We’ve been recently visiting with family and have been away from our cabin since November but the weather is warming up and it is time to get our Spring to-do list done.
There’s so many things we want(and need!) to get done this year before winter rolls around again and so my husband went home ahead of me and our son to get some Spring cleaning done before we arrive. This includes plugging in and cleaning the fridge and freezer, cleaning the water barrels, and doing maintenance on our small engine tools(generators, wood chipper, chainsaws).
It turns out our Ecoflow pooped out and that means his electricity is limited! We rely on our Ecoflow Delta Pro and extra battery to power everything we need at the cabin. His cell service is spotty at best so I phoned customer service this morning and we are fortunately still within the 5 year warranty and they will repair or replace our Ecoflow Delta Pro at no cost to us. How awesome is that?
Some people see living off-grid as a cheaper way to live, and while that can be true, it does take some moolah to keep things running smoothly. If we had to replace the solar generator, it would cost us $1,899. Which, isn’t terrible if we did have to go that route considering we paid $3,999 for it originally in 2022. But, it did come with a solar panel array as well. But who has $4,000 laying around?
If you’re new to off-grid, love to camp and want the flexibility of camping anywhere, or have a property that you want to go stay at periodically, we definitely recommend Ecoflow products. Their products come with the warranty and it was pretty painless to call customer service. I explained our unit wasn’t charging past 2% and the agent said, “It sounds like it needs to be repaired. Let’s open a repair case.” There wasn’t a back and forth of, “did you try turning it off and turning it on again” crap that we’re all used to when calling with issues on electronics.
We have plans to build another larger cabin in the next few years and are researching our options to expand our solar and battery capabilities outside of all-in-one systems like Ecoflow but for now, our current system has been working wonderfully besides this hiccup. It is a downside that we’ll be out of electricity while we wait for our replacement unit to arrive however, and so it’s always important to have redundancies or a backup. For us, we have multiple generators and also a smaller Ecoflow unit that we can hook into a small solar array.
I want to stress how important it is to have a backup plan. When you’re off-grid, you are the water treatment professional, the electricity technician, the everything person. We cannot rely on municipal or city resources since our property isn’t hooked up or located within 8 miles of the nearest paved road. And so I highly recommend having a dual-fuel generator. If you run out of gas, no problem. Hook up a propane tank and you’re back in the game. But personally we prefer to run our generator on propane rather than gas because it burns cleaner, doesn’t smell, and propane bypasses the carburetor so you’ll never need to worry about cleaning or rebuilding the carb. Propane is cheaper and you can get plenty more miles running on 5 pounds of propane versus 5 gallons of gas!
We’ve accepted that things happen. Things break. This isn’t the first thing to break on us within the last 3 years and it certainly won’t be the last either.
I want to share the system we use and include affiliate links to these items. If you choose to purchase through these links it helps us tremendously with a small kickback. These are all links to Amazon. We genuinely use and recommend Ecoflow Delta Pro and the Ecoflow Delta Pro Extra Battery. With these two products, we can run our medium sized fridge, deep chest freezer, tv, charge devices, and run Starlink for 2 full days without charging it. If it’s sunny every day, we hardly have to supplement with the generator at all.
I’m starting to sound like an Ecoflow rep over here but we love the ease of use of Ecoflow products and we also have the Ecoflow Smart Generator. We love that even while we’re not at home at the cabin, we can set up an automation so the generator automatically starts up on it’s own when the Delta Pro reaches a predetermined percentage. It also kicks on in the middle of the night when we’re sleeping so our Delta Pro never hits below 25% and we never lose power. If you have internet set up, you can even remotely check the levels of your batteries and even remotely start the generator so it charges when you aren’t there as long as it is connected to a propane tank or is filled with gas. We use a 40 pound propane tank with our generator and can fully charge the Delta Pro and the extra battery every 2 days for 2 weeks!
Okay, enough of that.
The topic of this post was to talk about how things are constantly breaking, needing repair, or maintenance. I hope you don’t run into set backs like this but unfortunately if a possibility exists for something to occur, it will eventually happen.
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