Speaker: N Rogers
Where in NZ are you, and why did you decide to go off the grid in the first place?
N Rogers : Hi, there Just in regards to where we live, and why did we decide to go off grid? Really easy question. We live in Palmerston North. Two years ago, we were looking at purchasing a piece of land without any services. After at least a year dealing with electrical suppliers, I gave up and we started looking at other options. Our property is probably 500 m from the road and it was going to cost us at least $100,000 to get power to our building site. We are slightly alternative - very slightly. So we live a lifestyle that suits being off grid. But the thing that that pushed me in that direction the most, which is the the atrocious service that we had received from the traditional power suppliers.
Why did you choose Power Station?
N Rogers : Okay. So why did we choose Power Station? When we decided that we were going to seriously consider going off the grid - at least with electricity... We approached At least 10 different suppliers mostly by email. I'm not sure how many emails, I sent - quite a few. A lot of companies didn't even bother to respond. Obviously they weren't able to do a decent off grid. You know, we didn't want to live like hippies in the bush. We really wanted to have a normal house, with with normal use appliances. So many of the companies aren't really able to, to provide that. And then these others... they really didn't seem to know what they were doing in regards to a decent sized off grid installation. And then we narrowed it down to three suppliers. For one of them, the process was just a bit hard for us. They asked us to walk around and look at all the appliances that we wanted to use and write down how many Amps they use and how often we - you know... just a pain in the butt. So we don't want to do that. So I said to the guy, listen, if you want our business, you need to go and do that yourself. I'm not doing it! I'll tell you what we use and that's about it. So the process was just a little bit... difficult. One of the other companies didn't really listen to what it was we wanted. So for me that's right away. I'm not interested in dealing with them. So Rhys at Power Station... right from our first contact, he just asked us what it was that we wanted, how we lived, and what we did. And he listened to us, and that just made a massive difference. He listened to us and and offered us what it was that we were asking for. So in the end it came down to 'night and day' with service. The Power Station service was, was faster - PERIOD - than the other companies. The product and the offer was very good. We were happy with it. We had a lot of confidence that they could actually provide what they were saying they could provide. You know it's nice, (but a slightly lesser concern).. We came quite considerably under budget. Rhys probably doesn't want to hear that.
What was your experience like dealing with Power Station?
N Rogers : Right, what was your experience like dealing with Power Station? Uh If I was to sum it up in one word... it would just be EASY. And it was the whole process right from the start was just really easy for us. Rhys listened to what it was that we wanted. And they offered a system that was going to work for us and and we had confidence in their ability to to deliver that. Yeah, there's been over two years now that we've been dealing with Power Station, we've had a a couple of teething problems earlier on, but you know, we've always managed to get past that, and we're very happy with how things have ended up.
How is your system working for you?
N Rogers : Okay, so in regards to how is our system working? The answer is very well, we had just one problem early on within the first six months and when we started to use the system a lot, and a bit of a crash and within a few days power station had sent a technician down to us at their cost. And it was really just a matter of adjusting a few parameters within one or two of the components and having those components talk to each other, including the generator that we supplied ourselves. And since that time the system has just been faultless! We have probably put a bigger demand on the system than what we originally talked about... and what the system was designed for. We we make all our own meat products and things like that here. So, we we constantly have two big deep freezers running. We've got three fridges. We run a big double pyrolytic oven, even a 1200 millimeter extractor in the kitchen, dishwasher, just normal stuff. And uh recently we've started to use heat us as well. So we're running a space heater in our baby's bedroom, which is on 24 hours a day. We never, we never turn that off. And we frequently use an oil column heater, certainly throughout winter and a little bit now, which uses about 2000 watts. It's quite a high use item, but the system is keeping up there, no problem. I've even been doing , welding and running machinery in my workshop during the day, which is amazing, really! On a general normal night, we'll probably get down to about 30% on our battery. And at the moment, by 10 or 11 am the batteries fully charged, and we don't seem to be having any problems, so we're very happy with how it's working!
