I roughly worked out my neighbours usage over a year, and their power costs work out at between $1400 and $1900 a year. They have 4 kids, LED lighting and some inverter appliances, including their A/C. Off the top of my head, think they average 18-23kwh a day. My house is 8-10kwh a day and some days, down to 4. They are going off grid sometime this year, when they get their lifepo4 and at that rate, they should pay off their system within about 7 years. With the right approach, they can look forward to 13 years of almost free power and in that time they would probably upgrade different things and maybe expand their generating capacity with the savings, extending the life of the system. So the savings would probably grow over time.T1 Terry wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 2:23 pm The question that then needs to be asked, how many yrs for the pay-back to go completely off grid so you no longer have the connection fees and account charges? The restrictions on the amount of solar you can have no longer apply and the unreliability of the grid is a thing of the past.
Reckon just about any body could go off grid and get their money back within ten years, the biggest cost is installation/labour costs, which today are normally 2-3 times the material costs. Got a bore put in recently and what a bonus, that cost me almost $10000, took 3-4 hrs used a few lengths of cheap poly pipe and 3 blokes watching, The drilling cost $3600, then they added over $6000 for labour. That's about $3000 an hr, as bad as lawyers.
There are tens of thousands of grid failures around the country each year and hundreds of major blackouts. The grid is so unreliable, they now want the power to turn your appliances and power on and off as they see fit, to cope with demand. That's not reliability, that's expensive irresponsibility in bucket loads. The national grid is just a profit growth machine for big business, its doesn't provide security of supply in any way and is a never ending rip off for worse and worse reliability. Just glad I'm not on the grid, it's a lovely feeling so energy secure.
The only way you can have a reliable grid set up, is to have micro grids, all feeding into a medium size storage system and every connection satisfying it's own energy needs before feeding the grid ans owned by the users. Then you never have failures and all power lines should be in the ground, there were hundreds of people who lost their homes during these fires, because of grid failure. They couldn't pump water could only use bucket, hence their homes burnt down.
