It can be pretty great, but you really do need to treat it differently than you would on the grid!

For example: at night, making sure you don't leave lights on, not running heavy loads like the microwave for very long, etc.

The good news is that as the old expensive equipment gets phased out, it gets easier and cheaper to DIY your off grid (or emergency backup) system!

For real, I have wood stoves (and propane heaters a supplemental) for winter heat so luckily a little less load on my system! This past winter was so cold here I had to get a subzero sleeping bag and put a living heater (my dog) inside of it because even the wood stoves couldn't keep up

I have mini splits but because of the sun situation I couldn't run them on heat without burning through my power/spending hundreds of dollars on gas for the generator!

That, and more energy. I swear something got fucked up at the factory when they made me. I'm a terrible scandinavian. I am prone to pretty intense winter depressions and I'm not a fan of the cold either. I have been so far down the dumps during the winter seasons that I have blacked out entire months and have no memory of what I did and my spouse is like "yeah, you basically spent two months sitting in the same corner of the home when you weren't working, just looking gone, dude." And when I have winters where I feel like I did pretty good and didn't get depressed my man still goes "yeah, nah. You were depressed af. Just not vacant this time".

On the flipside I have been giddy like a kid walking for hours in flip-flops in Mediterranean mountains, getting slow cooked by the summer sun. I remember last time I was visiting Greece with my parents and we walked all morning until noon to get to a nice little beach across the mountains and a couple of locals saw us coming and were fucking horrified that we had come all that way on foot, lol.

then there is the winter when you casually just realize that you haven't seen the sun in weeks, maybe event months because you leave for work before the sun rises and go home after it sets and in the weekends you are inside recovering from the workweek.

But still i like to say that it takes the whole winter to yearn for the summer but it only takes one day of summer to want it to be winter again.

For ghouls, maybe.

I have no kids, work 40 h/Week and only have a 6 min bike-commute left (used to be 55 min by train from a bigger city).
So in the summer I get up at 5:50, leave for work at 6:50, start work at 7 till 16:30 and am back home at 16:40 (Fridays are shorter). I go to bed at around 23:00. In the winter i sometimes shift the whole thing back by 1 hour.

So on a normal weekday I have ~6,5 hours left to cook, clean, meet friends, do sports. So yes, i am absolutely going to the lake at 8pm.

In the winter it's still dark 4 days a week, when I get home. So no visit to the lake, no long bike-tours etc... All activities that require sunlight have to take place on saturday/sunday. I could really use more sunlight in the winter.

People who bark about diurnal superiority are losers.

It's a lot less cool when you're robbed the option of day time entirely, because you have to spend daylight hours at work...you wake up, its dark...you leave work, its dark. And on top, it's rainy and cold and windy.

depends where you live

Mostly losing my will to live for months every year is not very cool.

No, fuck you.