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At first you want to drop down your usage of electricity as far as possible without loosing to much comfort. As rule of thumb. everything generating heat uses much electricity. There are some cheapo meters that can be plugged in between appliances. If you run those for 24h or so you get an idea. Sure it depends on personal usage, I found out that the biggest consumer were warm water as well as the washing machine.
Switched to a wood powered boiler, 80l water from 5-10 C to nearly 100 C in about 1h with 4-5 (roughly) kg of dry fire wood. Though after about 30 min you can take a shower. The above mentioned meter showed that the washing machine is another heavy user of electricity. Primally due to heating the water. There are machines you can feed in directly hot & cold water and it will mix it on its own. Though they are not cheap and ours was not old. There are also small appliances to premix the water, but expensive. The problem, most machines check the temperature and will just drain to hot water out like crazy. I found a "eco" setting where our machine would not check the temperature. So I attached the machine to a casual one-hand mixer tap, allowing to set the temperature manually. After 10 minutes you can switch to cold water, as only the first liters will be normally heated. Though that can be automated with a small self constructed appliance. This dropped consumption from about 1.5 kWh to 0.15 kWh per washing cycle!
As others pointed out, going micro-hydro if you have the possibility is the only way to generate power cheap. Even if you can drain just 200W, it is 24/7 so you get 4.8 kWh/day and when you need most, during winter times you have usually enough water flow. So you do not need big battery banks (expensive). So if you heat, cook, bake, heat your warm water and more with firewood you'll be fine. For backup purposes some cheap generator will be fine, running on fuel or/and wood.
So saving and using wood will allow you to get away with a smaller (cheaper) system to obtain electricity. The most important with firewood is to have/get it really dry (<15% humidity), Takes usually about 2 years drying. So planning is important and you need enough forest, so you do not take more out then what is growing/year.
Switched to a wood powered boiler, 80l water from 5-10 C to nearly 100 C in about 1h with 4-5 (roughly) kg of dry fire wood. Though after about 30 min you can take a shower. The above mentioned meter showed that the washing machine is another heavy user of electricity. Primally due to heating the water. There are machines you can feed in directly hot & cold water and it will mix it on its own. Though they are not cheap and ours was not old. There are also small appliances to premix the water, but expensive. The problem, most machines check the temperature and will just drain to hot water out like crazy. I found a "eco" setting where our machine would not check the temperature. So I attached the machine to a casual one-hand mixer tap, allowing to set the temperature manually. After 10 minutes you can switch to cold water, as only the first liters will be normally heated. Though that can be automated with a small self constructed appliance. This dropped consumption from about 1.5 kWh to 0.15 kWh per washing cycle!
As others pointed out, going micro-hydro if you have the possibility is the only way to generate power cheap. Even if you can drain just 200W, it is 24/7 so you get 4.8 kWh/day and when you need most, during winter times you have usually enough water flow. So you do not need big battery banks (expensive). So if you heat, cook, bake, heat your warm water and more with firewood you'll be fine. For backup purposes some cheap generator will be fine, running on fuel or/and wood.
So saving and using wood will allow you to get away with a smaller (cheaper) system to obtain electricity. The most important with firewood is to have/get it really dry (<15% humidity), Takes usually about 2 years drying. So planning is important and you need enough forest, so you do not take more out then what is growing/year.
