existing installs: a Dynamic ESS bug that caused the Multi RS to throttle solar production while charging from the grid is resolved. The release also adds support for the VM-3P5A energy meter, Carlo Gavazzi EM530-RG and EM530-MV meters, and three new Bluetooth tank senders (Mopeka Pro-200B, Garnet SeeLeveL SOUL and 709-BTP7). A point release, but the DESS fix matters to anyone running a Multi RS on Dynamic ESS.

Governor Wes Moore signed HB 1532 (the Utility RELIEF Act) on 12 May, putting Maryland's plug-in solar provisions on the books. Residential customers may run portable PV up to 1,200W per utility meter from 1 October; devices rated 391W or less are exempt from UL certification; systems above that must be UL-listed (or by an equivalent national lab). No utility fees, no interconnection process — but customers must notify their utility and may be required to pay for an automatic locking disconnect switch. Maryland is the fifth US state to legalise plug-in solar, days before Colorado's HB 26-1007 (1,920W cap) follows.

REDARC has its biggest North-American product week of the year. The RS3 pure-sine inverter range — 1200W, 2000W and 3000W with integrated automatic transfer switches, RV-C compatibility, and full output to 104°F — is now listed and priced on the US site, with the 3000W variant at $1,319. The RS3 family debuts at Overland Expo West in Flagstaff (15–17 May), alongside the new REDWorks pre-wired Power Panel range (Scout 25 to QuickFit 100A) and a stripped-down REDVision Essentials Display. The combined launch is REDARC's strongest US-installer pitch in years.

Ben Stein's LiFePO4 cycle-life test on the Panbo bench has passed 1,100 cycles on the original WattCycle 100Ah Mini and 500 cycles on a newly added Blue Heron 100Ah Extreme Series. WattCycle's degradation rate has slowed and projections now point at 3,000–4,000 cycles to 80 % SOH — well short of the 5,000-cycle marketing claim, but more than enough for serious marine use.

Battle Born published a technical note on 31 March arguing that the failures documented across forums, autopsies, and Will Prowse's bench are an intentional 'passive thermal fuse' that triggers around 85 °C. Will Prowse and RV-electricity's Mike Sokol have both responded — Prowse with a video disputing the framing, Sokol with a controlled load-bank test now under way.

Victron's new Microgrid solution lets separate, standalone inverter/charger installations synchronise on a shared AC bus using frequency droop — no communication cabling between units, no central controller, scalable to 400kW with existing MultiPlus and Quattro hardware.