Off-Grid Living

Hunting camp solar systems fail in one of two ways and both happen while the owner is at work. I drove up to a deer camp near Bancroft in November with a client who had installed a 200W all-in-one solar kit the previous spring. He had not been to the camp since September. We arrived […]

Disaster relief solar is most useful in the hour when no one thinks to set it up. I helped coordinate a neighbourhood power hub during the March 2024 ice storm near Fergus that left approximately 1,400 Hydro One customers without power for 41 hours. The street had four houses with generators. By hour 14 two

Farm solar power changed the conversation for me when a grain farmer near Fergus asked the right question. He had been approached by a solar developer who wanted to lease 40 acres of his best Class 1 farmland for a ground-mounted solar farm at $1,200 per acre per year. He was tempted by the $48,000

Construction site solar saves money that most site managers do not realise they are wasting. I walked a construction site in Guelph in February where a 20kW Kohler diesel generator had been running continuously for eleven days. The site had been shut down for the weekend but the generator stayed on to power two Hikvision

Solar power for remote mining is not a cost-saving exercise. It is a logistics survival strategy. I reviewed a diesel generator maintenance log from a diamond exploration camp in northern Ontario that had been running a 150kVA Caterpillar genset at approximately 18% average load for eight months. The camp drew 12 to 15kW for lighting,

Off-grid solar for remote learning fails at 11 AM more often than it fails overnight. I visited a rural school in northern Ontario that had a functional solar system: 800W array, 5kWh battery bank, LED lighting throughout, and a Starlink dish running the office. The system ran perfectly until the school received a grant for

Solar power for medical clinics is a different engineering problem from any other off-grid application. I was asked to review the power system design for a remote clinic north of Sudbury that was serving a fly-in community. The clinic had a standard residential chest freezer modified for vaccine storage running on a 3kWh battery bank

A community solar microgrid is not a scaled-up residential system. I learned this during a conversation with a township facilities manager in Wellington County. He was responsible for three community buildings: a school, a community centre, and a volunteer fire hall that collectively served as emergency shelters during winter grid outages. All three ran on

Off-grid Starlink setup done wrong is a slow battery drain that nobody notices until the system stops working at 2 AM. I diagnosed a Starlink installation on a Rockwood property where the client was losing approximately 30% more battery capacity overnight than the load calculation predicted. The Starlink Gen 3 dish and router were running