The Freedom Pro | Off-Grid Solar System

What grid free offered well exceeded any other company. Electrician installing system was very impressed. No faults or problems after 3 months, only service lacking is an indicator of use levels.

It has been about 9 to 10 months since I installed my Freedom Kit solar power system, and it has been a great experience for me as a first time user of solar power. We are fully dependent on our solar system, living off the grid fulltime.

With our Freedom Kit there are highs and lows to solar power, but the highs outweigh the lows. The lows I talk about is power use during winter - as there is less sun in those months I have to be a little conservative with power, but as for the highs? No hundreds of dollars in paying power bills to a company and no power cuts thanks to being off-grid and being the only ones using it.

It is only me and my wife that use our Freedom Kit, and we are running our fridge-freezer and freezer 24 hours a day plus our internet. We do have other electricals we use everyday, like phone charging, Sky television, our 85inch 4k smart android tv, and a few other things we use now and then such as laptops etc...

So overall it has been one of the best investments money can buy. To go on the grid with a power company would have been $40,000 - to hook up my "GridFree Freedom Kit" was $10,500.

Thank you Zed & GridFree store.

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.

We purchased a Bach Kit for our whare back before Christmas 2019. It was great over the summer months and kept up with what we needed it to do. When we purchased it, we always knew that by March 2020 we would have the funds to upgrade to the Freedom Kit.

With that plan in mind we talked to the team at GridFree who helped us put our plan in place. As scheduled we upgraded to the Freedom Kit in March. Both my husband and I were able to install the solar kit, and upgrade, on our own (with me reading the instructions, of course).

From March to now we have had no issues whatsoever. We have 2 teenagers and run all that's necessary for a functioning home. We don't have a generator for back up. Of course, we all have to be mindful of how and when we use the electricity but, in my mind, that's how we should be anyway. I've taught EVERYONE in the house to read that controller and think about what they're using as we don't want a freezer full of meat to go to waste.

What is our functioning home?
We have a rechargeable Dyson stick vacuum cleaner. This is charged during the day when required.
We have a gas hob (for cooking and for our hot water kettle) and run a gas infinity hot water heater - the ignitor of which is 240 volts.
We have inverter appliances:
Double door fridge freezer that runs 24/7
10kg washing machine that I use on timer to wash, hot and cold, during the day while I'm at work
7 KG dryer that I use occasionally and during the day (I have a wooden, roof space, clothes airer that I've been using during the winter months)
Inverter microwave - used very occasionally, but no issues when it's used
32 inch (50W) smart TV that we use every night to watch Netflix on
A 4G modem from 2 degrees
My kitchen light
At times, I run my Phillips breadmaker
Upright, run of the mill, Fisher and Paykel freezer
4-slice toaster - but we make sure nothing else of heavy power use is running.
All of the above 240W appliances run off our Freedom Kit, straight from the inverter, but soon will be wired into the switchboard. We don't have lights hooked up, yet (our whare is a work in progress) but we use DeWalt and Stanley lights that we charge during the day through our Freedom kit. Our water pump is a 12V pump that is left over from our pre 240V days so it's being run by our lesser 12V system. For heating we have our freestanding fire and if I want to bake or roast I use my camp oven over an open fire or my Weber BBQ.

We don't live for convenience, we live to LIVE. If we were to hook up to the grid, it would have cost us over $50k (just to the gate!) plus monthly power bills. I'm not interested in building right next to the gravel road. With Gridfree it's cost us just over $10k, no power bills, and we've learned to really think about how we're using the resources available to us.

And when we have any queries, the team at Gridfree are ALWAYS available to help us.
Thanks guys.

We decided to buy a kit, so we searched online and liked the way GridFree laid out what you should be able to run off each system, plus each kit was priced so you knew how much you would have to spend. They were also quick to answer any questions and, having been in business ourselves, good customer service is something we really appreciate.
For the first 5 months on our property we lived with very little power, just a couple of 150W panels, a single battery/inverter box, and a small Honda generator. This taught us to appreciate the power we had and to not waste it - an attitude we already had for other aspects of our life. Now we have more power, and a fridge that is actually running! It is a great feeling to know it is our resource, just another way we have become self-reliant.

We can live quite normally on our kit, although we had to be a conservative with power usage over a succession of cloudy overcast days.Ideally during the day we run a water pump, gas califont, washing machine, lights, toaster, sockets, vacuum cleaner, fridge and a TV on special occasions. Our gas fuels an oven, stove top and hot water.

We are really pleased with the Freedom Kit setup so far. We got the lead carbon batteries and so far have not discharged below 70% with them generally 90 - 100% charged. We are about to install a battery monitor to give us more detail regarding exactly what is going in and out of batteries. We installed our system over lockdown and were impressed that GridFree was always available to answer questions and sort out some parts that were wrong. We have installed our panels at 45deg pitch on a bank behind our house, which is steeper than the team recommended, but seems to be the preferred angle being used by the various people we know using solar. I must say, we have had a few friends currently on solar that are very impressed with the system both cost-wise and simplicity-wise and are watching closely to see if the lead carbon batteries live up to their promises. We run a very large Elcold chest freezer, 1-2 loads of washing most days, lighting, computers, vacumm cleaner, and some small kitchen appliances and will run a fridge over summer months with ease. Thanks for making solar so easy.

Love it for our off grid house

We are now up and running with the Solar Freedom System Day 2....yay! Here are some pics of our 4bdm home & setup. My wife & I built our home about 14yrs ago. We chose to be off grid & have been on generator & part gas with the view of going to solar. Prices for solar have dropped dramatically over this 14yr period & it was now timely for us to convert.

I'm also a builder here on the East Coast, Ruatoria & surrounding areas and I'm happy to receive enquiries re installation. Happy for people to contact me through GridFree.

Happy so far! I got my kit set up a few months ago, it is running my cabin while I have my relocatable house set up. Running a 600 litre fridge freezer, Wi-Fi 9v lights, small smart tv, microwave, toaster and electric jug. The water tanks have been moved over to the house now so no shade on panels.

Not a full load on it as yet. Hasn't missed a beat or needed the generator even with the crap weather. I guess that because the batteries are new but hopefully it keeps being awesome. Took these photo's on a wet day last week.

The Freedom Kit is working well for us. We had a few teething issues with panel location early on but since sorting that we have had no issues.

There have been times through winter when I wish we had got the hybrid inverter to enable battery top up after a few dark days. Otherwise very happy.

So much so that I will be buying another kit from you soon to power a small workshop. I will be getting the hybrid inverter for this one though!

Running well