What is the best way to heat an off grid home?
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What is the best way to heat an off grid home?
Michelle Nason
Aug. 8, 2018Last updated: Aug. 1, 2020
Concrete slab floor with frost wall
I will run with the assumption that your house is not yet built otherwise you would already have a heating solution, is that correct? If not let me know.
From the beginning, your best bet is to have a very good thermal envelope to reduce the heat load and, if possible, orient the house forpassive solar heating. Both of those design priorities will reduce the size of the heating system you require as well as the amount of energy it will consume during operation.
The cheapest way to set yourself up would be a wood stove, but they are not the most efficient system, and home temperatures tend to vary more when wood is the primary heat source. It also requires that you be there to continually feed the fire. They’re fun to sit around and excellent to have in an emergency but they are a bit of a hassle. I speak from experience here, I like my wood stove but it’s a lot of work, so I use my electric heat as much as possible.
如果您的平板还没有决定，请尽快与我们联系，因为我们将在大约3周后(2018年9月)开始建造我们的下一个演示屋，该演示屋将在平板地板上安装太阳能加热空气板。太阳能空气加热板比太阳能水加热板麻烦和风险小得多，比光伏太阳能板便宜得多。我们希望这是一种更实惠的离网加热解决方案，因为它只需要一个小型光伏面板来运行风扇，然后传递热量。
We already have the answers you’re looking for no matter what stage of design or construction you’re at, here are the pages that will help; and if they don’t, please don’t hesitate to drop us another question.
Dear Emmanuel,
Thanks for your 2018 post. As you'd suggested, I'm following up to see how the hot air tubes in your slab floor are performing.
I'm keen to use PV solar to heat my radiant floors in an off-grid high thermal mass passive solar house I'm building on California's Mendocino coast. I'm leaning toward using an oversized PV solar array to run a heat pump to store and circulate hot water (rather than hot air) through our radiant flooring; the up-front cost for panels and inverters is higher, but it seems to me the falling prices of PV systems and heat pumps and the overall relative simplicity makes this worthwhile. I'm keen to learn from your experience.
Best thanks and warmest regards.
Hi Jeffrey, The air heated floor is nothing new and works fine, Legalett has been doing that for decades. Its the solar panels that are an experimental concept here but they still aren't on unfortunately. We hope to have that done shortly, and when they're on they will be used to preheat domestic hot water until they're needed for heating in the fall. So it will be next winter when we get an idea of how much heat the panels provide. We're pretty hopeful, and we will for sure update our pages when we have some figures.