Going Off-Grid - Part 3 

That bowl is spectacular

Very nice!

Really impressive video. I felt you presented the info at a pace where I could really absorb it. Well done! I do wonder, for the general case, if it's good or bad for every other house to build a system that's much bigger than needed for it's own use so that the other half of the population on the grid are NOT using burned fuels. This would imply a larger battery, the excess capacity of which (ex, over what your house needs) is really only used by your neighbors via the grid. This would mean that the payment system would need to reimburse the panel owner better for their investment and the grid owners need to take less. I've also seen people floating the idea of a large battery per neighborhood (ex, every 10 houses) because larger batteries are more efficient and would be professionally maintained, monitored, and updated. A mini-grid that is resupplied from the central grid where there's multiple dark days in a row.

It seams you need a generator back up. Now if you are completely off grid you'll have to produce alcohol to run your generator.

Being green means to encompass a whole lot of things the heat coming from your Kim could’ve went back into heating or keeping water at a steady temperature or higher…. Meaning, if you were to use thermal solar panels to heat your water before you heated it with electricity, you wouldn’t have to heat the water as much and if you use the kiln to heat water in store that heated water in a heat exchanger. Going green ask actually a combination of a lot of things that we haven’t even fully understood how they relate to each other. It’s the laws of physics heat water with the sun. I know it’s not always sunny, but if you put it into the ground and let it stay there at a certain temperature do you know that the temperature is always going to be there. More battery than you really need.

I wonder if installing mini splits would be more efficient, instead of the traditional central heat/central air, since you can turn off the mini split(s) you would need at night and not have to cool or heat the entire house.

Very interesting sharing of your experience. But one thing you seem to have missed completely is checking where all that energy is going. I could do 2 full days in -25C/-13F on the energy in your battery in the Finnish winter, a far cry from a CA winter day. My current summer base load is ~100-150W, in winter during a cold winter day it might go up to 800W (due to the heat pump/electrical heating). From your graphs in February you seem to be at about 1400W a third more with a lot less need for heating.

Would u plan on finding way to add more battery/solar? Also since u trying to go off grid would u plan on getung air water generator?

This is why I do not like proprietary systems. You are at the manufacturers mercy. Where as if you bought server rack batteries and off the shell inverters etc you pay a LOT less and you can afford to have twin inverters/controllers. If Enphase discontinues this line and something goes sideways, good luck getting the software out of them that matches those batteries.