Listening off grid with batteries

Send an email to Twl, through Audiogon. He might be able to help you with this question.

Thanks for the replies.

Lplayer
Property is located on an Island, 20 minute boat ride from the mainland.
Thirty minutes drive from our home on the mainland to the Marina.
The Island has 200 inhabitants but no ferry access, it's boat or water taxi only.

My creek runs a large volume of water, but only in the rainy season which is from Nov to Apr.
Creek is located 60 feet from the back part of the house so the distance is not to far for the cable runs.
When I purchased the land I also obtained the right of way to the creek.
Solar during the summer and the micro will help during the winter time.

T bone, I agree on the high efficiency speakers. I have to admit over drooling over your Jadis speakers.........many times. How efficient are they ?

Lak , I see that Twl is a solar grid designer, I will contact him.
Thank you for the lead.
Take care,

The Jadis are not quite as efficient as they could be. The isobaric woofers are 96dB. The mid/trebles are padded down (or they would be 100dB+). My 8W amps are sublime in the treble/mids, but can't hack it in the bass. To get the most out of the bass (which I think goes to 4ohms), I need more power - probably 30W at a minimum.

How much vertical drop and/or flow do you have for the stream? And how much power can you get out of it?

"As to what is possible, no matter what I would go for high-efficiency speakers to get the most bang for your juice buck."

I think that is very good advice in your case!

If the speakers must be less efficient for some reason, then lean towards a high efficiency Class D amp to drive them.

I looked into this long ago - started a thread - way back though. Since most gear converts AC to DC internally, I always wished I could just use the DC from the batteries to directly power the gear - get rid of the sine wave altogether. I'm not sure if that is possible, as you'd have to seriously step up the DC to high voltage. Some gear (Redwine, Teres Turntable, Sutherland PhD, etc) is designed to run off DC directly. I would certainly pursue this. I wonder if some manufacturers might be willing to accomodate a "special" version that could be switchable b/t AC and DC input. One manufacturer who might be amenable, as he is interested in the technology, would be Ralph from Atmosphere. Maybe you could get one of his amps and preamps made for DC - and be quite happy with that. I think it's a good idea to have a dedicated set of batteries for your hifi, so "sag" from other parts of the system doesn't effect your sound - but I don't know enough about it. I do know that when I was looking, the choice of inverter seemed to be an important question. The inverter makes the sinusoidal waveform, and you want a pure sine wave form - and you want to know how well the inverter can handle short peaks in power demand.

What region of the world is your island in? I'm in the Pacific NW (USA).