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We are a family of 4 living off the grid. We don't have many panels and our batteries were free (not too many amp hrs!), so we use less than 50 KWH per month. We typically keep one CFL on in the evening hours, and sometimes have 2 or 3 on for various activities. We try to use our loads in the daytime when we have solar power to reduce the loss of power from putting the power into the batteries. We use a danby dtt 420 washer (which is 120V ac for those on the grid). It uses very little power. It is all manual so you decide the cycle length. We vary it based on how much power is available and how dirty the laundry is. It is a twin tub, so you have to move it from the agitation tub to the spin tub. We also use a 12 V radio which draws about 10 watts and the laptop which draws about 65 watts. We heat with wood, cook with wood in the winter, and heat 2/3 of our water with wood in the winter. At any given time we have 10 gallons of boiling water available on the cook stove. We have an on demand hot water heater, used only a little, for baths. This amounts to maybe 1 20 lb tank every month or month and half. We also run a small chest freezer, which I sometimes run as a freezer, sometimes as a fridge. We keep a cooler inside of the freezer storing all the food, which allows us to turn the freezer off all night and maintain frozen food. When I want to use the chest freezer as a fridge, I just turn it on for 10 minutes at the warmest thermostat setting in the morning and eve and keep the food in a cooler inside. During Nov dec and parts of Jan, we have to use a generator if we want to use the freezer. This uses maybe 3 or 4 gallons a month when the freezer is on. In the future we want to get a super efficient 12 V freezer, so we dont lose power to the inverter, and fill it up with food that we grow here so we dont have to drive to the store as often. Also new batteries and one more panel so we can get the generator use down to 1 gal/month or so.
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