Guy down the hill was switching his out for a better one and asked me if I wanted it for my cabin.
Up until then it was no power because the hauling a generator, even propane which would have been most practical, in and out would have been too much trouble.
Maybe if someone had offered me a gas generator that was already there, offered to maintain it, haul in the fuel and so on and so forth I would have gone for it.
Or maybe not.
Didn't happen that way so I didn't do it that way.
Getting the whole system for free certainly makes the decision easier, even if the system so disappointed the previous owner that he was faced with finding somebody to take it off his hands for no payment.
Most of us aren’t in the position of getting a solar setup for free. We have to make our choices based on spending our own money. Maybe for fair disclosure, you might want to mention that you got your system for free when you post about how well it works for you.
If it’s the best alternative for you, that’s great. From the research I’ve done though, I’d bet that a small gasoline generator would be the best alternative for the vast majority of people looking for power off the grid.
Going off the grid generally means finding ways to cut your consumption to bare bones level, and then cutting it some more. For somebody just using a cabin on weekends, if they’ve cut their consumption that much, they could probably power their limited uses of electricity by putting a single deep cycle battery in a cart and dragging it to their cabin, and just charging the battery with a battery charger at home each time between visits to the cabin. That would be a heck of a lot less expensive than what the actual retail cost of your setup would have been if you had bought it.