disclaimer - I am not off the grid but do have a number of friends who either are off grid or are very close to it.
Considering your situation, you might want to take a look at a wood pellet boiler for heating your house. The pellets and boiler can be located outside of your home in a shed and the heat brought into the house via hot water. This keeps the fire outside but still heats the house. Harman makes a solid product (http://www.harmanstoves.com/Products/PB105-Pellet-Boiler.aspx)
However, this can be expensive on the installation depending on the heat exchanger and vents within the house. As always, make sure that thee is someone who knows what they are doing to do the install.
Heating and cooling are often the two most expensive parts of an electric bill. Working those down first will then leave you with your “base” usage. When you plan your off grid solution, build to this base usage plus 10% with enough storage capacity to carry you through a number of days without your energy supply (sun or wind).
The old refrigeration cycle, compression-expansion-condesation, is an energy hog. Instead of trying to produce your own electricity invent a low energy A/C system.
We have electric heaters and a wood stove. We only turn on the bathroom heater in the morning, and use the stove for the rest of the house. We go through 3 cords a winter, averages
$130 a month for delivered cords.
Wife is Filipina and I’m cheap ... we AC with electric fans and sitting outside ... Sold the central AC unit that came with mobile home
Last year, from March 2013 - December 2014 (yes, almost two years straight) we used heating for TWO WEEKS during the artic freeze thingy in early Dec 2014 and no a/c at all. Coastal SoCal, you hardly need any heating or cooling and you can keep your windows open 75% of the year. It is super cold for us now, highs in the 50s, and heat is on. But it might not be on for much of the year.
We got 99 problems here but the weather ain’t one.