Our Offgrid Power Setup | Page 5 | Alternative Energy | Forums

Hi, I'm new here.

We came up to Maine in the spring of 2013.  We had bought 63 acres the year before.  Came up to our property and lived in a pop-up camper the first summer.  Got a small cabin up the next November.  It's small, 18x24 with a second floor (for bedroom) 16x18.

We are in the Mountains and Lakes Region of Western Maine.  The water is clean up here, you can drink the water that flows off the mountain (there's nobody, no houses, no nothing up over the mountain or down over the other side).

I threw a plastic pipe into the stream and fed it into the trailer for running water.  I plumbed it to a propane tankless water heater for a shower, but also plumbed that into the camper so that we had hot and cold water at the sink.  I used a 3,500 watt generator for power.  While there was no power lines along the road past our place, there was phone lines, so we got a land line as well.

We heat the cabin with wood and have a propane wall furnace as a back-up.  The refrigerator is gas, as is the stove and oven.  Since our gas refrigerator is small, we got a small deep freezer, it's only about 7-9 cubic feet.  We dug a well and I put in a shallow well pump.

We powered everything with a 7,500 watt generator (the 3,500 wouldn't run the water pump, too small for us).  We started out running the generator about 16 hours a day.  Wow, was THAT expensive.  We spent $475 a month on gasoline for two months before I bought a small 900 watt generator from Harbor Freight.  We used that 90% of the time and only used the big generator if we needed to pump up the water pressure.  Our fuel cost dropped down to $175 a month.  That little $90 generator paid for itself three times over in the first month.  It was a pain in the butt switching between them, and we didn't have any power if the generator wasn't running.  We could get 2,000 hours on those little generators before they wore out.  There's a trick to starting and using them, if you know the tricks, they will last a long time.

The next summer, I decided that it would be better to turn our system into a hybrid generator-inverter system with a battery bank.  The goal was to have it online by Christmas, which was one of those goals we actually hit.  We took the small generator out of the system and only used the 7,500 watt unit.  This worked good for us.

Six months later, I decided to add some solar panels and a solar charge controller.  We only have four panels on the roof of the cabin right now, but in bright sunshine, they will charge up our battery bank in about an hour and a half.  Our batteries are Trojan AGM 8-D batteries, and we use four of them in a 48v system that is all Xantrex equipment.  We are using the 6048 inverter that I bought used on ebay for $1,800.  It works great.  We are using a Midnight solar combiner box and DC breaker box.  The panels are Solar World from Germany, 30v 300 watt.  The generator is from Harbor Freight.

As has been mentioned, this far north in the winter, we still have to run the generator from time to time.  Our fuel costs for the generator right now in the dead of winter is about $60 a month.  In the summer it will hit about $30 a month if we get a lot of overcast days.

I installed everything, it wasn't all that difficult, but I did get to look at a system that was up and running before I bought anything.  This system will pay for itself in about 5 years with what we are saving over running the two generators.

Right now my most current project is building an electric choke for the generator so that I can make it automatic start and have the electrical system start and stop the generator as needed.  The hour meter for the generator will be indoors so we can log things like oil changes, etc.

This system works fantastic for us.  It powers our electric water pump, the electronic ignition on the stove, television, satellite box, DVD, my component stereo, and my ham radio equipment.  Our electric power is superior to what I can get off the grid.  It's a very 'quiet' power, the sensitive radio equipment doesn't pick up any electrical noise like it did when operating from the grid.

Harvesting sunlight for our electricity doesn't seem any different from harvesting our trees for our heat in the winter.

I do think that another bank of batteries and a couple more panels would do the trick.  That would give us more reserve power and reduce how often we would run the generator.  It might give us enough power to run a safer form of heat, like a pellet stove, too.

This is the cabin in the winter.  Snow got to 5.5' that winter.

This is the inverter, entrance panel, breaker for the generator, solar controller, DC breaker box, a small intelligent charger, and the thing with all the wires dangling from it is a test run of our homemade battery balancer.

Putting the panels on the roof: