Here's my take on our situation. We were looking at having the power brought in to our acreage,it was going to cost $14,000 to bring it to the edge of our property. (A distance of 1 kilometer). Then I figured we would be paying an electrical bill of $200.00 per month, so thats $2400.00 a year. So in ten years thats $24,000.00 plus the intial $14,000.00. Thats $38,000 dollars we would pay for power over ten years!
So... We built our own wind turbines, got free batteries from the Tel.company, bought an Outback inverter, a Listeroid engine and 5000watt gen(Which I run on Veg oil or Bio diesel) and we now have lived off grid for 2 years coming up in march. I have about $6000.00 into our system. And this summer we plan to add Solar .
We had a high efficient wood fireplace put in when we built the house, you can duct heat to different rooms, so it heats the entire upstairs 1500 square feet. We use a grain burning stove in the basement, but grain prices went nuts so were buying wood pellets. Our total heating bill for all of last year was $153.00! that was for wood pellets. This year its looking to be right on target for about the same. And this is in cold old Canada. Its minus 28 celius outside here today and plus 26 in our house!
But to me the real beauty of this type of set up is, if down the road we decide to move and the next person dosent want to mess with RE, we can pack it all up and take it along!
But the $38,000.00 we would have gave the power company... that would be long gone.