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I'd agree, I was just pointing out the basis that the author was coming from which was the reason why he was considering seasonal variations in battery calculations.

With that said, from reading some articles about off-grid living, it's not outwith the bounds of possibility that people are looking at pure solar (or pure renewable anyway) off-grid living, for priniple-based reasons , rather than a more pragmatic rationale.

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Only if they don't care about their lives. Look, I've lived off the grid for a number of years. 99% of the time things work just fine and all your plans come out. And then, in the middle of January there is a 9 day spell without wind and solar and you're going to have to fire up the genset. Tough, but preferable over having all your waterlines freeze due to 'principles'. Principles are nice to have but when you go off-grid out of principle the one principle you don't want to throw overboard is reliability and a good generator is worth gold when everything else you carefully planned out fails. If there is one thing that you can predict about the weather then it is that it is unpredictable.

I guess a genset doesn't add much to the final bill?

A small one is better than nothing in a pinch and a 2 KW gas powered genset is a few hundred bucks. I went the overkill route (diesel, 6.5 KW) but I also had a machineshop attached to the house and it was nice to run the mill or the lathe without draining the battery in a couple of hours.

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