Building the Hogan

Up to this point our labor has mostly been of the manual variety.  With the exception of the tiller, our work has been done with shovels, rakes, wheelbarrow and hand.  We haven’t missed the fact that we are completely without power.  More noticeable is the absence of ready water, but that’s another post.

Some sustainable communities are close enough to commercial power sources that it becomes an option whether to be completely off-grid or grid-tied.  Several of the properties that we considered fell into this category.  Like a favorite blanket to a child, it was tempting to have that security feeling of the universal power flow.

In our community, grid-tie is not an option.  The closest power source is three miles away and the costs to connect to it would be more than the cost of the house.  So it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re completely off-grid and will be for the foreseeable future.

As the time draws closer for us to spend more time on the property, perhaps in our very own Tiny House, we felt the urgency to come up with a reasonable off-grid solar system to provide us necessary power for our basic needs.  In case you’re not familiar with the concept of “basic needs”, here’s our list:

• Lighting
• Refrigerator
• Washing Machine
• Toaster Oven
• Laptop Computer/Printer
• Space Heating

Cecilia wrote an article about determining power needs on Innovative News. 

The remainder of the items on our list fell into the category of “wants”.  These items included a television, dishwasher, bread-maker, desktop computer and other miscellaneous small appliances.  These, we reasoned, could be accommodated as our system expanded and as alternative power sources became cheaper.

For the near term we needed to have a way to power the few tools we’d be using such as a circular saw, drill and potentially a small cement mixer. 

Since we only needed a small amount of power to begin with we were tempted to buy just the basics; a panel or two, a battery or two and an inverter.  After spending a fair amount of time on research I discovered that there were many advantages to getting the entire system right away.

I shopped online for panels and found that many of the distributors had already put together complete packages designed around previous customer purchases.  There were systems designed by the size of the house - and those that were designed by application type - such as grid-tie or off-grid.

After looking around I came to the conclusion that Wholesale Solar had the best combination of parts and price for our needs.  As it turned out, quite coincidentally, the owners of the company had previously lived within our community before moving to Mt Shasta, CA.

As an added bonus, they continue to maintain an office in Taos and their representative, Wil was more than helpful in explaining the details of our system.  We ended up purchasing the medium off-grid system, which provides more than a kilowatt of solar power, contains all the necessary batteries, inverter, cables, mounting poles and power center.

With a kilowatt of power we can meet all of our basic needs and carefully managed some of our wants as well.  The power center that comes with the medium off-grid system can handle up to 4 kilowatts and is designed to allow us to add additional solar or wind power in the future.  With this system we can expand it as large as we’d ever need.

Within two weeks of ordering the solar power system we took delivery.  The power center came completely assembled and ready to install.  Overall our experience with Wholesale Solar has been fantastic.

Because our roof will be used for rainwater collection we opted not to place the panels on the roof.  Another practical reason is that snow removal is much more difficult for roof-mounted systems.  On our site plan we’ve marked off an area on the southwest side of the garden for the panels.  Once we finish with the clearing inside the garden walls, we’ll dig the hole for the pole.

With the energy piece of the puzzle well in hand, it’s time to think about water.