Off-grid solar,explained plainly.
Short guides for your home, cabin, van or RV: how it works, how much you need for your winter sun, and what to skip.
Find the guide for your situation
A few questions, then a guide that explains every part and why.
New to solar?
Start here.
Six short reads, in order: the ideas every setup is built on.
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Solar basics · two minutes
Every setup does four things: make it, move it, store it, use it.
No need to learn volts and amps. Here's the whole system in one picture.
They catch sunlight and turn it into power.
Takes panel power and feeds it safely into the batteries.
Save it for night and cloudy days.
Turns battery power into normal wall outlets. At home, 2 and 4 come in one box.
What you run decides how big everything else is.
Go deeper: electricity, explained like water
A 100-watt bulb uses 100 watts while it's on. Ten of them use 1,000.
Like how far the tap is openThat bulb on for 24 hours = 2,400 watt-hours = 2.4 kWh. It's the number on your power bill.
Like gallons in the bucketThey save the day's sun for the night. Bigger tank, longer without sun.
Like a rain barrelThey refill the tank. More panels refill it faster, even on grey days.
Like a bigger gutterSee it running
Real homes, cabins and rigs, and what their owners learned.
What they built, how it's going, and what they'd do differently.
Off-grid homestead on a pallet of 30 used panels and a ground mount
Affiliate links See their setup Down to Earth Homesteaders YouTubeFamily homestead: about 3.6 kW of panels, 8 Battle Born batteries, Victron
Affiliate links See their setup EXPLORIST.life YouTube · wiring diagramsStep-by-step wiring diagrams and builds for vans, buses and RVs
Victron & Battle Born ambassador See their setup Will Prowse YouTube · DIY Solar ForumIndependent teardowns and tests of batteries, inverters and power stations
Earns from affiliate links too See their setupPrepare
Get ready for an outage.
How long real outages have lasted, and what it takes to keep water, food and heat going.
- Where to start prepping: water and food, then power, then shelterStart with water and food for a few days, then two weeks, then power to keep water flowing and food cold, then shelter. Each step covers far more real outages than the last, until about three months, when storing more stops paying off.
- A long power outage: winter storms and ice stormsPlan for about four days without power, and two weeks if ice storms reach you. That's how long the worst recent US winter outages lasted.
- When the grid goes down for monthsIt has happened in the US: after Hurricane Maria, most of Puerto Rico had no power for months, and the last neighborhood waited 328 days. What kept people going was local power, water and medicine, not stockpiles alone.
About this guide
Liberty Offgrid is a free guide to living off grid. Power comes first; clean water and buildings are next.