I’m going to try very hard not to complain or rant…

Preparing for planned power outages over the last few years has meant I have bought a generator, and many smaller solar powered security devices, and the discussions at the office have lead to load shedding almost exclusively in the last few weeks…

lets face it , it sucks, and shouldn’t be necessary with some planning on the part of the publicly owned power providers, many guys are looking at solar,  inadvertent side effects of load shedding is that many are looking to go off grid now .and that’s good for business if you sell that sort of thing and its better for the planet ( well sort of ).
For private use, going off the grid, is actually quite easy, point solutions actually rain supreme, when it comes to cost, and scaling up. a bit of good planning goes a long way.

Getting a solar powered low voltage lighting system is cheap and works very well. – I would recommend this to all .. even if its just using LED globes, as a start – lights don’t use much power and you can at worst put a second solar powered light in the main rooms of your house.

Getting a solar heated geyser is also not too expensive and works well too, most of the time, on sunny days.

Getting your fridge and other appliances on, is a load more work, and cost a lot of money, my suggestion is start with an battery pack with an inverter that that charges from the grid, and can take the load of the fridge at startup ( which can be up to 3 times the normal running load )  and run those off one of those with the idea to charge with solar as funds permit, its easy to add solar to one of these to charge with a few panels and a charge controller…

If you can live without the TV and home theater system, you will be well on your way to getting off grid – or at least less dependent on grid power, or you can spec an inverter and batteries to help with these too. (but its starts to get expensive as things get bigger)

Cooking on a gas hob will take a big load off your system .. and give you an alternative, that’s cheaper and doesn’t need grid power, almost all houses in ZA use electrical stoves, or paraffin ones… but this is changing slowly,