I was about to ask how's the cheap solar charge controller working out then I read that it's not as good.
I had one of these back home to power my hydroponics system, using a 20W solar panel. It worked "well" until there were cloudy days that the charge controller couldn't simply provide enough output to charge the battery. We used a normal car battery for that.
After a few days the battery was dead because it wasn't being charged, so we decided to scrape it and run our hydroponics connected to the grid instead.
If you're feeling adventurous, there is a MPPT chip that you can use for your electronics projects (though the only time I tried it I managed to burn the chip and couldn't find it anywhere in local stores, buying from AliExpress would take months to arrive) is the LT3652, though it's rated for 2A only. I believe you can find bulkier chips for higher PV wattage.
EDIT:
> The number one lesson is to 4x your power needs. 4x your watts and 4x your battery amp hours. Don't cheap out on charge controllers.
I have installed a PV system on my home back in 2019 and the rule of thumb we found out as well is, if you're building a PV system for a house and use inverters, you should also not go cheap on inverters (i.e. go for cheap chinese brands).
We have a Fronius inverter and it works wonders, much better than the other cheap brands and it has a lot of interfaces you can use it to retrieve data from.
Another useful thing, if you buy an inverter rated for, say, 2kWp, you can safely overdesign your system to provide at least 20% (I don't remember the exact percentage) more power than the peak wattage your inverter supports. Reason for this is that because you can't predict clouds and bad weather, having a few extra panels will compensate the performance loss and will make sure you're always running at peak performance. It will also help a lot during off-peak hours. Of course, the extra panels won't magically bring you to peak performance if you have a very cloudy, dark day. But if you have some clouds, you can get a very big performance hit and you can compensate that by having more panels than your inverter is designed for.
So, for example, if the inverter is designed for 2kW, you can build your system to produce 2.4kW.
Another suggestion is to split your arrays in as many strings as your inverter suggests. They will operate like if they were independent systems, so if you have cloud covering one string, bringing its output power down, it won't affect the other string (assuming the cloud is only covering one of the strings). If they were under the same string, any shade on any of the solar panels would severely affect the output of that string.