Demystifying Electricity and Embracing the Sun’s Power
While providing me 100% energy independence for my off-grid home, solar panels have demystified the enigma of electricity for me and increased my understanding of the movements of the Earth itself. As I learned the hard way, getting power from solar panels after a snowstorm just requires brushing them off. My wife and I purchased a not-quite-finished off-grid home about a month into the COVID-19 lockdown and immediately went to work installing half a dozen solar panels. I’ve learned a few lessons about solar energy the hard way.
The motivation to add a solar power system to your home is usually simple: reduce your power bill or even earn money from your utility. But if there’s no grid at your location and solar is your primary source of energy, you have a different set of motivations and concerns, including some that force you to look at basic facts in a whole new light. Can solar panels save you money? Interested in understanding the impact solar can have on your home? Enter some basic information and we’ll instantly provide a free estimate of your energy savings.
My solar panels were initially connected to — believe it or not — a pair of huge 6-volt golf cart batteries, each weighing 83 pounds and wired together in series to create a 12-volt system, which generates plenty of 120-volt alternating current via a large inverter. It’s a modest system for our modest home. My solar power system first began producing around the time of the summer solstice in June 2020, and it was a truly magnificent thing to behold. But it was just the beginning.
Relying on the Sun: Unexpected Insights and Greater Accountability
Relying on the sun transforms your relationship to energy, providing some unexpected insights and greater accountability when it comes to consuming it. To flip a switch and watch as a refrigerator, wireless router, or lightbulb springs to life — knowing that its power has been quite literally pulled out of the air — is a wonder to behold. What is going on inside that light socket? Some tiny computer converting invisible electrons to visible light? Gnomes? To me, either explanation once seemed equally likely. Then a mentor explained that electricity behaves like water — flowing across the path of least resistance and filling any reservoirs along the way with energy, be it a battery or an electron-draining laptop screen. Demystifying the power of electricity was empowering.
Few things are more delightful to me than watching water flow, be it majestic waterfalls or crashing waves. As a kid, I took great joy in engineering canals with my cousins using just a bucket of water and a plastic shovel on lakeshores. The revelation that electricity follows similar rules, yet is invisible and also makes our entire world function, is eye-opening. Putting it to use with solar technology that allows you to collect, contain, and control that power autonomously is life-changing.
Harvesting your energy directly from a ball of fire in space can cause you to revisit some basic facts learned in grade school, like how the Earth’s tilted axis gives us seasons and varying amounts of sunlight at different times of year. It’s all basic geometry, really. But in my new home where the sun provides not just warmth but also electricity, this geometry takes on a whole new meaning. Getting the angle right for solar panels can boost energy production.
Seasonal Variations and the Challenges of Off-Grid Living
What I didn’t comprehend when I first connected our system in the middle of summer was that it was operating under ideal conditions with almost 15 hours of sunlight. The panels are tilted at an angle that splits the difference between what’s ideal for summer and winter solstice. But while standing in the summer sunshine and marveling at my handiwork that day, I didn’t account for something else.
Less sun in winter means less electricity, sure. But the shortfall can compound quickly. There can be up to five hours of less sunlight per day in December in my location compared to June. That’s five hours less electricity generated, but it’s also five hours more spent drawing power from batteries, which — once again — have five hours less to charge.
This may seem quite obvious to a lot of you, but many more of us go through life on the grid and simply think of winter as a time when the sun sets a few hours earlier than in the summer. But when the sun is your source of light and power, you quickly realize there is a total daily energy deficit of over 10 hours between summer and winter solstice for most people living in the US.
It gets worse. In the winter, we’re inside most of the time to avoid the cold, meaning more lights, screens, heaters, and whatever else are draining more precious electrons compared to the summer. Running an air conditioner, which we don’t need living at 7,000 feet, might even things out more. If you store your batteries outdoors, as we did for two winters with flooded lead-acid golf cart batteries, you’ll likely see their performance degrade a bit in the cold as well.
Add it all up, and winter off the grid means less electricity, higher demand, and decreased performance. This is to say nothing of the occasional multi-day snowstorm that blocks out the sun, covers the solar panels, and collapses the whole system. This is why we have a portable home generator that can run off gasoline or propane. We found ourselves having to run it more than anticipated our first few winters, especially in the deepest dark depths of winter or on days with a few clouds or a few loads of laundry to run.
