The Off-Grid Farm

Our family home and business premises are based at Burwains Farm, which is a stone farmhouse built in the 17th century. There are two houses on the farm, along with 2 business premises and 2 fully electric vehicles. As the site is family owned there was a single grid connection for the whole site. The electrical demand of the site has always been substantial.

  • Average daily site consumption 150 kWh
  • Single phase site
  • Bore hole for water supply

In 2014 we took the decision to install a wind turbine to supplement out electricity supply, this had an immediate impact on the amount of electricity we drew from the grid and after seeing the improvement we wanted to add solar to our system to help further.

The problem with this however was that we had reached the limit of our 100A single phase grid connection and in order to install more generation on site we would need a 3 phase connection to the grid and this would have been at our cost.

When we looked at the cost of this connection together with the price we were selling electricity back to the grid for, we started to look at the possibility of disconnecting from the grid and becoming energy independent.

Wind Turbine System

At first it seemed it wouldn’t be feasible to go off grid due to the amount electricity that we use and it seemed like whoever we spoke to told us it would be more or less impossible.

Wind Turbine Equipment:

  • 1 x 24kW C&F Wind Turbine
  • 4 x 6kW ABB wind inverters
  • 1 x ABB wind interface box

We started by making a detailed analysis of our electrical consumption to see if we could reduce our usage but we realised that the savings we could make were limited. We needed more on site generation and a substantial amount of battery storage.

  • We would need battery storage
  • We would need PV solar
  • We would need to keep all the energy supplied by the wind turbine (rather than sending a large proportion back to the grid)
  • We would need a backup generator for extended periods of low renewable output

We took the decision to invest in the additional equipment we would need to take us “Off Grid”.

Additional equipment

We designed and installed our off grid system using the following equipment and almost two years later we are still fully off grid and the system has worked flawlessly.

  • 120 x 250w PV solar panels (20kW of DC and 10kW AC coupled PV solar)
  • 4 x Victron 250/100 MPPT’s
  • 3 x Victron 48/15000 Quattro’s
  • 30 x Pylontech US300c battery modules
  • 1 x Victron Cerbo GX
  • 2 x 5kW solar inverters
  • 1x 24kVA Deutz Generator running on waste vegetable oil
  • 1x WVO filtration system
  • 2x Victron EV Charging Stations

Our farm energy statistics