We live on 40 acres and don't use that much power. Been tracking since we moved here years ago. We planned on moving and the market sucks and we realized our current property is 90% is what we want anyways.

Long story short we are staying at our current house. We heated last year 90% wood as the wife works from home. Though we had the furnace fan running to circulate the heat. Worked great.
We just did not leave the stove on if we had to both leave.

our house is 1500 sq. ft. Everything LED and propane water heater and stove. We have freezers and soon a freeze dryer that I know draws some power.

we want either the Grid Inter-tied Residential Solar Power System with Battery Backup and maybe Off Grid Solar Power Systems.

Just curious what other homesteaders have (why I'm not posting on GD)
We normally do 500 kilowatt hours a month and our extreme is 1000 (AC running or other extreme weather)

Thanks

Lots of good videos on YouTube for DIY applications.


Sub 1000 kWh is relatively cheap, even with the battery storage. I run about 3800 kWh a month and I am looking to do a green tie system for about $60k.  Just in the research stage right now. 0ST for more information.

House is all electric except for wood heat. By the way our wood heat is very efficient (2 1/2 cords/yr) and requires very little to no tending.
House is 2700sq ft approx. 2 freezers, well pump, lift pump for septic, iron filter, water softener, workshop (approx 900sq ft) heated with in floor hydronic, and so on. No lack of electrical uses at the place. Rarely use the A/C tho as the house is insulated very well.
Just wife and I. We are both home all day so we are using power all day long.
Looking at our electric bill for the month of May we used 972kwh from the grid and we generated 535kwh that was sent back to the grid.
SO according to WE energies we used 437kwh (not actual tho). This May was cold and cloudy. As a comparison May of 21 according to WE we used only 142kwh.

Have no easy way to check how much we generated and actually used tho. We have system setup to charge batteries 1st, use power in house 2nd and send excess back to grid 3rd. So the mystery is how much we actually generate and use in the place.

We have 10K of panels and 8 6v battery backup.
The battery backup is just for backup, its never used otherwise.
So it gets used maybe 2-3 times a year for maybe 2-6hrs.

All that said could we be off grid? No, not without drastic change in usage and more batteries.
We looked at going off grid when we built the place. Cost us 12K at the time to run power in. Could of just about tripled battery storage.

Longest outage of power was approx 30 hrs in Aug. a couple of years ago. When power goes out we have to watch our usage, no TV, no cooking on electric stove, no clothes washing. Just the basics to get by. Over night our batteries get beat down to suggested limits. But after 2-3 hrs next day (sunny day) our batteries were charged and ready to go. So at that point it was use as much power as we can otherwise its wasted. That day plus made it clear that we needed alot more battery to be off grid.  And that was Aug,one of the peak generation months.

Winter power outage would be much worse. More cloudy days, less hrs.

Our Panels are at a 45 degree tilt on a south facing roof. I clean panels as far up as I can reach after snow. About 2/3 the way up. They will usually melt clean within a day after the snow stops. So every snow day really knocks down production for 1-2 days.
At these times we would be dead after very short period of time as we sit now without grid.