Design Your Off-Grid Power System: The Complete Course

Three off-grid quotes came back last spring for the same 1,400-square-foot cabin: $22,400, $38,900, and $61,000. Same roof, same location, same wish list. None of the three installers asked to see a load list. None showed their sizing math. The homeowner had no way to tell whether the middle quote was the fair one, a $16,000 markup on an identical battery bank, or a genuinely different — and genuinely justified — system wearing the same square footage. That's not a story about a dishonest installer. It's the default state of buying off-grid: a five-figure decision with no independent yardstick.

Off-grid power isn't sold like a car, where a sticker price and a spec sheet let you compare apples to apples. It's sold like a custom home — and custom homes vary by tens of thousands of dollars for reasons that are completely invisible from the buyer's side of the table. The fix isn't learning to trust the right installer. It's owning six numbers yourself — load, array, battery, inverter, protection, and what your permitting authority actually requires — so a quote becomes something you can check, not something you take on faith. That's what this course teaches: not enough electrical theory to replace an electrician, just enough fluency that nobody can quietly move a decimal point past you.

It's a self-paced course built from the same method Grid CEO's guides teach for free, packaged into six modules with worked examples, plus three ways to go deeper depending on how hands-on you want the result.

The Six Modules Behind Every Off-Grid Spec

Every real off-grid system is built from the same six numbers, in the same order, whether an installer admits it or not. Each module below ends with one number you can check against your own site before you move to the next one:

Module	What you walk out able to do	A real number from the course
1. Load auditing	Turn a room-by-room appliance list into one honest daily kWh figure — and stop pricing cycling loads like fridges and well pumps off their running watts.	A properly audited 1,400 sq ft cabin lands at 5.8 kWh/day; an unaudited "safe" guess for the same house routinely comes back at 11–14.
2. Array design	Convert that daily number into DC array size using worst-month peak-sun-hours — never the annual average a brochure leads with.	The same 5.8 kWh/day load needs about 2.0kW of panel at a sunny Sunbelt site (≈4.3 worst-month PSH) and about 3.2kW at a cloudy New England site (≈2.6 PSH) — same house, same load, 60% more roof. Worked in full here.
3. Battery sizing	Turn a target days-of-autonomy and a chemistry choice into nameplate kWh, instead of buying whatever fits the budget.	2 days' autonomy with a backup generator needs ≈15kWh nameplate; 4 days with no generator needs ≈29kWh — a $4,000–$6,000 swing at 2026 LiFePO4 pricing, decided by one design choice, not a parts catalog.
4. Inverter selection	Size to motor-start surge, not average draw, and pick the right voltage and phase for where you actually live.	A 750W well pump can surge to roughly 2,250W for the second it starts — that's the number that pushes a build from a 3kW to a 3.5kW-class inverter, not the running load.
5. Protection	Fuse, breaker, ground and bond the system to a real code standard instead of a guess — the module that keeps a DIY-adjacent build insurable.	PV string overcurrent protection is sized to a defined multiple of short-circuit current, not operating current — get that backwards and a fuse that looks correctly rated simply won't trip when it needs to.
6. Permitting	Know what your specific authority needs before you buy anything, not after the truck arrives.	US rules run county-by-county and state-by-state; European rules run country-by-country. The module teaches the questions to ask your own AHJnational authority, not one number pretending to cover 50 states and 27 countries at once.

Who This Course Is Actually For

This isn't a general homesteading course, and it isn't a parts-buying guide. It's the design layer that sits underneath both:

• You're about to buy land or a cabin and need a real budget number before you make an offer — not a figure pulled from a forum thread.
• You've already got two or three installer quotes that don't agree with each other, and you need to know which one, if any, is honest.
• You're planning to build all or part of the system yourself and need the engineering behind the parts list, not just a shopping cart.
• You want to sit across from an installer as an informed buyer instead of a target.

What it isn't: a grid-tied, net-metered solar course — that's a genuinely different design problem with its own rules (see off-grid vs. grid-tied vs. hybrid) — and it isn't a substitute for a licensed electrician anywhere your local code requires one to pull a permit or make the final connection.

Three Ways to Take the Course

All three tiers include the full six-module curriculum, worked in both US and European numbers. What changes is how much of the follow-through gets done for you.

Enrollment opens in stages — waitlist members get first seats and launch pricing.

One-time price, not a subscription. Checkout is opening in stages — create a free account now and you're first in line at these prices when it does.