About Us

We’ve been living off grid since buying the property 5 years ago, and there’s been a lot of challenges and sacrifices. When I say off grid I mean using 12 volt camping fridges with a portable solar panel and a battery powering each of them, and running a small generator each night to top up the fridge and freezer batteries with individual chargers, and run a couple of lights,  a small TV, and charge up our phones.

The “dwelling” has so many air gaps that we can’t even keep frogs and snakes out, let alone the wind so in winter when the wind blows it’s like living in a fridge, and in summer it’s like an oven. We’ve had 5° in my bedroom in winter, and 44° in summer. No grid power so we’ve been limited to around 1600 watts of power from the generator, so no heaters and no air-con. Also no pressure pump for water so we’ve been limited to gravity feed pressure via a 70 metres or so of black poly pipe then runs from a tank up the hill a bit, and we have no water heater either (other than that pipe which in summer heats the water too much to be able to shower in).

I jokingly tell people we have hot and cold running water, but not at the same time.

Enough background – like I said, challenges and sacrifices.

So when sufficient funds were finally available I started researching what was currently available in full battery-backup off grid solar electric systems. Once I knew basically what I was after I started ringing around to get some quotes. The 2 biggest towns in the region are Gympie, a bit under an hour way, and Kingaroy which is a bit over an hour away. As this only gave a couple of options for suppliers I phoned around a little further afield, mainly just to see if there would be much price variation.

I am SO glad I did! This is when I first contacted Simon and Offgrid Lifestyle Solutions, based almost 2 hours away in Hervey Bay.

Of the other suppliers I contacted, one never ended up getting back to me with an actual quote, despite me sending a reminder email, one was very busy telling me what I wanted and not listening to what I needed, and one just seemed ‘vague’ about everything and kept referring me to manufacturers websites.

Simon on the other hand provided a quote that was more inclusive and more detailed than any of the others. We spoke a couple of times on the phone, changed a couple of things around a little, and ended up designing exactly the system that I wanted and needed.

As the roof of my dwelling was tree shrouded and not up to scratch for mounting panels on, I then had to shop around for a steel roof to hold the panels. This roof was to stand over 2 x 20 foot freight containers and the space between them (7 x 10 metres all up) and provide a safe and sunny location for the complete system to be installed.

So …. more phone calls and online enquiries. Only one of the online enquiries even earned me a return call, but they were unwilling to install a roof without support posts at the 5 metre midpoint. As this would prevent parking a car / trailer / etc between the containers I didn’t want that, so was told they could not help me. In the end, out of 6 enquiries I made I received just one quote: $5700 to supply the materials in kit form, or $12,500 fully installed.