HOW TO LIVE OFFGRID ON AN ISLAND: 3 EASY STEPS ON SOLAR ENERGY
HOW TO LIVE OFFGRID ON AN ISLAND: 3 EASY STEPS ON SOLAR ENERGY
La Vida GypSea is all about living Off Beat and Out There. We are also all about living Off-Grid as well. There are several methods of creating power and potable water. Some methods are more sustainable than others. In this blog, we will focus on solar energy and how we live off-grid on our island.
WHAT IS OFF-GRID REMOTE LIVING?
Off-grid living characterizes a lifestyle designed to be independent of one or more public utilities. This means that you strive to generate your own power, potable water, managing waste, and, sometimes even food. As a result, a self-reliant lifestyle allows you freedoms that those attached to the grid may never experience. One of our bucket list items was to move to a remote island and build a home overlooking the water.
However, there are no power companies or water districts on remote islands. Without designing for an off-grid lifestyle, we would never be able to accomplish this goal.
On our island, we had several methods of generating power to consider. There is wind power, which allows you to create energy both day and night as long as there is wind. There is power from fossil fuel-powered generators, but this is expensive and not sustainable for the environment.
Finally, we have solar power, which allows you to generate power from the sun, but not at night. The most common energy source in the tropical islands is solar power, which we chose to use.
HOW DOES SOLAR ENERGY WORK LIVING ON AN ISLAND?
With a solar system, you can collect energy from the sun during the day through photovoltaic or PV panels and use them to charge a bank of batteries. We use charge controllers for regulating the amount of energy being used from the PV panels to charge the batteries so that the batteries are not over or undercharged.
The batteries are the system component that stores the power for use when the sun is not shining. The use of an inverter is to convert the direct current of the battery bank to an alternating current used by many appliances. These are the essential solar components comprising a system.
The issue with solar systems is that the sun doesn’t shine every day. You must design a system to collect enough power in a single day of sun to power the overcast days. Because of this limitation, most systems are hybrid and utilize a generator as a backup source when there are a string of cloudy days. A properly designed solar system should only need the backup generator a handful of times in a given year.
HOW TO SET UP SOLAR ENERGY TO LIVE OFF-GRID ON AN ISLAND
All manner of sustainable, off-grid power systems shares the same design fundamentals.
Step 1 – Figure out how much power you intend to use in a day.
You must determine the amount of power you will use. It is possible to design solar energy that will accommodate any style of living. Of course, the more power you intend to use, the larger the system will be. As long as you have the space for the components and the budget to purchase them, then you can use as much power as you desire.
For most of us, Linda and I included, budget tends to be a limiting factor. However, when designing solar on a sailboat or RV, you may find space to be the limiting factor. Using as little power as comfortably possible will allow you to create an affordable and efficient system.
Some practical ways to reduce your power demands are eliminating appliances that use electric heat, like hairdryers, irons, electric cooking, or microwaves. You should also highly consider giving up the air conditioning as even the most efficient systems can overwhelm a battery bank. You can create a spreadsheet that lists the appliances you intend to use (lights, fans, refrigeration, TV, etc.) and the number of watts each appliance draws.
Decide how many hours each device is likely to be used in a day and multiply this by the watts to get the daily watt-hours you will design the system to handle. I find that the homes living off grid on an island here in Bocas Del Toro typically consume about 5,000-7,000 watt-hours per day.
STEP 2: Determine how you will store the Solar Power.
Next, you will need to store the power you intend to use in a battery bank. There are so many factors to consider with batteries that can be overwhelming. This is also typically the most expensive component in your system. The battery bank should hold the amount of energy designed for a day and reserves for those all too often rainy days. If the budget allows,
I suggest preparing for three days without sun. For instance, if you intend to use 6,000-watt-hours (6 Kwh) per day, you need a battery bank with 18 Kwh of usable power when designed for three days of rain. I say useable power because you cannot use the entire capacity of a battery bank. Different types of batteries, lead acid or lithium, to name a few, allow different percentages of their capacity to be used before needing recharging.
The different types of battery chemistry will have different charge times, different weight characteristics, different lifespans, different maintenance schedules, and different upfront costs. In addition to these differences, you can also design your battery bank with different voltages as well.
This overview of solar will not delve that deeply into batteries. If you want an in-depth follow-up blog on batteries, be sure to leave a comment.
STEP 3: Efficiently Restoring the Energy once it’s used.
As the power is used from the battery bank, the power must be replaced. You can charge the batteries with a generator and a charger. However, the preferred method to recharge the batteries is with solar energy on the PV panels. Depending on the geographical location of your system, each site has a design factor for Sun Hours. Panama has a factor of four Sun Hours. This is the number of hours in a day when the sun’s intensity reaches an average of 1000 watts/meter squared. This is also crucial to know when you live Off Grid on an Island.
To give you an idea of the watts needed for your PV array, you can take the daily watt-hours from your design and divide that number by the number of Sun hours. In our example, we had 6,000-watt-hours being used per day and four (4) Sun hours.
As a result, we would need approximately 1,500 watts of solar panels in total. (You can check out this online calculator to get a feel for what your usage will be by clicking here.) If the budget allows, adding more panels and watts to your PV array is an inexpensive way to boost your charging power as the price of panels continues to drop.
Living Off Grid on an Island is a lesson in conservation. You are your own power company, and you don’t want to run out of energy.
WHY LIVE WITH “OFF-GRID SOLAR ENERGY?”
With proper planning and design, you do not have to sacrifice your quality of life. We love living off-grid on an island, and as a result, it has allowed us to live sustainably in a beautiful remote island location that would otherwise be unattainable. Renewable energy is not only kinder to our environment, but, by cutting loose from the grid, the whole world is open to you.
Find solar energy interesting? Want us to expand on this topic or know more about off-grid living? Want to get down and dirty in the detail on how you can design and price a system for yourself? Go ahead and let us know in the comments section below!
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