What full independence is actually worth.

Read this before the numbers

This page shows the finished picture — every load electric, all of it on your own power. Getting there is a series of steps, and most people take them a few years apart. The appliance side is its own project with its own cost, so if you want a true payback figure, make sure the installed-cost slider covers everything you'd actually be buying, not just the array and the batteries.

These are estimates built from typical New Hampshire values and whatever you typed above. They are not a quote, and nothing here is guaranteed. The single biggest lever is your actual fuel use — if you have last year's delivery tickets, put those numbers in and the rest gets a lot more trustworthy.

Watch the three-way split above, because it tells you where the money is really coming from. If you're on natural gas, the fuel switch on its own often saves little — gas is cheap per BTU in the towns that have it — and most of the number is the solar array, which you could have put up anyway. On oil or propane the fuel switch carries itself before the roof does anything. We'd rather point that out than let a big headline figure do the selling.

The battery isn't in the payback maths above. It doesn't lower a bill; it keeps water running, heat on and food cold when the road is closed. We treat that as what you get on top, not as the reason the numbers work.