Trying your place off-grid

The Off-grid tab can answer “what if the power went away?” as a quick what-if. If you want to take the idea further, we can set up a second version of your place where being off-grid is the real plan, not a hypothetical. Everything you see after that is worked out as if there is no grid at all.

Your existing setup stays exactly as it is. You end up with two, and you swap between them from the layout picker at the top of the page.

What comes with you

Everything about the building, because it is the same building. Your address, your panels exactly as you have grouped them, your battery with its reserve and charge rate, how much power you use each day, and your car charging if you have set that up. An off-grid home can still charge a car.

What changes

You get a generator, switched on. With no power company, the generator is what decides what electricity costs you. We start you with a common 3 kW petrol one so your first run actually plans some generator time instead of just telling you the year would not work. Change its size, how thirsty it is, what fuel costs and when it is allowed to run on the Generator row. If you had already set one up, we keep your settings and simply turn it on.
The electricity plan goes. There is no power company to bill you, so there is no deal to shop around for.
Selling power back goes. There is nowhere to send it, so extra sun on a good day is simply not used.
We start aiming at something different. On the grid we look for the cheapest way to buy and sell power. Off the grid we look for the least fuel burnt, or for keeping a healthy reserve in the battery if you would rather play it safe.

What stays behind

Your inverter stays connected to your original setup, on purpose. Only one of them should be telling your inverter what to do. If both were connected, both could send it instructions and they would end up arguing over your actual hardware. So the new one starts with nothing plugged in. If you decide it is the one you want running the show, connect it and disconnect the other.
Shading and fine tuning. If we have measured how trees or a neighbouring roof shade your panels, or tuned your forecast against real readings, the new setup starts fresh without that. ⚠️ So the two can give slightly different answers for the same roof. Judge the off-grid one against its own runs rather than against numbers from the original.
Past plan comparisons and emails, which belong to the setup they were run for.

If it will not go ahead

There is a limit to how many setups an account can save. If you are at yours, we will say so; delete one you no longer use from your account page and try again. You also need to be signed in, since this gets saved to your account, and there is nothing to work from if you are only looking at the example.

Seen enough? Delete it from your account page. Nothing about your original changed while it was there.

Closes this tab and returns to the calculator.