As someone who’s house is entirely powered by solar, I love the long days! I also do a lot of outside work so the extra hours of daylight really help me there too
During winter it was so overcast and cloudy that I had to run a generator almost the entirety of the season
If it weren’t for having to run the heat pump, I’d have 10X what I need right now. But 3 or 4 hours of usable sunlight in the winter makes it hard to keep up.
For real, I have wood stoves (and propane heaters a supplemental) for winter heat so luckily a little less load on my system! This past winter was so cold here I had to get a subzero sleeping bag and put a living heater (my dog) inside of it because even the wood stoves couldn’t keep up
I have mini splits but because of the sun situation I couldn’t run them on heat without burning through my power/spending hundreds of dollars on gas for the generator!
As someone who’s house is entirely powered by solar, I love the long days! I also do a lot of outside work so the extra hours of daylight really help me there too
During winter it was so overcast and cloudy that I had to run a generator almost the entirety of the season
If it weren’t for having to run the heat pump, I’d have 10X what I need right now. But 3 or 4 hours of usable sunlight in the winter makes it hard to keep up.
For real, I have wood stoves (and propane heaters a supplemental) for winter heat so luckily a little less load on my system! This past winter was so cold here I had to get a subzero sleeping bag and put a living heater (my dog) inside of it because even the wood stoves couldn’t keep up
I have mini splits but because of the sun situation I couldn’t run them on heat without burning through my power/spending hundreds of dollars on gas for the generator!
Full solar power is the dream! That’s awesome.
It can be pretty great, but you really do need to treat it differently than you would on the grid!
For example: at night, making sure you don’t leave lights on, not running heavy loads like the microwave for very long, etc.
The good news is that as the old expensive equipment gets phased out, it gets easier and cheaper to DIY your off grid (or emergency backup) system!