The Cost of Off Grid Living

My new home has four solar panels, four batteries, and a backup gas generator. In addition, the fridge, stove and hot water tank is propane. Coming into this I knew absolutely nothing about solar. I googled the hell out of the topic and learnt as much as my non technical brain could take in, but reading and doing are certainly two separate things.

I was a little nervous coming into this, worried that I wouldn't have enough power to be able to do my online work. Bottom line, if I cannot work, I cannot pay my bills, not cool!.

It's been a couple of days now, using the solar during the day and running the gas generator two hours each night as directed by the previous owner, and so far so good. I have been able to do all my online work, both my son and I have been able to use our computers at the same time, I ran the fan, washed clothes in the washing machine, filled the water tank (using the pump that requires electricity), and I have been able to watch about 3 hours of TV daily. With the price of gas, it's costing me about $3 a day.

$3 a day is certainly not bill free! However, it is cheaper than what I was paying the government for electric; My average bill was about $200 a month, with about $120 of that being delivery fees, taxes,debt crap and other assorted BS.

I also have to pay for propane. Going by the previous owner the tanks of propane that are here should last me a year, they cost around $600 to fill. So, that works out to about $1.75 a day.

So, now I'm at about $4.75 a day (summer and winter as the year of propane for $600 includes heat; I also have a wood stove so will not need to use the propane heat often)

Well, lets be fair, the solar panels are not going to produce as much energy in winter, so lets up our daily cost to an even $7.

We also need a quart of oil weekly for the generate, and if you don't get it on sale it costs about $6. So let's just put our grand total to $8.

$8 a day, 365 days in a year, so that's about $2920

My old place averaged $200 a months for hydro (averaged out between winter and summer) and about $1200 a year in oil for heat that's about $3600 a year.

We plan on adding more solar panels when we can afford them, which will drop the daily cost even more.

So, is living off grid do-able for the average person? Yep, it totally is!

By living off grid I do not rid myself of all my power bills, but I did managed to drop them by about $600 a year.

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