Before we built our home, my wife and I visited every off-grid home we could find that would talk to us. We wanted to see what this actually looked like at scale, in practice, with real families. What we found was consistent and discouraging: every home was either making serious compromises to daily comfort, or it was running primarily on propane. I know a lot of people are fine with propane, but I'm just not. It feels very dependent to me, but I can't make my own diesel so I get that it is a bit hypocritical.
The compromises varied. Some homes had no air conditioning and were heated by wood. Some had very limited lighting because every watt counted. Some required the family to monitor power levels constantly and adjust behavior accordingly. We do some of that, but some homes have to do too much of it. Some homes needed the generator to do certain tasks, like fill the water tank with the well pump. One home even has regular power outages when the batteries run out and the generator has to be turned on manually! That is a different way of living than what I wanted for my family. Not worse, necessarily — some people find it meaningful to live that closely with their energy system. But it wasn't what I was trying to build. I wanted to be able to leave it alone and go on vacation and I wanted my wife to be able to deal with basic situations that arose.
I wanted to build a home where nine people live the way nine people want to live. The dishwasher runs when it's full. The washer runs when there's laundry, which in a household of nine is basically always. The house is warm in winter without anyone tending to it. And none of that requires us to think about our power system on a normal day. We have been doing this since 2023. This entry is what I learned.
What actually made it possible
The answer is not a bigger solar array. That's the instinctive response — if the house needs more power, add more panels — and it's the wrong starting point. The right starting point is the building envelope and windows.
Our home was designed from the beginning to minimize that heating load. The air sealing tested at 1.03 ACH50. The walls are R-25 with continuous exterior foam. The ceiling is R-60. The windows have a solar heat gain coating that makes them function as passive heaters on sunny days — on a clear day above 20°F, the heat system doesn't run at all. The result is that our total winter heating draw is around half of what it would be in a standard home. That reduction is what makes the electrical system feasible.
Our home used 3.30 MWh on heating in the 2023-2024 heating season, 2.70 MWh in 2024-2025, and 2.17 MWh in 2025-2026. Our most recent winter was mild. Our 2nd winter was colder than our first, but we used our wood heater more on the super cold days that were below the design temperature and I knew the heat pumps would just burn a ton of power and struggle to keep up. That was always the plan. A standard construction home of our size in this climate would use around 50% more power due to needing to make more heat due to higher heat loss, having to use larger, less efficient heat pumps, and not having solar gain windows. That load, run from solar and battery storage, would require an electrical system roughly 25% more solar panels and battery than what we have.
"The answer to making off-grid work isn't a bigger solar array. It's a smaller load — which means a better-built house."
This is the principle that most off-grid system designers miss, because most of them are not home designers. They size systems for the house as it is or how they assume it will be, not for the house as it could be. A high-performance building envelope is the most cost-effective component in an off-grid electrical system, because every unit of energy the house doesn't need is a unit that doesn't have to be generated, stored, and converted. The savings cascade through the entire system design.
What we actually run
For anyone trying to calibrate what off-grid at this scale looks like, here is what our household runs routinely, entirely on solar and battery storage:
Two dishwashers — in a family of nine, a single dishwasher runs constantly; two means we don't manage a queue. Two full-size ranges because my wife teaches cooking and we feed nine people at every meal. A washer and dryer. A hybrid heat pump water heater providing hot water for nine people's showers, dishes, and laundry. Two refrigerators and two giant chest freezers, because feeding nine people requires the storage capacity to buy and preserve food in quantity. A forced-air heat pump system for the whole house — not a wood stove, not propane, not resistance heat. A home network and server room, computers and monitors, and all the small appliances and electronics a large household generates.
We also run a central vacuum, a water treatment system, a VFD-controlled well pump, and excellent lighting for 5,000 square feet. We used more power on LED lights this winter than heating water. None of this is rationed on a normal day. None of it is scheduled around solar production. The system handles the load.
The well pump surprise: Our single biggest electrical load last winter was not the HVAC — it was the well pump. Without a storage tank to buffer demand, the pump cycles on every time house pressure drops, drawing 2.45 MWh this past winter. Both heat pump systems combined drew 2.24 MWh last year and 2.70 MWh the year before. Heating the house costs the same as drawing water. If you're designing an off-grid home with a well, a pump-to-storage-tank strategy or using a standard pump with a 60/40 switch rather than VFD can meaningfully reduce this load, perhaps by half.
What we actually gave up
Honesty requires this section, and I want to be specific rather than vague.
