I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy. Well - I say “off grid

I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy. Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain. Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves. As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”. It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg. People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.