Living off the Grid, Part II: Northern Exposure

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KT: I have to operate it for 2-4 hours a week. But that's during the winter and while operating some pretty energy-hungry power tools. If I had decided to build in May, I wouldn't have needed it nearly as much.

MOTHER:Eventually the system's going to power the entire household, right?

KT: Sure.

MOTHER:With the addition?

KT: Right.

MOTHER:Will a larger home require a much larger solar system?

KT: There's still only two of us, my wife and I. When it might get taxed is on the holidays, which usually occur in the winter. If we have a number of friends up, are burning more lights, and making more coffee, the generator will have to come on.

And down the road a bit I hope to get a generator that uses propane instead of gasoline as well as an automatic start that kicks the generator on as soon as the batteries are depleted past a certain point.

If we find later that we badly need more power, we will expand by adding just one more bank of PV panels and a comparable amount of extra batteries. Everything is modular. It's not a big problem to do that.

MOTHER:What kind of work was involved in putting the system together?

KT: I did the basic wiring. But again, most of the electrical equipment is modular. It's easy to put together and all of the connections are color coded. And believe me, I'm no electrician and definitely not a mechanic of any sort. For example, I hate working on cars.

This whole process should be easy anyway. People need to know that they can do it. But years ago it was different. In the late '70s and early '80s, it was daunting to just look at an alternative energy catalog. There were dozens of components to even simple systems. And they all needed to be wired together. I can remember thinking, "Who's going to provide all the different components, and how do the charge controllers connect, and how do you connect them to this? Which one goes where?" New powercenters unify nearly all of those disparate parts into one simple box, and the connection wires are standardized so it's much tougher to make a mistake.

I still had to be careful each step of the way, though, especially when the time came to hook up the battery bank. The wires from the battery bank and the banks's connections to the powercenter have to be handled with extreme caution. Anytime I worked near the bank, I removed any tools or utility knives and I wore protective gloves and safety glasses the entire time. There's no such thing as being too careful around a battery bank.

MOTHER:What about the wiring inside the house to the outlets. Are you planning to do all that yourself?

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