We think about power in January
On a normal day in spring, summer, or fall, we think about our power system approximately as much as grid-connected households think about their utility — which is to say, basically never. I check in on things about once a week, but that's it. In December, January, and February during an extended cloudy stretch with high heating demand, we are aware of the state of the batteries and solar production. We live life mostly normally. If we can run fewer larger laundry loads, we do. Same with the dishwashers. The biggest adjustments are watching the overnight low and considering whether the heating demand warrants running the generator tonight to add to the batteries and whether we should start and tend a fire to reduce heating demand for a few days.
This is not the constant monitoring and rationing I observed in the homes we visited before building. But it is not zero. About eight weeks of the year — the heart of winter — require some active awareness of the system. The rest of the year it takes care of itself.
The generator exists and we use it
I want to be direct about this because many people planning off-grid homes underestimate it. Our generator is a designed part of the system. It is not a sign that the system is undersized or failing. It is there because sizing the solar array and battery bank to handle 100% of the worst-case winter load without any generator backup would require a solar array two times the size of what I have, with no meaningful improvement in daily life. The generator runs during bad winter stretches and that is exactly what it was designed to do.
Managing the generator is the most significant operational difference between our household and a grid-connected one. Ours is diesel, which requires preheating before startup and can't be automated with modern inverters the way propane can. Running it involves a multi-step manual process. I recommend propane to clients for this reason — propane generators integrate cleanly with modern inverters and can be fully automated. But even with a propane generator and full automation, an off-grid home in a serious winter climate requires accepting that generator runtime is part of the system, not a failure of it.
The condensing dryer
We use a condensing dryer rather than a vented one. A condensing dryer doesn't exhaust to the exterior — it condenses moisture from the clothes into a reservoir that gets automatically pumped and drained into the washer drain. The reason we have one is that I didn't want to install a dryer duct to the exterior to avoid that air leakage. This is a choice I do not recommend. Install a dryer duct and seal it off if you aren't using it.
Condensing dryers work, but they're slower than vented dryers, require regular maintenance, and are less effective on heavy items. In a household doing as much laundry as ours, this is a real friction point. A vented dryer in a high-performance home requires a well-sealed, dampered exterior penetration — but it's completely achievable, and I'd do it that way if I were starting over.
Snow and solar panels
Our roof is a 4:12 pitch — shallow enough that snow accumulates on the panels rather than sliding off. In a heavy snow year, clearing them is a regular winter task that can be mildly hazardous. A steeper roof or a ground-mounted array would eliminate this entirely. I think about it every time I'm up there clearing the array.
What we don't think about at all
This part surprises people who ask about off-grid living, because the assumption is that the list of things given up is long. It isn't.
We have never had a power outage. The grid fails somewhere in our county several times a year — weather events, equipment failures, scheduled maintenance. We are not on the grid. We don't notice. When neighbors lose power in a winter storm, we are fully operational.
We have never received a utility bill that surprised us. We have no utility bills. The cost of our power system was paid at construction. The ongoing cost is generator fuel during bad winter stretches and routine equipment maintenance. That cost is a fraction of what a grid-connected home our size would pay annually in utilities. We do save for eventual equipment replacement. We hope costs continue to drop and efficiency continues to improve.
We have never had a furnace fail during a cold snap. The heat pump systems are reliable, and critically, our house holds temperature for an extended period even without active heating — because the envelope is tight enough that heat loss is slow. If the system failed entirely during a cold stretch, we would have a couple days before the house became uncomfortably cold. That's why we have the wood heater too.
We have never wondered whether utilities will eventually reach our land. We bought a property a mile from the nearest power line. That property was affordable partly because most buyers would have faced significant extension costs. We did not. The distance from the grid was an advantage, not a limitation.
Whether it's worth it
That question has two honest answers depending on what you're asking.
Financially, for our specific situation — rural land away from utility infrastructure, a large home with high baseline energy needs — yes, but it was expensive. The cost of extending power to our property was expensive too. The ongoing utility cost for a home our size would be significant. We paid more upfront for the high-performance building and the electrical system, and we spend nothing on an ongoing basis and we spent less on the land. The math works, but you need to understand that it is expensive. If doing this would put you in excessive debt, you should not do it.
As a way to live, that's more personal. We value the independence. We value knowing what powers our home and where it comes from. We value the absence of utility bills, power outages, and dependence on infrastructure we don't control. We accept a few weeks per year of active system management as the price of that independence and don't find it burdensome. Others might. If the idea of running your own power plant intimidates you, this probably isn't for you. That responsibility is serious business.
What I'd push back on is the premise that off-grid living requires accepting a lower standard of comfort. It doesn't — not if the home is designed correctly. The families I visited before we built had lower comfort because they had homes that were expensive to heat and poorly suited to off-grid systems. Ours is comfortable because we designed the building and the system together, with performance as the starting constraint rather than an afterthought. That is what the design process I offer produces — not just drawings, but a home that actually works the way the family needs it to.