About

We teach the method. You build — or buy — the system.

Grid CEO is a design library for off-grid power, water and self-sufficiency systems — field guides that teach the method, calculators that size it to a real site, and maker-direct gear lists priced against the finished spec. We don’t install anything ourselves. We get you to a number you can defend, then hand it to someone licensed to build it.

What Grid CEO is

Off-grid is a wide field — solar, batteries, hydrogen and fuel back-up, water capture and filtration, heating and cooling, sanitation, food resilience, connectivity, survival gear, and the land underneath all of it. Treated separately, that’s eleven purchases made by guesswork. Treated as one system, it’s a spec. The library that does that runs on four things:

The two editions aren’t a language toggle. Voltage, codes, incentives and climate data run separately for a US site and a European one, from the ground up rather than translated after the fact.

How it works

Three steps, in order — sizing before learning the method just moves the guessing downstream:

1. Learn the method. A guide walks through how the number actually gets built — a load audit, a worst-month sun-hour figure, a battery-autonomy target, a permitting rule — before it hands you a hardware list.
2. Size it with a calculator. Enter the load, the site and the climate; the tool computes array kW, battery kWh, generator size or tank capacity live, with the method shown next to the result, not hidden behind it.
3. Buy against the spec. Take the finished numbers to the maker-direct gear lists — or to any builder you trust — so whatever gets quoted is quoted against what the site needs, not a brochure.

Editorial standards

A guide or a calculator only earns a place in this library if it clears three rules:

• Every number carries its method. A figure that can’t show its formula, its assumption or its source doesn’t get published as a fact — it gets published as a range, or left out.
• Worst-month sizing, not average sizing. An off-grid system doesn’t get to average across the year; it has to survive its single worst month with nothing to fall back on. Every guide and calculator here sizes to that month — the shortest sun hours, the longest dry spell, the coldest week — not the annual figure a brochure leads with.
• No pay-to-say. A brand doesn’t buy a better verdict, a higher spot on a list, or a softened paragraph. What a guide says about a product is the same whether the link underneath it earns a commission or nothing at all.

Grid CEO earns money two ways, both disclosed in plain terms rather than filed away in a policy nobody opens: some outbound product links are affiliate links, and an installer introduction can carry a referral fee. Neither changes the price you pay, and neither buys placement in a guide — full wording is in the affiliate disclosure.

Who it’s for

The library is built around four readers, not one:

• New builds and homesteads. Land with no grid connection to extend, or where running a line costs more than a system that doesn’t need one.
• Backup and resilience retrofits. A grid-tied home adding storage or standby power after an outage made the cost of doing nothing obvious.
• Portable and mobile power. Vans, RVs and cabins sized around a power station rather than a roof-mounted array.
• Installers. Licensed pros who want qualified leads they can buy one at a time — shared with two others at most, or won outright — instead of a résumé-blasted shared list.

The vetting bar for installers

A routed lead is worth nothing to a homeowner if the installer on the other end isn’t real. When the installer program opens, every applicant is checked against the same bar before a single lead reaches them:

• Licensed and insured in every state, province or country they claim to serve — active business license and liability insurance, verified before the first lead, not after a complaint.
• An off-grid track record. Off-grid, hybrid and battery-backed work behaves differently from a standard grid-tied install; the trade credential behind an application has to show it — NABCEP-class certification and state licensing in the US, the applicable national installer scheme in Europe.
• References we call. Past customers, checked directly, plus a look at any unresolved complaints on a state licensing board or national trade register.

The bar is re-run every year at renewal, not just on sign-up. Full detail is on the installer page.

Nothing on this page is a specification, quote or guarantee — see the terms for what that means in practice.