Ultimately, relying less on the generator will likely require installing more panels and/or battery capacity to capture as many available electrons as we can on sunny days. Digging to partially bury water collection and storage tanks is a decent metaphor for batteries. It turns out that pesky axial tilt gifts us with delightful seasons that define the rhythms of life, but in the winter, it means less sunlight, less warmth, and less electricity generated. This is especially true if you don’t install a racking system for your panels that allows you to adjust their angle to be nearly vertical in order to catch all of those precious rays from the low-hanging winter sun. Guess what’s at the top of my list of needed DIY upgrades?
Embracing the Challenges of Off-Grid Living
Living off the grid gave me a new perspective: fewer bills and increased independence. It also led to a deeper transformation and reckoning with some old inadequacies. As I learned the hard way, living off-grid can mean new ways of going about things. It’s a tragic accident of history that we designed modern civilization around burning fossil fuels before we figured out efficient means of storing the practically limitless amounts of clean power put out by the sun. That’s why I moved my family off-grid. We source all our water, heating, power, and everything else we need without any public infrastructure.
My journey to energy independence began many years ago when I lived in Alaska for a job and found myself living alone in the sub-Arctic, barely able to take care of myself. Everything in my provided housing, an inadequately insulated trailer, was frozen, including the water in my toilet. I didn’t know how to start the gas heater or use the chainsaw to cut firewood for the back-up stove. I couldn’t even swing an ax to chop what little split wood was available. At the village bar, an inebriated local sized me up and told me I wouldn’t make it there. If I had any money at that moment, I would have bet against myself too. I was humbled and ashamed of my incapacity and frustrated by my inability to do much about it.
I’ve figured a lot out since then. Moving off-grid was, in some way, an opportunity to see if I might now be able to measure up to some of the challenges I wasn’t up for when I was younger. Not only have I been able to remove a lot of clutter from my life, deepen relationships with the remaining people and things, but I can finally face up to some of those shortcomings.
When I left Alaska, I dove into starting a family and a career in media. But my wife and I continued to seek out places with more rugged, frontier-adjacent lifestyles. This is how we landed in rural New Mexico, a land where scientific projections forecast a decades-long megadrought, which is probably already underway. Recycled water grows lush vegetation and nutritious tomatoes and zucchini in the high desert of New Mexico. So, we’re becoming good at conserving water, not just to avoid hauling it, but also to prepare for a future with increased scarcity.
Rainfall in the high desert is always a magical thing, but it’s all the more satisfying watching it drip into our storage tanks, knowing it will sustain my family, clean our clothes or our dishes, and then be reused again to grow berries in the yard that further sustain us. It can become a game to see how far the water can go. During a downpour, I’ll toss some extra buckets outside and use that water for cement and stucco in some ongoing DIY projects. That rain is now a permanent part of the house. The same vigilance goes for keeping track of the wattage coming in and out of the house via a modest maze of copper wire. I now know my TV uses almost as much electricity in sleep mode as it does blasting a Tarantino classic throughout the house. And I’d estimate the average shower uses around four times more water than what’s actually required.
There’s a deep irony here. For much of my life, electricity has seemed like an infinite resource, always available to me via the simple flip of a switch or push of a plug, thanks to a reliable power grid. Of course, the reality is that most of those on-the-grid electrons were derived from finite fossil fuel resources, and the bill for them came due each month in the form of an actual invoice from the utility, as well as carbon emissions released. Today, my electricity comes from a resource that doesn’t get depleted by my using it. There are almost no bills to pay, either monetarily or environmentally, and yet I track it more meticulously than I ever did on the grid.
Living off-grid means learning to live with the resources available, even in the desert of New Mexico. Water is easily a more valuable resource than electricity. It’s more scarce, especially in potable form, finite, and essential to life. This makes it all the more frustrating that we, as a species, still prefer to source our energy using destructive means requiring more impressive engineering than what we had to do to go off the grid. It’s a tragic accident of history that we designed modern civilization around burning fossil fuels before we figured out efficient means of storing the practically limitless amounts of clean power put out by the sun. There’s just no way that things like horizontal drilling techniques, fracking, and shale oil extraction are the best use of resources when a guy like me who couldn’t start his stove in Alaska can manage to set up a cleaner, free alternative on my own. But I did do it, which means a lot of us can. Which means less demand for destruction, not to mention being able to leave a light on every now and then guilt-free. Although those compact fluorescent bulbs don’t last forever, so better to hit the switch.
