As mentioned in a previous post, we have no grid power to our lot, it’s about 650m away and would require a fair amount of money to install, so we’ve decided to set up our house to be “off-grid”, using solar PV panels to charge a large battery bank which will then power standard electrical loads in the house through an AC inverter.

We’ll also have a backup generator (either gas or propane) to recharge our battery bank when there have been too many consecutive days without power.  I think we are going to go with approximately 8kW of PV panels, a 1300Ah battery bank, and a 6kW inverter.  I’ll devote a separate post to each of the main components of the system, and a complete system overview, in a later post!