The off-grid site report

What is in a report

• The local rules: the county's verdict on all eight off-grid questions (zoning, tiny homes and RVs, building permits, septic and composting toilets, greywater, rainwater, wells, utility disconnection), linked to the full page with sources.
• The sun and weather, for real: peak-sun hours by month (and the worst month, which is what sizes an off-grid system), annual rain and snow, heating degree days, frost dates, and the design low, from 30-year records.
• The ground: elevation, and the county and ZIP the spot sits in.
• How far help is: straight-line distance to the nearest hospital, fire station, hardware store, and grocery.
• Next steps: one click runs the solar, heat, water, and garden calculators with this spot's real numbers already filled in.

Everything here is pulled from public datasets for the spot you enter (ZIP-level climate data). It is a researched starting point for planning, not a survey, not legal advice, and not a substitute for calling the county and walking the land.

How to read the report

The report is arranged in the order the questions actually matter. The verdict card comes first because the local rules decide whether anything else is worth costing out: a parcel where a permanent dwelling cannot be permitted is not a cheap parcel, it is a different product. Read the eight verdicts, then read the ones marked unclear or varies, because those are the calls you will have to make yourself. The full county page behind the card carries the sources.

The climate block is next, and the number to look at is not the annual sun figure but the worst month. An off-grid system that meets its load on the annual average will fall short in the darkest month by the difference between those two numbers, which is exactly when heating fans, pumps, and lights are working hardest. The gap between the two is the single most useful figure on the page for sizing a system, and lesson four covers turning it into a load list.

Heating degree days tell you how much heating the building will need over a season, which is what decides fuel volume and whether a second heat source is worth having. Frost dates give the growing season. Snow tells you about roof load, driveway work, and whether a ground mount will be buried in the month it matters. The design low is the number that sets freeze protection and whether a lithium battery bank can live in an unheated space, which it cannot.

The distance block looks like trivia and is not. The fire station figure is one of the inputs insurers use to rate rural property, and some carriers decline off-grid or owner-built structures outright. The hospital figure decides what your medical planning has to cover in the gap. All distances are straight line, so road miles are longer, and in winter longer again.

Where the numbers come from, and what they cannot tell you

Climate figures are 30-year normals for the nearest ZIP, not for your parcel. Over a few miles that is usually close enough for planning; across a valley, a ridge, or a thousand feet of elevation it is not. Sun figures describe the resource arriving at the location and know nothing about your particular horizon, so a site behind a ridge or inside tall conifers will produce less than the number suggests, especially in winter when the sun is low. Walk the building site and look south before you trust any solar figure.

Distances are computed straight line from the coordinates to the nearest matching feature in public mapping data. That data is good but not complete, and a small volunteer fire station or a rural clinic may not be listed. Elevation is from a public terrain model and is reliable within the limits of its resolution.

The rules come from the county or town research on this site, which is generated from public sources and cites them. Where a county has not been researched individually it inherits its state framework and says so. None of it is legal advice, and ordinances change without telling us. The report is designed to get you to the right questions quickly, not to answer them finally.

Using it to compare parcels

The report is most useful when you run it on several candidate parcels and set the results side by side, because the differences are where the decisions live. Two parcels an hour apart can differ by a month of growing season, by a meaningful share of winter sun, by whether a composting toilet is recognized, and by whether the nearest responding fire station is close enough to matter to an insurer.

A workable order is this: run the report, discard anything whose rules make your plan impossible, then use the climate numbers to cost the two or three that remain. The solar calculator, heat-loss calculator, rainwater calculator, and garden calculator all accept this spot's real numbers, so the comparison ends in dollars rather than impressions. The cost estimator turns that into an annual figure you can put next to your income.

Then move from data to ground truth. The parcel check looks at a specific parcel by its parcel number or coordinates and pulls flood, wetland, slope, and access information with its sources shown. The land walk checklist is what to carry on the visit, and the questions for the county is what to ask on the phone. Lesson two puts the whole sequence in order.

What it does not do

It does not tell you whether a well will hit water, what a septic system will cost on that soil, whether legal access is recorded, what the covenants say, or what the parcel is worth. Those come from a driller, a soil evaluator, a title search, the recorded documents, and a local agent respectively. It does not know about a neighbor's planned quarry, a seasonal road closure, or the fact that the track you drove in on crosses someone else's land.

Used for what it is, it removes a great deal of guesswork in about twenty seconds, and it makes the expensive checks cheaper by telling you which parcels deserve them.

A worked example of reading one

Suppose a report comes back with a worst month around 2.5 peak sun hours against an annual average near 4.5, roughly 7,000 heating degree days, 90 inches of snow, a design low well below zero, and the nearest fire station 14 miles away. None of those numbers is a verdict on the parcel. Together they describe a specific build.

The solar figures say an array sized on the annual average would be short by something like 45 percent in December, so the design needs either close to twice the array, or a generator and a fuel budget, or a load list small enough that the gap does not matter. The heating figure says wood or another serious fuel will be a year-round job and that the envelope deserves more money than the appliance. The snow figure says the roof, the driveway, and the placement of a ground mount are all real design questions rather than details.

The design low says every part of the water system must be below frost, drainable, or heated, and that a lithium bank cannot live in an unheated shed. The fire distance says talk to an insurance agent who writes rural policies before choosing how to build, because it may change what is insurable. That is five design decisions from one screen, and none of them required a site visit to reach.

Now change one thing. A parcel 40 miles south with 3.4 hours in its worst month and 5,000 heating degree days is a materially cheaper build for the same house, and the difference will not be visible in either listing photograph. That comparison is what the report is for.

Saving, sharing, and coming back to a report

Every report has its own address, so it can be bookmarked, sent to whoever you are doing this with, or pasted into an email to a builder or an agent. Looking up the same spot again returns the same page instantly rather than rebuilding it, and the county verdicts on it stay current with the research on this site as it is corrected and extended.

Three ways people misread a report

The first is treating the annual sun figure as the design number. It is the number that makes a place sound good and the worst month is the number that decides whether the lights stay on in January. Always read the pair together, and size for the smaller one unless you are deliberately planning to run a generator through the dark weeks.

The second is reading unclear as permissive. Where the county research could not confirm a rule, the card says so, and a county with little published information can look open when the truth is that the rules are simply not written down anywhere findable. That is a prompt to call the office, not a green light.

The third is assuming ZIP-level climate describes the parcel. Elevation, aspect, and terrain move these numbers meaningfully over short distances, and the sun figure knows nothing about the ridge or the stand of conifers to your south. The report describes the neighborhood well and the specific building site only approximately. Standing on the site in the worst month remains the only way to settle it.

If you are working through several candidate parcels, keep the links in one place alongside the parcel numbers and your notes from the county calls. That collection becomes the first section of the systems binder described in lesson twelve, and it is the document you will wish you had kept when a question about the land comes back three years later. The printable binder has a place for it.