Free guide · sized for where you live
Literallywhat you need.
Tap a few questions. Get the exact gear, sized for where you live, and why. Buy it once, and your power is yours.
A real result: power for a van
Covers a fridge, phone chargers, two laptops, lights, and a roof fan. About $7,000.
Sized for a dark US winter (safe for most states) · use your location
Where do you need power?
Tap one to startWhat a usual off-grid home runs
What's here
Off-grid living, one system at a time.
Liberty Offgrid is a free guide to living off grid. It starts with off-grid power: solar panels, batteries and inverters for homes, cabins, vans and long outages, sized for where you live. Then clean water, shelter and preparedness. Every answer says what to get, why, and the catch.
- Pole barns & metal buildings
- Earthships & cabins
- Container homes, honestly
- Filters for tap or creek
- Wells & hand pumps
- Rain catchment
- Starlink, anywhere
- Radios for when the network's down
- Monitoring your system
- Where to start
- Long winter outage
- Grid down for months
Why you can trust the numbers
- NASA sun data for 890 ZIP areasSized for your darkest month, not a sunny average. See the data
- No sponsorsThe pick comes first; where to buy comes after. How picks are made
- Real owners' setupsHomes, cabins and rigs running this gear today. See them
- Sources people already trustWill Prowse's tests and the DIY Solar Forum, linked where they apply.
See it running
Real homes, cabins and rigs running this gear right now.
Watch how it's going for them, then get the same setup, sized for you.
Off-grid homestead on a pallet of 30 used panels and a ground mount
Affiliate links See their setup Down to Earth Homesteaders YouTubeFamily homestead: about 3.6 kW of panels, 8 Battle Born batteries, Victron
Affiliate links See their setup EXPLORIST.life YouTube · wiring diagramsStep-by-step wiring diagrams and builds for vans, buses and RVs
Victron & Battle Born ambassador See their setup Will Prowse YouTube · DIY Solar ForumIndependent teardowns and tests of batteries, inverters and power stations
Earns from affiliate links too See their setupHow it works
Three taps. One clear answer.
Answer a few taps about your life
Where it goes, how you like to live, and how long you'd want to go without sun. No specs, no jargon.
See the best setup, and why
How many panels and batteries, the proven gear, and what each one does for you, in everyday words.
Tweak it, check it, decide
Add a battery, drop a panel, and see what changes. Then tap to get the parts.
What you're really buying
Freedom. Your own power.
Solar basics · two minutes
Every setup does four things: make it, move it, store it, use it.
No need to learn volts and amps. Here's the whole system in one picture.
They catch sunlight and turn it into power.
Takes panel power and feeds it safely into the batteries.
Save it for night and cloudy days.
Turns battery power into normal wall outlets. At home, 2 and 4 come in one box.
What you run decides how big everything else is.
Go deeper: electricity, explained like water
A 100-watt bulb uses 100 watts while it's on. Ten of them use 1,000.
Like how far the tap is openThat bulb on for 24 hours = 2,400 watt-hours = 2.4 kWh. It's the number on your power bill.
Like gallons in the bucketThey save the day's sun for the night. Bigger tank, longer without sun.
Like a rain barrelThey refill the tank. More panels refill it faster, even on grey days.
Like a bigger gutterPrepare
Plan for what worries you.
How long it really lasts, from the record, and how long your own setup would keep going.
- Where to start prepping: water and food, then power, then shelterStart with water and food for a few days, then two weeks, then power to keep water flowing and food cold, then shelter. Each step covers far more real outages than the last, until about three months, when storing more stops paying off.
- A long power outage: winter storms and ice stormsPlan for about four days without power, and two weeks if ice storms reach you. That's how long the worst recent US winter outages lasted.
- When the grid goes down for monthsIt has happened in the US: after Hurricane Maria, most of Puerto Rico had no power for months, and the last neighborhood waited 328 days. What kept people going was local power, water and medicine, not stockpiles alone.
- A solar flare that takes down the gridA Carrington-class solar storm wouldn't fry your phone or your panels. It threatens the big transformers on the grid, and Lloyd's estimated 20 to 40 million Americans could be without power for weeks to a year or two.
- An EMP: what it would do, and will your solar survive?Solar panels survived a strong simulated EMP in Sandia's tests. The weak points are long wires: the grid, and the cables into your inverter. Keep spares wrapped, and power that doesn't depend on the grid.
- Hurricane power outages: how long, and what keeps you goingMost homes get power back within days of a hurricane, but the hard-hit ones wait weeks. After Beryl in 2024, heat killed more people than the wind. In September, solar refills a battery fast once the clouds clear.
- If Yellowstone erupts: ash, a dimmer sun, and your powerA Yellowstone super-eruption is very unlikely (USGS puts it near 1 in 730,000 a year) and would come with warning. If it happened, the threats to your power far away are wet ash shorting power lines, ash on your panels, and a dimmer sun for a year or two.
- The Cascadia earthquake: power for months, not daysOregon's own plan expects electricity to take 1 to 3 months to come back in the Willamette Valley and 3 to 6 months on the coast after a full Cascadia earthquake. Two weeks of supplies is the floor, not the goal.
- A nuclear attack: what the official guidance says to doGet inside, stay inside, stay tuned. Federal guidance is to shelter in the most protective building nearby for at least 12 to 24 hours, because fallout radiation drops fast: every seven-fold increase in time cuts it about ten-fold.