My name's Deb Murdoch and we're in Maxwell, New South Wales. We're in 100 acres here or 36 hectares. I've actually built two houses here and one is a three-bedroom house. It's a split level home and the other part of the property is a one-bedroom with a central pod. So we actually build in three separate pods. We're totally off grid here, we have no landline for telephone. We collect all our water from the roof of both the shed and the house, and we have three tanks. So in total we have in the vicinity of 250,000 litres of water collected off the roof. And so we have fair amount of roof space to have solar as well. So off-grid was about living totally independent of the infrastructure for me. The other side of it was the cost, and so being off grid meant an investment in the first place, it meant that I didn't get continuing escalating prices for electricity. So with what we've got with the three pods and the shed, we have quite a bit of roof space for solar panels to go on and for water to collect.

I looked at the costs of the system based on what I had been paying in electricity five years ago on a house in town that was smaller. And I calculated the cost of the system against what I'd been paying in electricity, and worked out that it would take me 10 years to pay for the system. And given that their system with the batteries is likely to last me up to 19 years, that's going to give me free electricity from year 11 on, for nine years. I thought that was a pretty good deal, it was worth the investment.