My wife and I bought some property that had power "on-site", which made the loan app. more feasible. However the "on-site" power was (is) quite a ways away from our house site, it would probably cost us somewhere in the 5-10k$ range for the transformer and to run cable to our home. We've thus far spent about $7,000 on a small humble solar system, and we have a modest generator back up ($1,100). While it is not the biggest of systems, it has been quite adequate for our needs (which we've made small adjustments to, here and there). I still get frustrated when I see prices like: "20-25k$ minimum"; that's probably true if you have a larger house and use a lot of power, but there are plenty of us out there who live in small homes and have made small adjustments to maximize efficient use of electricity that will never spend anywhere near that much. For off grid in particular, one of the nice things is that most of the system (excepting the batteries) is quite modular and can be built piece by piece, adding as your budget allows, or your needs grow. With a generator to fill in as a back up, you don't need to size your system for a "worst case scenario", but rather try to size it to a more optimal and Conservative power usage; every time that you have to fire up the generator for an hour or two it can be some what of a warning bell that you are using excess power. We are still looking at adding some to our system, in the form of a larger inverter, and a few more PV panels, but we still will probably NOT spend more than another 3-5k$ total. As it stands now we run the generator once a month in the spring/summer/fall months to help with our battery EQ'ing, and maybe a couple of hours a week in the winter to make up for lower solar production (we could eliminate this extra usage with a few more PV's).
I suppose that our main area's of conservation have been:
tankless water heater
all CF lights
extra insulation, and super insulated windows, etc...
passive cooling (wish that we'd done a better job at creating passive heat gain for winter, but we're just learning)
just plain ol' turning lights and stuff off when not using them.
So there you have my vote for "off grid" : )
good luck, and enjoy the learning experience
