MikeAug 24, 2026Sign in or create a free account to reply.
The forum is new and every board is open. These are the other live threads:
The full topic guide for this subject, including the questions that come up most and the mistakes that cost the most, is on the Heating & Cooking board.
Wood stoves, rocket stoves, propane, heating oil, cookstoves, chimneys, and the building envelope that decides how much of any of them you need. In a cold climate the energy a house needs for warmth dwarfs everything electrical it will ever do, which is why heat gets its own board and why almost nobody heats off grid with electricity.
Cooking belongs here too, including the seasonal problem: a wood cookstove that is a pleasure in February makes a small house unbearable in July, and most households end up with a summer arrangement of some kind.
How much wood will I burn? A function of climate, building, and how you burn, which is why answers vary so widely. A moisture meter and a season of records will tell you more than any table, and wood wants splitting and stacking a year ahead, longer for dense hardwood.
What size stove? Smaller than instinct suggests, usually. An oversized stove in a small, well-insulated cabin gets run choked down and smoldering, which is the condition that builds creosote fastest and the most common route to a chimney fire.
Will a heat pump work off grid? In milder climates, in a well-insulated house, or as a shoulder-season option paired with wood, often yes. Carrying a northern winter on solar alone is a different proposition, because demand peaks exactly when production is at its annual minimum.
Is an unvented propane heater safe indoors? Not as a primary source in a tight house. Carbon monoxide is odourless, and a modern sealed envelope makes unvented combustion considerably more dangerous than it was in a drafty building.
A thread is a record of what worked for particular people in particular conditions, which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly what makes it dangerous to apply directly. Off-grid outcomes depend heavily on climate, on local rules, and on the equipment already installed, and the same advice can be sound in one place and wrong two states away.
So when reading, check the conditions before the conclusion. Where does the person live, what do they run, and for how long have they run it? A recommendation from somebody in a mild climate with abundant sun is not a recommendation for a northern winter, and a rule about septic or dwellings from one county says nothing reliable about the next.
Check the date, too. Equipment, prices, and regulations all move, and threads persist. A battery recommendation from several years ago may describe a product that has been superseded twice, and an ordinance may have been amended since anyone here read it.
Weight experience by specificity. An answer that names the equipment, the numbers, and what went wrong is worth considerably more than one that expresses a preference. Where a claim touches safety, code, or law, look for a source, because this is the category where a confident wrong answer causes real harm: direct-current faults, combustion appliances, chimneys, and county requirements are not places for approximation.
And treat anything about the rules as a starting point rather than an answer. The laws section of this site records what public sources say for each state, county, and New England town, with the sources listed and the unconfirmed parts marked as unconfirmed, and every one of those pages ends by telling you to confirm with the office that will issue your permit. That is not a disclaimer, it is the only honest advice available on a subject this local.
The most useful reply to an old thread is frequently the one that says what happened next. If you tried what was suggested here, saying whether it worked, what it cost, and what you would do differently turns a question into a resource. That includes the failures: an approach that did not work, described honestly, saves the next reader more than a success does.
If you are adding new advice, add the conditions with it: your location, your equipment, how long you have run it, and how confident you are. If you are asking a follow-up, say what is different about your situation, because that difference is usually where the useful answer lives.
Posting needs a free account, which exists so that answers carry a name and so that the same person can be asked a follow-up later. Reading needs nothing at all.
And if something in this thread contradicts a guide, a calculator, or a laws page on this site, please say so. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page with the date rather than quietly edited away, and readers who have called the county or run the equipment are the most reliable source of correction this site has.
Three kinds of claim turn up in threads like this one, and they age at completely different rates. Knowing which is which is most of the skill in reading a forum usefully.
Physics does not age. Watt-hours, peak sun hours, depth of discharge, head and flow, heat loss through an assembly, and the current a conductor can carry are the same this decade as last. Advice grounded in that arithmetic stays reliable, and it can be checked rather than trusted: every calculator on this site publishes its formula and constants for exactly that reason.
Products age quickly. Battery chemistry economics have shifted substantially within a few years, inverters gain and lose features across firmware revisions, and model names persist across silent changes to what is in the box. A specific recommendation from an old thread is worth reading for the reasoning and worth re-checking for the product. The spec tables carry current published figures with the date each was recorded.
Rules age unpredictably. An ordinance can be amended without notice to anyone outside the county, and a rule reported accurately three years ago may be wrong now. Worse, rules do not generalise across boundaries, so a correct answer for one county is not evidence about the next one. Anything on this board about zoning, dwellings, septic, greywater, rainwater, wells, or utility connection should be confirmed against the laws pages and then against the office itself.
Prices age fastest of all, and they move regionally as well as over time. The price index tracks the market ranges with dates attached, which is more useful than any figure quoted in a thread.
The obvious objection to a quiet board is that a busy one has more answers. In this subject that is less true than it looks, because the volume on large general forums is dominated by the questions that are easiest to ask and the answers that are cheapest to give, and off-grid questions are neither.
A useful answer here depends on knowing the climate, the county, the equipment, and the stage of the build, and those details get lost at scale. What tends to survive on a large board is the confident general claim, which is exactly the kind of answer that gets somebody a system that works in April and fails in December, or a plan that is legal in the county the advice came from and prohibited in theirs.
A smaller board has the opposite failure mode: fewer answers, arriving more slowly, but from people who read the whole question and say where they are. It also means a question does not disappear under twenty others within an hour, and that a thread from two years ago is still findable and still being added to.
The other thing a small board can do is stay attached to a body of written work. Every board here links the guides, the course lesson, and the calculators that cover its subject, so a question that has already been answered at length gets pointed at that answer rather than answered again badly. That is a deliberate arrangement rather than an apology for being new.
None of which means a quiet board is better than a busy one in every respect. It means the trade is real rather than one-sided, and that the answer to a genuinely local, genuinely technical question is more likely to be useful when the person answering it has read the whole thing and knows where you are. If you have experience with the subject of this thread, adding it is the thing that makes that true.
A thread is rarely the whole answer to an off-grid question, because most of them depend on numbers that belong to your own site rather than to the person asking. If this discussion is close to your situation but not quite it, the fastest route is usually to get your own figures first and then ask the narrower question.
The site report gives any address its real worst-month sun hours, heating degree days, frost dates, design low, and distance to services. The laws pages give the county position on the eight rules that decide off-grid legality, with sources. The calculators turn those into an array size, a fuel quantity, or a storage volume, and show their working so an answer here can be checked rather than believed.
With those in hand, a follow-up post tends to get a much better response, because it asks something specific that somebody with comparable conditions can answer from experience rather than in general terms.
If this thread is close to your question but not quite it, the board list covers the whole subject area, and each board carries a topic guide that works as a standing answer to the questions that come up most.
For the arithmetic behind most of what gets discussed here, the calculators show their formulas and constants, and the system planner sizes a whole design from one set of inputs rather than one component at a time. For the reasoning in order, the free twelve-lesson course runs from deciding whether the life suits you through to the first year on the land. For location-specific numbers, the site report gives any address its real sun, climate, and distance figures.
New here, or not sure where this fits? Start here walks through the whole thing in order.