The TRUE Cost of OFF GRID Solar

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com A salesman will tell you twenty thousand dollars. A man on the internet will tell you four. He will show you the same number of panels on the ground and tell you he did it in a weekend with his children helping, and he is not lying to you either. Both numbers are real, and that is what makes people give up. When two men both telling the truth give you answers five times apart, you stop believing there is an answer. There is. They are answering two different questions, and neither one is answering the question you actually have. In my community we allow solar, panels on our own buildings charging batteries for our own uses, and the stricter orders do not, so I say that plainly at the start. I have talked here before about putting a panel up and wiring it, and I do not do that again in this one. This one is the arithmetic, because nobody does the arithmetic. Not the salesman, for reasons you can guess, and not the man with the children on the roof either, because he is counting what he spent and that is not the same as what it costs. My grandmother taught me the difference with a lamp. I was twelve and very pleased with myself, brass and heavy and got for almost nothing. She asked three questions. What does the chimney cost. How often do they break. And where will you get the wick when that one is gone. The chimney was an odd size, I never found another, and that lamp sat on a shop shelf for years. The price of a thing is what it costs to keep, not what it costs to get. What we go through: Why the price of a panel tells you nothing, and the one number to compare instead What a company's quote is actually made of, and why three quarters of it is not panels The question underneath both numbers: what you are asking it to power Powering the chores instead of the house, and why that one decision moves the price more than anything else A rough measure for how many panels a load really needs, worked in winter numbers rather than summer ones Secondhand panels, where the cheapest watts in the country are, and how to buy them without getting caught Why the number on the side of a battery is not the number you get to use Lead acid against lithium, the cycle counts, and why it is usually the years rather than the cycles that finish a battery The twenty five year arithmetic: what wears out, when, and how many times you buy it Why a panel under snow makes nothing, and why that argues for a ground mount and a broom The lithium rule almost nobody states, and the permanent damage you will not notice on the day Four rules for doing the wiring yourself, and why the usual reason given for it being safe is the wrong reason The part that gives the video its name. Panels do last twenty five to thirty years, fading perhaps half a percent a year. The inverter does not, and the batteries do not. So across the life of those panels you buy the inverter twice and the bank twice, and a four thousand dollar system has a twenty five year cost nearer eight or nine before a single gallon of generator fuel. It is still a far better deal than running utility line to a remote property, which runs into many thousands and buys you a bill at the end of it. But it wins at eight or nine, not at four, and the man who plans for four gets a surprise in year eleven with nothing set aside. The plain limits: this does not make electricity free, it makes it something you buy once and buy again, which is better and is not the same thing. It will not run a house full of things that want power all day, and if the plan is to change nothing about how you live then the quote will be twenty thousand and it should be. Tell me in the comments what you would put on a panel first if you did one load this year, and whether it is a want or a need. And if you are new here, tell me how cold it gets where you are in January as well, because that number decides more about your batteries than anything else here. Next time I am finally going to show you the well, because the first and best thing a panel ever did on this place was lift water. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #OffGrid #OffGridSolar #Solar #SolarPower #DIYSolar #Batteries #LiFePO4 #Homesteading #SelfReliance #OffGridLiving #SolarCost #AmishWisdom #OldWays #EnergyIndependence