Living Off Grid
Solar Data — live numbers
Daily PV production and energy use, straight from my tracking sheets:
The Barnpartment PV System
The larger building is the “Barnpartment”, a name my wife hates but I think both accurate and funny. The other building is my office, which has its own roof-mounted PV system. Also shown are 3 of our 4…
Tracking 2026 Solar Production, Electricity Use, Battery SOC, and Generator Use
I tried to improve and automate our 2026 tracking of solar production, energy use, minimum battery state of charge, and whether we needed to use a generator on any given day, at our off-grid property in midcoast Maine.…
2025 Solar Production, Electricity Use, Battery SOC, and Generator Use
Here’s a Google Sheet that shows our daily solar production, energy use, minimum battery state of charge (SOC), and whether we needed to use a generator, for every day in 2025. The link allows you to view the…
The Beauty of Thermal Mass (more about the buffer tank dump load)
Turning excess solar production into heat is near the top of the list for ways to use that excess energy, which is why I installed the buffer tank with electric heating elements (see that post for more info).…
My Very Nerdy Experiment Heating with Solar via a Buffer Tank
When it's sunny, even during the dark days of November-January, each of our buildings can recharge its batteries to 100% by about 10 AM if we haven't used up most of their energy over several days with little…
One Year Off Grid. Zero Use of Generator!
The winter solstice is special for most solar power enthusiasts because it marks the last day of increasing darkness and a return to the days of more and more precious sunlight each day. For my wife and me,…
Not Being Dependent Feels Great
I just sent this text to another friend who lives off grid: “ When we were designing and building our house, I can’t tell you how many people said, “Oh, you’re gonna wish you had connected to CMP.”…
The ADU people won’t do an off grid building
We’ve been working on plans for my wife’s “she shed”, which will double as a place for our infrequent visitors to stay for a night or two. It will also be used as a place to entertain sometimes,…
Off grid has become (pleasantly) boring
When we started down the path to build an off-grid, 100% solar home with no grid connection, all electric appliances, and heat pumps for heat (except the slab in the garage and entry foyer, and we hope to…
My Google Sheets PV Tracker
We’ve had access to the Google suite of office programs (I’m supposed to say “apps” to not sound really old, right?) for years now. It comes “free” (Ha!) with our email hosting on the paid version of Gmail,…
Monitoring My Office
It would have been reasonably easy to run an electric line in a trench between our “barnpartment” and my separate little office building (16’x22’), but why do that when you can install a completely separate PV and battery…
Monitoring our PV System
Given that our off grid home was basically a big experiment, I wanted to track how much energy we’re using and how much we’re producing, along with how much energy was in the batteries. the company that markets…
Monitoring our Use of Electricity
I started monitoring overall use of electricity in 2021, and got serious about it in 2022, when we decided we were going to build an off grid property at some point, “Getting serious about it” meant that I…