Off Grid Solar: Build Your Own Affordable Off Grid Solar System (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781922300164)

Are you looking to be part of the solar revolution? Are you just looking to save some power on your electricity bills?
This book could be the answer you're looking for...

As a person who has had to survive a hurricane or two, I can officially tell you that one of the best reasons to make your own Off the Grid solar power system is simply to have electricity when other people don't. Because you are the one that is monitoring and providing maintenance on your specific grid, this means that the likelihood of a random power outage is very unlikely, unless one of your solar panels is shattered by some unknown force.
In a giant power grid that connects wires that traverse tens to even hundreds of miles, practically anything can go wrong. A transformer could blow, a power line could be knocked down, one of the wires could snap and come loose etc. Any number of things can go wrong. When an electric company must find a problem, first they narrow the problem to specific sections of the grid, then they manually inspect all of the individual poles and lines in that section to find the problem. Locating and fixing the issue can take a long time depending on where it originates.
On the other hand, because your solar grid is typically located on your property, if you notice that you are starting to lose power you can easily detect it through monitoring and then find the source of the problem within a relatively small area. In your system, all you have to do is simply look at the wires that are connecting to your battery packs and see which one might be causing the problem. Then, if the wires all check out, you just look at the solar panels themselves to see if any of them have broken or if something happened to them inside of their cases. Finally, you can then check the charge controller to see if it got hit with a surge of power or you can check one of the many surge protectors that you lay around the house so that you don't fry your devices. In other words, whenever you do experience a power outage you know the exact reason why you are experiencing it, and you are busy fixing it rather than having to wait for somebody else to fix it.