Peter's Story - OFFGRID NOW® on a Rural Property in Federal, QLD.

On this trip OFFGRID NOW® Founder Mark Leckenby and I are off to visit Peter in Federal, a rural locality south of Gympie in Queensland. It’s a typical warm winter afternoon in south-east QLD, and as we track the winding driveway to Peter’s home we take in the view of the beautiful little piece of rural property. The paddocks are neatly slashed, a large vegetable garden bordered on one side with a line of fruit trees, a dam and a modern house perched on the hill. As we cross the rise, the shed comes into view, the roof gleaming blue with new solar panels and the things you would expect on a rural property: a tractor with attachments laid out neatly in the side paddock, an old tipper, shipping containers for storage – and in this case, Peter sitting on a beat-up old excavator. We had installed a OFFGRID NOW® Forza 20kW power cabinet on his shed several months ago. The system was designed to power the workshop operations in the shed, as well as both Peter and his son’s medium sized residential homes located a hundred metres or so from the main shed. We were back for a visit to see how it was all going.

Peter is everything you would expect from your typical rural QLD bloke – tough, rugged and fiercely independent. A career builder, he is a no-nonsense type, who is both well read and skilled with his hands, exuding a calm, quiet confidence. “Come on in”, Peter motions as we approach his shed. He is dressed for work, a greasy rag draped over his shoulder and as we enter the shed and our eyes adjust, we can see he has been working on a piece of machinery towed by a tractor. “What are you working on, mate?”, Mark gestures to the contraption on the floor. “That’s an old rotary hoe. it needs a bit of work, but I got it for $1000”, he says beaming, “A new piece like that normally costs thousands”. I’m no farmer, but the series of clamps and timber holding everything together ready for welding looks impressive, and I am sure he will make it work like new again.

Peter disappears to the corner of the shed and returns with 3 dusty wooden stools that we arrange in a semi-circle amid the tools and machinery and sit down for our interview. The new OFFGRID NOW® Forza power cabinet stands shining in the corner, the clean white lines contrasted against the dusty tool covered shelving and walls of the workshop.

Peter’s shed was designed and built with the off-grid power system in mind..

“I should let you know it was not purely an economical decision”, Peter says as we sit down. “Environmentally I wanted to do my bit, but primarily I believe that power prices eventually are going to go out of control. I really just don’t trust any of the governments, and I think the power prices are going to continue to go up and be less reliable. It was more that than an economical decision”.

When Peter says it was not purely an economical decision, he is referring to the up-front cost associated with taking a farm workshop, 2 medium-sized residential homes and 4 adults off-grid, which is considerable. He has an OFFGRID NOW® Forza 20kW system with 2 x 10kW inverters, 25kW of solar panels on the shed roof and 40kWh of battery neatly installed in our 3mm aluminium and powder coated cabinet.

“I needed a large system to run the tools here in the workshop, and the 2 family homes. I want to run air conditioners in the summer, pretty well all the time in the houses. If you run them during the day, it’s much easier to maintain that temperature into the night. When we were on grid we would never do it, because it was too expensive. Our power bill was between $3-3500 per year, and if we ran the air conditioners it would have been up around $7000”.

Another reason to go off-grid was the power outages and Peter’s concerns around climate change. “I believe in climate change, you know, that the climate is changing and that there will be more violent storms. And every time we have a violent storm, we lose power. Especially out here in a rural place – the power goes out 3 or 4 times per year. Sometimes the power has been out for many hours”.

Peter’s OFFGRID NOW® Forza 20kW cabinet has 4 hinged doors for easy access to the inverters or battery.

Our discussion turns towards the installation process, which was a little bit bumpy as there were some unusual elements to this install. The Main Switchboard for Peter’s property was located on his house but the pitch of Peter’s roof was orientated inconveniently, which would have required solar panels mounted on tilt stands. “I didn’t want solar panels on the roof for aesthetic reasons, so I built this shed with the intention of putting solar panels on the roof of the shed and cleared every tree around it. There is also a high wind rating up where the house is, N4 vs. N3 on the shed location”. So, the shed was built with the plan to turn it into the power station for the property, with an expansive roof for the solar panels, and a cable trench dug back the hundred or so metres back to the house where the Main Switchboard was located. “Once that part of the design was sorted, it all worked perfectly”.

Whilst Peter’s system is designed to produce and store power for all of the energy needs on the property, Peter is still connected to the grid as a back-up for the batteries if there is a run of cloudy days. “Are you going to export your excess power back to the grid as a Virtual Power Plant?”, I ask and Peter shakes his head, “Nope, I don’t want to give my power to the government”. And that’s that.

“How has the solar been performing, have you had to draw energy from the grid?”, I continue.

“Yeah, we struggled to get 30kWh for the day back into the batteries during a cloudy period. On one of those days, we got down to a bit under 30% battery charge overnight, and we only got back up to 75% charge due to the cloud cover, so we had to wind things back a bit that night”. The system had been programmed to draw energy from the grid to charge the batteries if they fell below 30% charge, but we had recently reprogrammed that to 20%. “I want to add more solar panels if I can, because mate, if the sun comes out for even an hour it really pumps it in!”.

Peter’s system was initially supplied with a 40kWh battery pack, and this was before the announcement of the Federal Governments Cheaper Home Batteries Program. The OFFGRID NOW® Forza 20KW power cabinet can store up to 60kWh of battery capacity, so Peter made the recent decision to expand with an additional 20kWh of battery purchased under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program which will be a good boost to the energy storage.

It’s pretty clear that Peter is not one for wanton spending, but he knows value when he sees it: “I got a few quotes, but I don’t think anyone could have beat your price”.

As for advice for others looking to go off-grid? “If you can afford it, do it”, was Peter’s simple reply.

“We are extremely happy with the system, it’s doing everything we hoped to do and we are thankful for the help from OFFGRID NOW®”.

Peter is running his farm operations and two family homes off-grid with the OFFGRID NOW® Forza 20kW power system.