Our Freedom Kit is installed on and in our three bay shed high on Mt Cargill, overlooking Dunedin city. We installed the racks and panels ourselves, and had a sparky connect the fancy bits inside the shed as he was on site wiring our shed and outbuildings anyway. The shed is oriented so that the panels are facing a little east of north, which seems ok as they take good advantage of the morning sun that way.
We are living in the shed and other buildings until our home is built next year sometime, so we have an interesting setup. The three bay shed has our "lounge kitchen dining" in it so has a fridge, microwave, jug, and lots of power points. Good lighting as well. We also have a freestanding fire to stop us freezing to death! Wired in to the shed are three caravan plugs - one goes to a caravan with teenager and associated electronics inside it. One goes to little shed with another teenager in it, and the last goes to a portacom with the two adults in it, plus the shower, laundry and chest freezer. Cooking is done on gas, as is hot water. Our water pump is electric though, as we are on tank water. We do struggle in winter with short daylight down here, so have a little petrol generator to top up the batteries with as needed.
We have always liked the idea of being independent from the power grid and buying this land and then building gave us the opportunity to be completely off grid - no services at all on our road except power, but our building site is 500m from the road and the ground is pretty solid rock, so cost to get power to our site was prohibitive.
Our biggest challenge was researching and deciding on a supplier. We chose solar as there are numerous companies to choose from, it's very low maintenance, and it's fairly easy to set up. We have no stream for microhydro. We have a great wind resource on site, and a turbine tower built and installed, but we're struggling still to find a reasonably priced turbine in the 1-2kw range to use. It's also hard to get good info about how to marry the two systems together.
I found gridfree on the web. It was a pretty easy choice, as the other companies I had info from were making life complicated, and after heaps of questions they came up with systems three times the price. I like the way GridFree does absolutely complete packages and give a pretty good description of what they will run.
The best part of going solar was having electricity to make living easier. You should have seen the excitement when we turned lights on the first time and boiled the jug! And we also like having no bills and no power outages.
Our advice to others is to give GridFree a go. Great service and product, and I'm sure they would scale up a kit for the really big power users.
