Mountain Adventures: Life Off-Grid: Solar

Well, it has been quite a ride the first 18 months of living in Black Mountain! The building journey is just beginning, so there’s a lot more to come on our story, but everything starts somewhere!

The property we picked is absolutely breathtaking, but part of what makes it beautiful also makes it challenging. One of those challenges is that most of the property is separated from the road (and utilities) by a very large creek and the Broad River. While upstream, other properties have electricity brought over, ours did not, and to do so was proving complicated and difficult (and expensive). So, since part of our mission is applying classical dressage philosophy to the environment, we opted to go with off-grid solar.

This has been rewarding and challenging all in one. We went with a DIY kit instead of using a company because of the initial cost, but unfortunately, the company we went with initially did not pair components all that well, leading to a lot of issues. After about a year and a lot of help from a client’s spouse, we optimized our inverters, replaced faulty batteries, and got the system working.

Living off-grid is different. You become painfully aware of what uses a lot of power and when to use those things and how to swap to more energy-efficient options. Things like leaving a hose on and the water pump running all night means you wake up with no power in the morning. However, you also realize how many things have gotten quite energy efficient and how you can enjoy a lot of modern conveniences without much adaptation. It’s a great feeling having power even when the rest of the area does not, and even if we do run out of battery storage during a storm, we turn on the generator and reboot the inverters, and within seconds, we’re back in power.

However, solar does have its limitations with cloudy days and limited winter hours. While a generator helps, it’s not a long-term solution for us because of the amount of fossil fuel it takes. Since we do have a river and large creek, we are looking at hydro power for supplementing the solar power. As appealing as hydro is, it is complicated to engineer and install, and when it rains a lot, our creek rises significantly, risking washing away the precious turbines. It also produces “too much” power constantly, and that power has to go somewhere. Small wind backups are also an option, but we haven’t done a lot of research on that.

If you’re looking to go off-grid, here are the biggest pointers:

1: Identify your high-usage machines and either swap them or time their uses appropriately. For us, it’s the camper air conditioner (which is not very efficient anyway), and the clothes dryer. For the air conditioner, we are careful about timing. Luckily, where we are, it’s not atrociously hot most of the time, so we can run the air conditioner just a little bit in the afternoon. However, we still have to be a bit more resilient and tolerate things being warmer than we would if we could run the A/C down to arctic temperatures. For the current tack and feed buildings, we found some inexpensive solar attic fans, and these work beautifully to keep things cooler. As we get further along, we probably will install energy-efficient mini-splits for climate control in these buildings. For the dryer, we’re switching to a propane dryer. While it does use fossil fuels, it is a lot more efficient and uses very little compared to what it takes to generate the electricity it would need. Electric heaters and heat lamps are total power drains. When we raised chicks, we had to switch from heat lamps to heat plates, which really did a good job and let the chicks cuddle up next to it. When we start our actual building process, we will be engineering the buildings to be more insulated and require less energy to heat and cool so that we can minimize our electricity usage.

2: It’s better to have multiple pods than one large station. You lose a lot of power running lines over long distances, so if you have a farm that you want to take off-grid, you’re better off doing multiple smaller stations than one large station. We have one station and are installing a second for the yurts and bedroom cabins. We also have smaller stations for powering little needs, such as the WiFi mesh nodes and the Sr. Priscilla Pavilion by the arena.

3: You cannot have enough battery back-ups. Seriously. We use 3 or 4 portable power stations, which are basically batteries with outlets. I’d keep these around even if we were on-grid. They are so handy for making power portable to areas where extension cords can’t reach. Plus, when we do run out of power, we can have certain vital elements still powered (such as our Starlink internet, as we have zero cell service).

4: This is more in the solar engineering side, but if you have the option to have a battery balancer and you’re debating it, get the battery balancer. For our system, in which the inverters also manage the charge, it reads the total power of the whole bank. However, one battery will always get topped off faster and another will always get topped off last. Unfortunately, the system will read the average. I’m not going to get into battery mechanics, but you never totally drain the batteries. For example, ours will power down at 11v apiece, or 44v per bank of four. The max charge is 14.4v apiece, or 57.6v for the bank. So, if most of your batteries read 13v, and one is at 11.5v and another is at 14v, you may think you’re still okay on battery at 51.5v. All of a sudden, the one battery drains its last half volt, and the whole system turns off. The balancers prevent this and also preserve the life of the batteries.

5: WiFi switches are your friend. We have them for different high-draw areas so that they can go on a timer and turn off before they drain the system (such as for the well pump). It is so handy having these so that you can make sure you don’t have to remember to unplug or turn off different high-power draws.

All in all, while it takes some adaptations and takes more monitoring, we love being off-grid. The independence and knowing that we’re doing our part for the environment makes it worthwhile. We are excited to see how we can further work with alternative energy to develop a truly “green” facility.