ROI, page-2

You're starting to get a feel for what's involved in setting up an always-available, reliable, steady power supply that delivers your peak energy requirements as well as your 24-hour background requirement. If you live in suburbia then you get all this from your utility company at what is actually a moderate price.

If you are interested in going off grid you are going to have to radically change your power consumption! For a start, 50kWh/day is pretty high so you'll need some pretty serious generation capacity. On top of that if your consumption is uneven you might be drawing more power during your peaks than a battery (or even a battery+generator) can supply!

As a teen in the 1980's my family lived off the grid for about a decade because of the cost of connecting to the grid across about 2km of countryside. We used a diesel generator (no neighbours, so no issue of manners). We ran the diesel for about an hour during the morning to chill the fridge. In the evening we'd run the generator from about 6pm to 9 or 10pm. The rest of the time our 240V power consumption was zero. We had two 12V lead/acid truck batteries in the roof that powered the lights.

Being off-grid if anything broke we were in the dark until we fixed it... no back-up!

Are you sure you're ready for an off-grid lifestyle?