xtry51
NES Member
Looking to see if anyone in NH or MA who has built their own solar system might consider letting my wife and I see it in person and pick your brain on ideas.
The current will-certainly-change situation. Kids are getting older, 2nd of 3 is a year away from leaving the nest. Wife and I are looking at buying a large piece of land or farm (>100acres) while we keep the current house and one of the 3 kids takes it over. Either we're going to build a new house or basically gut whatever we buy to the studs and start completely from scratch.
The ambitious long term power goal. Both the wife and I want an off grid solar for basic things lights, fridge, freezers, well pump up front. I would likely later clone whatever we build to take over as much as possible in house (TVs, computers, small appliances etc). We'd also have a garage with workshop and several sheds (chickens, goats, etc) and would like to plan independent systems to support those as well so possibly a 3rd and 4th smaller clones.
We realize doing this will each be high $ projects. We realize we will need to have regular utilities to support some items, especially the shop equipment I have. We have started making a list of current power usages and categorizing them into need, want and wish lists. We're also going to pull our power usage history for last two years.
We're trying to learn as much as we can and are not going to pay a company to do it for us as that would defeat the purpose of being self sufficient. The point is to understand how it all works and how to fix it if necessary ourselves. Plus we enjoy doing everything ourselves. So I'm basically reaching out to the hive here so hopefully someone can piss all over our cheerios and point out where not to go majorly wrong out of the gate and at least have enough knowledge to start a budgeting process. This is likely a 2-5 year from now move as we're hunting for exactly what we want in a property, not just jumping on what's available today.
So, any generous people who love telling engineers they are wrong and/or idiots?
The current will-certainly-change situation. Kids are getting older, 2nd of 3 is a year away from leaving the nest. Wife and I are looking at buying a large piece of land or farm (>100acres) while we keep the current house and one of the 3 kids takes it over. Either we're going to build a new house or basically gut whatever we buy to the studs and start completely from scratch.
The ambitious long term power goal. Both the wife and I want an off grid solar for basic things lights, fridge, freezers, well pump up front. I would likely later clone whatever we build to take over as much as possible in house (TVs, computers, small appliances etc). We'd also have a garage with workshop and several sheds (chickens, goats, etc) and would like to plan independent systems to support those as well so possibly a 3rd and 4th smaller clones.
We realize doing this will each be high $ projects. We realize we will need to have regular utilities to support some items, especially the shop equipment I have. We have started making a list of current power usages and categorizing them into need, want and wish lists. We're also going to pull our power usage history for last two years.
We're trying to learn as much as we can and are not going to pay a company to do it for us as that would defeat the purpose of being self sufficient. The point is to understand how it all works and how to fix it if necessary ourselves. Plus we enjoy doing everything ourselves. So I'm basically reaching out to the hive here so hopefully someone can piss all over our cheerios and point out where not to go majorly wrong out of the gate and at least have enough knowledge to start a budgeting process. This is likely a 2-5 year from now move as we're hunting for exactly what we want in a property, not just jumping on what's available today.
So, any generous people who love telling engineers they are wrong and/or idiots?