Thread: Getting back to living off the land.....

Originally Posted by grandpamac

Greetings All,

Some notes on surviving Gabriel.

It has been an interesting week. We were without power for almost a week but have survived the cyclone without loss or significant deprivation. We bought our 8 ha block, about 20 km out of Hastings, in 1992 and built the house in 1999. The house design and location incorporated a number of features to make it liveable and I thought I would share these in case they are of interest.
The house is located on a low knoll at the end of a ridge. This provided nice views without the need for a steep long drive and kept the site reasonably safe from slips. Water supply is from a well pumped to a storage tank further up the ridge which gives 3 to 4 weeks of supply without power. Both a gas fired hob and a wet back on one of the fires supplies hot water and cooking. This kept us reasonably comfortable
The bit that needs improvement was a power supply for the deep freeze and fridge. I took a chilly bin of meat into my son and a friend lent me his generator so we have not lost any of the meat that remained. The easy fix for this would be a petrol generator but this might never be used in our remaining time here so am looking at a small solar and battery system that could run the fridge, freezer and a little lighting.
Communications were a problem. We had no phone or cell phone reception for about 5 days and were physically cut off from town for about 2. I had a wee tumble shortly after the power went out. No lasting damage was done but it could have ended rather differently.
Finally there have been a number of both urban and rural subdivisions done recently that have left me scratching my head. I drove past one this morning with a row of near new houses each has a pile of sodden ruined belongings piled outside. The developers will have made their money and the current owners are left to carry the can.
Regards to you all, Grandpamac.

To set up an off grid system capable of running a fridge and a freezer is not cheap: A petrol generator may not be cheaper, but will definitely be simpler to set up.

I don't know how big your fridge/freezers are, but step one would be to see how much power they consume:

Get something similar to one of these. AliExpress will be much cheaper.

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketpl...8?bof=BiWhSe3w


This will allow you to get a good handle on just how much power you are going to have to replace.

For a rough calculation's sake lets assume the two appliances will use 2KW a day.

And lets say that you have one KW of solar panels (3 or 4).

Lets say the fridge and freezer will run on free power from the solar panels during the day, and you have to store the other half of the power for the dark hours.

For simplicity's sake lets say thats 1KW during the day and 1KW during the night.

This is only for emergencies, so you can be harder on your batteries than a permanent off grid system would tend to be. So you are going to drain your lead acid gell battery to 50% every night. There's a bit of additional charging and losses I haven't covered, but you will get the picture.

So the battery will have to store twice the 1KW the fridge and freezer will draw. And a little bit more for losses

So you are looking (say a 12 volt system) at a 200 amp gel or agm battery

Then an inverter (say 2000watts minimum, a quality one will suck up the start up current, less so a cheap chinese one.

Then a charge controller (to look after the charging of the battery)

So minimum of:
$1000 for solar panels
$1600 for an inverter
$750 for that battery
$250 for a charge controller
Sub totol of $3600
Then some wires, joiners, fuses etc

Say 4K all up.

Then the skills to wire it all together.

Or a 3Kva Honda inverter generator at 5K...