General & Introductions Forum

What this board is for

Introductions, orientation, and anything that does not obviously belong on one of the topic boards. If you are new to the idea of living off grid, or new here, this is the place to say what you are working on and what you are stuck on. It is also where questions that cross several systems belong, since a great many off-grid problems are not really about one department.

There is no expectation that you already know the vocabulary. Nobody arrives knowing how a charge controller relates to a battery management system, or why anyone would care about heating degree days, and the questions that feel too basic to ask are usually the ones several other readers also have.

The questions that come up most

Where should I start? Usually with the life rather than the hardware: what the five departments of water, power, heat, waste, and access will actually ask of you, and whether the budget and the household are ready for that. The first lesson of the course is written for exactly this question.

Is this parcel any good? Land questions get better answers when they include the state and county, the acreage, whether there is legal access in writing, whether there is a well or nearby wells, and what the county says about dwellings and septic. Without those, any answer is guesswork.

Am I being quoted a fair price? Usually answerable, if you post what is actually in the quote: array watts, battery capacity and chemistry, inverter continuous and surge ratings, and what is included beyond the equipment.

How long does it take? Longer than the plan, in nearly every account. The build year is the exhausting one and the steady state most people picture tends to arrive in year two or three.

What a useful post looks like

Say where you are, at least the state, because climate and local rules change almost every answer given on this site. Say what stage you are at: dreaming, shopping for land, holding land, mid-build, or living there. Say what you have already read or tried, so nobody spends their evening repeating it.

If money is part of the question, a range is enough and it helps a great deal, because advice that assumes a budget you do not have is worse than no advice. And if you are asking whether to do this at all, say what is drawing you to it. The honest answers to that question vary enormously and so does the advice that follows from them.

Where newcomers most often go wrong

Buying land before checking whether it has water, legal access, or an approvable way to handle wastewater. This is the expensive one, and it is almost always an ordering mistake rather than a knowledge one: the information was available and was sought after the offer rather than before it.

Sizing a power system from a shopping list instead of a load list. Panels, batteries, and inverters are all sized from one number, which is how much energy you actually use in a day, and every hour spent reducing that number is cheaper than the hardware it saves.

Underestimating the first year. Not the money, though that too, but the hours: a build season is evenings and weekends for months on top of whatever job and family you already have, and the pace is set by weather rather than by determination.

And assuming that because a thing is physically possible it is legally permitted. Off-grid rules are local to a degree that surprises people, and what is routine in one county is prohibited in the next.

What is genuinely contested, and what is not

Some questions here have settled answers and it saves everybody time to know which. Sizing arithmetic is settled: watt-hours, peak sun hours, and depth of discharge are not matters of opinion. Direct-current safety is settled: conductor sizing, overcurrent protection at the source, and correct fusing for a battery bank are engineering rather than preference.

Plenty else is genuinely contested and reasonable people run their homesteads differently. Lead acid against lithium in a small, lightly used system. Whether to build to code where nobody inspects. Whether a generator is a design component or a fallback. How much autonomy is enough. Composting toilets against conventional septic where both are permitted.

It is worth saying which kind of question you are asking, because the useful response is different. For the first kind you want the arithmetic; for the second you want several people's experience and the reasoning behind their choices.

Reading the rest of the site

Most questions asked here have a longer answer somewhere on this site, and pointing at it is not a brush-off, it is usually the fastest route to a real answer. The free course covers the decisions in the order they arrive. The calculators do the arithmetic and show their working. The laws section covers what is permitted, state by state and county by county, and marks the gaps as gaps.

The start-here page is the shortest route in for somebody entirely new. The glossary covers the vocabulary. And the journal goes deep on individual subjects, organized by the same topics as these boards.

If something on the site is wrong, saying so here is welcome and useful. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page rather than quietly edited away.

How much of this is regional

Almost all of it. The same question asked in Vermont, Arizona, and coastal Oregon has three different right answers, because heating demand, water availability, winter sun, fire risk, and the local regulatory culture all differ enormously. That is why answers here keep asking where you are, and why a confident national rule of thumb is usually wrong for somebody.

Climate sets the physical design: how much array, how much fuel, how deep the water lines, whether freezing or heat is the season to defend against. Governance sets what is permitted, and it varies not just by state but by county, and in New England by town.

The practical consequence is that advice from a forum is a starting point and the local check is the finish. The laws pages record what public sources say for each jurisdiction, and the site report gives any address its own climate numbers.

Where the money and the risk actually sit

Three categories account for most of the unexpected spending people describe: the wastewater system, because soils decide it and engineered alternatives cost multiples; the access road, because it is priced by the foot and needed by everything; and the first-year operating costs, which are consistently underestimated.

Three categories account for most of the physical risk: anything involving combustion and chimneys, anything involving a battery bank and direct-current wiring, and water systems in a freeze. Those are worth doing conservatively and, where you are unsure, worth paying somebody to do.

If a question here touches one of those six, it is worth saying so, because the useful answer is more careful and more specific than it would otherwise be.

The lesson that covers this

Lesson 1: Is off-grid actually for you? in the free course works through this subject in the order the decisions actually arrive. Decide with your eyes open: what the life costs in money, time, and attention, and what it gives back.

The whole course is twelve lessons, free, with no account required to read any of it: start at the beginning if you are new to this, or jump straight to the lesson above if you are not.

Tools for this topic

Most questions on this board come down to a number somebody has not worked out yet. These do the arithmetic and show their working, so an answer here can be checked rather than taken on faith.

• Tools/planner: a whole system plan from one set of inputs
• Learn: the free twelve-lesson course
• Tools: every calculator on the site

How this board works

Posting needs an account, which exists so that answers have a name attached and so that the same person can be asked a follow-up six months later. It costs nothing and it is not used for anything else.

The conventions here are the ones that make a small forum useful. Say where you are, at least to the state or region, because almost every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules. Say what you have already, and what you have already tried. Give numbers where you have them, and say when you are guessing. And when something works or fails, come back and say which, because the thread is read by far more people than post in it.

Answers here should be able to say where they came from. Experience is welcome and so is a rule of thumb, as long as it is labeled as one. Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the reader on the other end may be about to spend money or wire something themselves.

Boards next door

Off-grid questions rarely stay inside one department. A water question is often a power question underneath, and a land question is usually several at once. These boards field the neighboring subjects:

• Transition & First-Year: What the first year off-grid is really like: honest timelines, the mistakes almost everyone makes, easing in instead of ...
• Land & Real Estate: Finding, vetting, and buying off-grid land and cabins: access and easements, title, perc tests, water rights, zoning and...
• Solar & Power: Panels, power stations, batteries, inverters, and wiring: how to make and store your own electricity, and what actually ...
• Community & Finding Others: You do not have to do it alone: meeting rural neighbors, vetting intentional communities, group buys and mutual aid, and...

Asking a question that gets a good answer

The difference between a thread that gets three useful replies and one that gets none is almost always in the first post. Four things do most of the work: where you are, what you already have, what you have already tried, and what you are actually trying to achieve.

Location matters because nearly every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules, and the same question has different right answers in Vermont and Arizona. What you have matters because advice that assumes different equipment wastes everyone's time. What you have tried stops people repeating it. And the goal matters because the best answer is frequently that the problem should be solved somewhere else entirely: a load reduced rather than a battery added, a parcel checked rather than a design revised.

Numbers beat adjectives. Give the figure where you have one and say plainly when you are guessing, because a guess labeled as a guess is useful and a guess presented as a measurement sends people down the wrong path.

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