Showing the wife how to switch out propane tanks on the generator.

We use propane to power our generator when we don't get enough sunlight to charge our batteries up during the 6 months of winter here. (The generator charges the batteries through a chargeverter rather than powering the house directly since it's not "clean" power and could shorten the life of our inverters pretty dramatically). We've got a nice Champion 10K generator that allows us to charge those batteries fairly quickly. The wife learns pretty quickly those things we need to know to survive off-grid.

[@burrpenick]

Cant remember if you said, but is running a power line to your house out of site price wise? I know you did a well and was thinking you were not going to have to, but is seem like a wire would sure make life easier!

[@AlAndValOffGrid]

Running a line to the house would have cost us more than our entire solar system and we'd still be stuck with monthly payments, power outages and keeping corporate CEOs in yachts. I'd been researching off-grid living for a few years prior to making this move, so I'd already pretty much made up my mind to do it. The huge expense just to run a line to the house was just the final nail in the connected coffin. We've never looked back.