Off Grid Living

Off Grid living is different to taking for granted the unlimited amount of electricity you have available when connected to the grid, but not much! The golden rule is not to use your precious stored power that has taken all day from solar panels or hours of generator running to boil a kettle, run an electric heater or indeed anything to do with heating. Heating takes an enormous amount of power and will need a larger solar panel system and a much larger (and more expensive) battery bank. Using bottled gas or a wood fired boiler for all heating tasks will keep the initial cost of your system down and ensure your system runs more efficiently. Saying that, we can incorporate some heating requirements into the your system design if you really need to, but it will increase the system size to cope.

How Much Power?

Use our easy to complete form that will add up all the power used on the appliances and lights you use every day, along with an estimate of how many hours a day each. A daily amount of Kw you need will allow us to provide a cost of the system size you will need. Once completed, email it over to us, or simply tell us how much power you need to use every day. We will then be able to work out an ideal system size for you. Remember to take into account any future devices you may want to add, and take those into account.

What System Type for Me?

As standard, we supply either a basic battery and inverter combination together with all ancillary items to provide you with a 230v AC system that will be hooked up to a generator. With this option you will need to run the generator during the day, which will both charge the batteries and allow you to use higher demand appliances such as washing machines and power tools at the same time. Once the generator shuts down, you will continue to have 230v AC power. For most electric start generators, such as Hyundai or Kipor, we can integrate an auto start relay that will start the generator when the batteries run low.

Adding a Solar Panel option will allow you to only need that generator to run on occasion to boost the batteries in times of low sunlight, such as the Winter. Having the solar panels added on will keep your fuel bills low and allow the whole system to operate quietly most of the time. Depending on your daily use, we will be able to recommend a suitable size solar panel system to connect to the basic setup