I Had an Entirely Solar Property, But Here’s Why I Ended Up Paying for Utilities

The year was 2006. Two women, one a fellow singer in a devotional music group and the other a friend of hers, invited me to join them in the purchase of a 17-acre property on a ridge in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Monterey Bay. I took out a home equity loan on the property I currently owned to pay a share of the down payment, and I accepted the invitation.

The property was far from turnkey, but we were prepared for an adventure, and the fact that it was an off-grid solar property was part of the fun. Jump to 2026, and we’re still here, but the solar energy system is not. It wasn’t our first choice to scrap it in favor of bringing in utilities. Many twists and turns through the years, some financial, some logistical and some caused by acts of Nature, led us to the decision.

In this post, I’ll share about our system and what happened to it, what I learned about the pros and cons of living off the grid and why, in the end, the cons outweighed the pros — at least for us.

An Undersized System Gets Fried

The PV system powering our new house consisted of six 175W Shell solar panels, a charge controller that fed power to a battery bank consisting of 16 lead-acid batteries. They in turn powered a Xantrex 48V inverter which supplied 120/240V electricity to the main panel on the side of the house. A 10kW diesel generator (biodiesel, actually), located some distance away in a concrete bunker, also connected to the inverter and was programmed to switch on to charge the batteries when they needed it.

The previous owners, who had DIYed the system, outfitted the main house with gas appliances, so the primary load on the electrical system (besides lights and small appliances) was the well pump and a jet pump to pressurize the water system. They had been optimistic enough about the system’s capabilities to have installed a pool pump, but judging by how often the generator switched on during everyday use, the panels didn’t seem to supply enough power for something like that, so we discarded it.

We hated the generator. It sounded like a Mack truck and pumped thick black smoke into the sky whenever it was running — and it ran often. Moreover, biodiesel was hard to find and expensive. We would have replaced the generator, but we never got the chance. One spring day, as we were sitting outside, a rogue bolt of lightning struck the building that housed the inverter (about 20 feet away from us) and fried it. Not stopping there, the bolt traveled along the wires to the generator and also disabled its control panel.

When You’re Off-Grid, You Need Friends

That single lightning strike left us completely without power, and if our property had been isolated in the backwoods, we would have had no way to restore it. Luckily, we had one close neighbor who allowed us to connect an emergency cable to their panel to power our essentials.

Eventually, the neighbor allowed us to upgrade to a heavier cable and a bigger breaker. We connected to a meter to monitor our usage so we could pay our fair share of the electric bill, and then to a subpanel to back-feed the property. This jerry-rigged and dangerous situation persisted for several years as we tried to figure out what to do.

Comparing the Costs of Solar and Grid Power

The reliability of utility power was a relief. It meant eventually, no battery maintenance, no noisy generator and no PV system upgrades were required. However, to bring utilities to our property meant burying a cable under the road from the nearest power pole, which was 400 feet away. Then there was the panel installation itself, running wires to outbuildings, and doing it all up to code. Estimates for the installation hovered in a range between $80,000 and $125,000.

Besides the expense, this all promised to be disruptive, and we hadn’t given up on the solar dream, so we got quotes from local solar contractors. They blew our socks off. It turned out a system with enough panels and battery storage to meet our needs would cost just as much, if not more. One bid came in at $110,000, and another, which included a high-end Kohler backup generator, was around $130,000. And that was with the 30 percent federal rebate that was available at the time.

We Chose to Tie to the Grid — Partly, But Not Only, Because of Money

The price of installing solar notwithstanding, it was still an option that captured our collective imagination. When you’re generating your own off-grid power, we reasoned, you’re self-sufficient while doing your part for the environment and staking a claim in the electrified world of the future. Best of all, you’re getting Free Energy! Or so we thought.

It turns out you still need to buy components and maintain them, so the electricity isn’t free. The batteries on our old system had cost $3,500 to replace (cheap by today’s standards, but still a burden), and they only lasted from five to seven years. Moreover, when we needed help, we were totally dependent on local contractors who may or may not have been able to understand or fix our system, and they charged for the service call either way.

Environmental concerns entered into the decision. Our individual system powered our house with renewable energy with all its benefits, but PG&E, our local utility company, was selling energy increasingly supplied from renewable resources to the whole community. It made sense to support that.

Finally, there was county permitting, which was a major issue if we ever wanted to sell the property. Our old DIY system would never have passed an electrical inspection, and who’s to say that any system we installed today would pass inspection 10 years from now, given how fast the solar industry is evolving? Tying to the grid guaranteed code compliance in perpetuity, as long as we managed to clean up the wiring mess left by the previous owners, which we did.

The dream of going it alone died with these realizations.

Still Off-Grid? A Few Takeaways

• Every property is different, and some are so far from utilities that a solar installation makes sense. Don’t DIY it. If you hire a contractor for the job (after researching them well, including their knowledge and relationships with the relevant agencies), you have a ready resource when you need repairs.
• If you want to save money, find a contractor without a sales agenda that favors particular products, so you can take advantage of the diversity of solar equipment on the market.
• Follow codes when you do wiring in your buildings. It will make your property more valuable if you decide to sell it.
• Monitor your energy usage carefully to avoid having to run your generator for extended periods during prolonged periods of cloudy and rainy weather. Generators use fossil fuels (which you are trying to avoid), and they wear out quickly when they run continuously.

The post I Had an Entirely Solar Property, But Here’s Why I Ended Up Paying for Utilities appeared first on Family Handyman.