This morning I was looking at our expenses and our energy bills have gone berserk over the last year while our consumption has actually gone down. I have a number of theories that explain this, but I'll set that aside for now.
This has me thinking the time may have come to get serious about getting the house off-the-grid since that's the only way we'll have any control/predictability around these costs. Of course there's lots of other good reasons to do this, so it's not a hard case to make, but this one might be the easiest to justify financially.
That said I really don't know how much it would cost to do such a thing, especially if it was purchased "off-the-shelf" and the installation was hired-out. Normally I'd love doing something like this myself but there are codes and also roof work and if you've seen our roof you'll understand why nobody (myself included) wants me working up there.
It does make me wonder though if there could be an incremental path for this though. To some degree I've experimented with this by adding some standby capacity in the form of homebrew solutions and off-the-shelf Bluetti "solar generators", but having done this for a few years it begins to feel a bit like "building a ladder to the moon". There's a lot to love about the Bluetti devices, but after some inconvenient issues I'm not ready to trust them with the day-to-day operation of the house, especially because when things go wrong with them the answer is "ship it to us" which isn't really going to fly when we start talking about 10's of killowatt hours worth of batteries and roof-mounted solar panels...
Another hard part about implementing such a system is sizing. A lot of people simply look at their current usage and then try to scale an off-grid system to match that and wind-up disappointed by the cost. Others try to cut their usage to the bone and design the system around that, but that isn't likely to lead to satisfaction in the long run. An incremental approach might solve both these problems by reducing the initial cost to something small and adding cost incrementally to scale the system up. At the same time, it gives you an opportunity to learn about how you really use electricity and make more informed decisions about where you can reduce usage. I've done some of this playing with the solar generators I have, and I've found a lot of power going into things that I don't want/need so dropping those KW was virtually painless.
This also can inform other decisions over time as opposed to making all these choices and trade-offs at once when designing and installing a system in one shot.
For example: maybe you decide to part with some enterprise networking gear and replace it with something low-power and focus your work elsewhere when it becomes apparent that the short-term cost outweighs long-term operating costs...
Taking all this into consideration I'm led to think that something like The Digital Bug-Out Box could be the starting point for such an incremental system. I've always intended for the design of that box to be parametric so I could experiment to find the right size, but maybe that could be more than just an experimental aspect of the project. This might simply sound like recreating the solar generator incremental pattern, but the key difference is that my design is open which minimally mitigates the maintenance problem. Being open also makes deeper and more flexile integration possible than with an off-the-shelf, proprietary and closed design.
This does nothing to address the input side of the problem though, and no matter what I come-up with I don't think I can eliminate the use off-the-shelf panels and mount them on the roof. Of course this can be done in an incremental fashion, but the overhead of setting-up and tearing-down to do the work is non-trivial, especially if hiring someone else to do it. I suppose as expensive as the panels are, they don't make up the bulk of the cost in an off-grid system (that would be the batteries), so maybe going "whole hog" on the panels is a wise trade-off? Perhaps for people that don't have an alpine cabin-style roofline could take the incremental option here.
Another design I've considered incorporates a number of features directly into the panel itself; not only batteries but compute and storage as well. This sort of fully-integrated design might fit the role of incremental implementation, especially for people who are unable to deploy a large number of panels on a roof, etc. I haven't actually experimented with/prototyped this design yet, but maybe I should. There's some very interesting dynamics that could be played with here...
All of this tells me that maybe I should be focusing some more time on the projects and ideas I've had in this area. I'm currently in the process of figuring out what to do with my life as my current profession is questionable for a number of bummer reasons I won't drag us all down with right now. Of the things I've considered, tackling this problem incorporates some of my favorites and of course has the added benefit of maybe being useful to help others as well.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026