Solar panels, not for motorhome, but for garden use

Now, I bought these solar panels, the controller and the leisure battery about 3-4 years ago when I had a wonderful little Japanese Kei-car van:

It was a great little 660cc powered van that we used to ferry around the basset hounds in - my plan was to fit the 2xsolar panels to the roof and allow us to have proper electricity in the van for making cups of tea / coffee and maybe have a small induction cooker or something.  However, the basset hounds passed away  (they did make it to a glorious 12years) and the solar panel kit moved from the back of the garage into the kitchen; where I then hooked up the solar panels onto the top of the wooden pagoda things outside the backdoor of the kitchen.  I t really was more of a "test" setup to see how it all worked.  The panels did their job, the controller did its thing, the battery got charged and I used to use it to charge the PS4 controllers and the odd phone every now & then.  Then we had a huge storm hit us called Storm Eunice

I think I got off a bit lightly with the solar panels being ripped off the pagoda (yes they were nailed down - there's the issue, should have used screws..hindsight & all that), others did not get off so lightly:

I picked up the remains of the severed cabling and the panels and placed them, as you do, in the kitchen, leant again a wall for "future repair".

Zoom forward until this weekend.... where I thought, y'know what I think I'll repair those solar panels and get them back out in the garden doing something useful, like powering some lights; or powering some of the pond water pumps; or powering my "yet to be built/invented automated watering system".

After spending far too long hunting for the soldering iron....and then trying to find the tiny container with the actual solder in it (still haven't found the actual solder I was looking for), I set about dismantling the solar panels to repair them - they were in a pretty bad state, but nothing was broken.

I then set everything up outside, I think that's a good re-use of a "greenhouse" structure where herbs/plants got cooked/died because they got scorched by too much sun - perfect place for solar panels!

After spending far too long fiddling around and attempting to figure out the cabling for the solar panels to connect to the controller (it was totally illogical, honestly!), I had it setup & charging the battery:

The eagle-eyed will notice there are 2xbatteries - that is because whilst I was trying to get the solar panel cables setup right, I thought that maybe the leisure battery was too far gone, it was reading 7.7volts - I put the smaller battery in place (can't remember what vehicle that came out of, again was in the back of the garage?!) and that showed 10volts.  That's when I then did a fair bit of googling to make sure that I had the cabling setup right:

I got there in the end & the solar panels started to pass their power into the controller & out to the battery and within 30mins the leisure battery was up to 11volts and by the next morning was at 12volts - albeit the lack of sun meant it didn't get much higher - I will still keep an eye on it, just incase it has gone "too far" down and if so, will swap it out.  The inverter (red thing) that I have in the photo is just a small one, whereas I do have a 3000w inverter that I do plan to use to then be able to power various garden related items - again, this was something that was bought many years ago & has just sat there waiting to be used!

The irony is now that we've had the hottest heatwave for the past couple of months - it's due to rain, have thunderstorms etc..etc...etc... next week - so I'm not doing anything extra with this setup, apart from potentially bringing it into the conservatory if it starts raining!

I do have a plan to go visit Wilko to get some of those "really useful box/containers" - so that I can flip them upside down to cover / protect the inverter and the battery, but still allow for airflow around and underneath them - if that makes sense.  If anyone see's a flaw in this, let me know.