Jan's Story - OFFGRID NOW® on a rural property in Kin Kin, QLD.

Mark drove out to Kin Kin along winding roads, past rolling paddocks and lush countryside, arriving on a warm morning. His conversation with Jan quickly settled into the straightforward, lived-in tone country people favour — direct, specific and practical.

Jan has been on her block for nearly 26 years, and over that time rising power costs and ongoing reliability issues made the decision to change feel inevitable.

She didn’t want solar panels on her house, so the old shed became the powerhouse. Thirty-two 590W panels (around 20 kW) sit on the shed roof, feeding an OFFGRID NOW® FORZA 20 battery cabinet with a 20kW inverter and 40 kWh of storage, all tied into her three-phase system. The setup is protected from dust and weather — a system built to match the scale and realities of life on her property.

Her reasoning was simple and practical.

“To not get a power bill,” she said.

She had watched costs steadily climb over the years.

“I’ve been here for nearly 26 years now and the power bills have always been expensive here. I do have a lot connected to power, but they’ve gone up to a ridiculous amount — up to seventeen hundred odd dollars a quarter. I think I had virtually no option but to go off-grid because I couldn’t afford to keep paying those amounts.”

Jan has 2 dwellings and a large block of stable which are OFFGRID NOW®.

The property supports a range of ongoing activities.

“I’ve got two dwellings and a large block of stables where I run lights,” Jan explained.

While the stable lights aren’t on 24/7, they run on timers — from 3:30pm to 10pm, and again from 4:30am to 7am. They’re LED for efficiency, but regular, scheduled loads still add up. She also runs four hot water systems, an AGA electric oven, a large three-phase workshop, a truck with a built-in living area that stays plugged in, and a swimming pool. All of these steady demands shaped the size of the system she needed.

Before installing the FORZA system, Jan already had solar.

“Hardly any benefit. I think it was about 13 or 15 kW,” she said.

Despite having a decent-sized system, the network was only paying around three cents for exported power. With most of her usage happening in the evenings, exporting solar didn’t make financial sense. A battery was the obvious solution.

Jan had to replace the main property power pole twice in a 5 year period.

Reliability was another major factor.

“I had to replace the main property power pole twice in a five-year period,” Jan said. “Both times it was signed off by a licensed installer, and those poles are meant to last a long time. But when it was eaten out again in five years, I had to pay to replace it.”

Replacing power poles was expensive and inconvenient, and it highlighted just how unreliable the grid can be in rural areas.

She had also experienced extended outages.

“We’ve had a few five-day periods with no power,” she said. “It costs you a lot of money when you’re not prepared to be without power for five days.”

For someone running workshops, maintaining stables, and relying on refrigeration and essential systems, those outages weren’t just inconvenient — they had real financial impacts.

With rising bills, ongoing energy demands, low feed-in returns and unreliable infrastructure, moving to an off-grid solution made sense.

The OFFGRID NOW® Forza cabinet has been installed in the shed for addtional protection from the elements.

Jan chose an OFFGRID NOW® FORZA battery cabinet sized to meet her current needs, with room to expand later. The system allows her to isolate the property and run entirely on solar and batteries when she wants, simply by switching off the grid connection.

At the same time, she’s kept the grid as a backup. This avoids the cost and maintenance of installing a large generator and gives her flexibility during extended periods of cloudy weather. When the system produces excess energy, she can still export enough to offset certain fixed costs, while maintaining control over her power supply.

The expandable design of the OFFGRID NOW® FORZA cabinet means she didn’t have to overcommit upfront. She could size the system for today, with the option to add more storage later if needed.

Jan’s decision was driven by everyday realities. She wanted control — over her bills, her reliability, and the continuity of work and life on the property — without adding unnecessary complexity.

The OFFGRID NOW® FORZA system gave her that control. It provides enough storage to carry daytime solar into the evening, supports the regular demands of her workshop and stables, and leaves room to grow.

Since installing the system, Jan has changed the way she manages her property. There’s less worry about high quarterly bills, better resilience during outages, and the flexibility to run the property on her own power when she chooses.

She still uses the grid as a safety net in extreme conditions, but most days the system does the heavy lifting — and that shift has made a real difference to life and work on her Kin Kin property.