Yes, a house can run entirely on solar. Whether it should is another matter.
Making power at noon on a sunny day is the easy part. The hard parts are keeping the fridge running at 2 a.m., starting a well pump in January, and getting through four straight days of rain. Once you’re trying to replace the grid rather than trim your bill, you’re no longer shopping for panels. You’re designing a small power plant.
Start with your bill, not the panels
The average American home used about 865 kWh a month in 2024, according to the EIA. That’s roughly 28 kWh a day.
Put that next to a big portable battery. Jackery’s Explorer 5000 Plus holds 5.04 kWh, less than a fifth of what that average house burns through in 24 hours, and that’s before conversion losses.
That doesn’t make it too small. It means the real question is what you actually need to keep running. A fridge, a freezer, Wi-Fi, lights, phone chargers and a furnace blower add up to a fraction of what an electric range, water heater, dryer and central AC draw when you live normally. Where you land between those two lists decides whether you need a modest battery or a very large one.
What a real outage looks like
One owner near Chicago bought a 5000 Plus and two solar panels shortly before a derecho knocked out power across the region. They ran a sump pump, a freezer, a fridge and a fan from it. It worked, but after about 20 hours the battery needed a recharge from another source, because the storm was followed by days of clouds and rain. (This is one owner’s account on Reddit, not a test.)
That’s the lesson. The battery covers the night. Extra capacity covers the bad weather. Panels that top off a battery in a day in July can barely trickle in December, which is exactly when you might need backup most.
At the other end, another Jackery owner linked two 5000 Plus units and eight expansion batteries for about 50 kWh of storage. They reported running their house for 74 hours with no solar input, at around 15 kWh a day, including the boiler, dishwasher, oven and microwave. Again, a self-reported result. But it shows the scale involved: 5 kWh is solid emergency backup, while 50 kWh is closer to a private utility, with a price tag to match.
How much battery do you need?
Take the total kWh from your electric bill and divide by the days in the billing period. At 900 kWh a month, that’s 30 kWh a day. If you want to live exactly as you do now and have a full day of autonomy, you’re looking at about 30 kWh of usable storage, plus a reserve and allowance for losses. Two sunless days means roughly 60 kWh. That gets expensive fast.
Now try it with essentials only:
| Essential load | Approx. daily energy |
|---|---|
| Refrigerator and freezer | 3.0 kWh |
| Internet and networking | 0.4 kWh |
| Lighting | 0.3 kWh |
| Computers and phones | 0.7 kWh |
| Furnace blower / pumps | 2.0 kWh |
| Reserve | 1.1 kWh |
| Total | 7.5 kWh |
A battery of around 10 kWh could cover that for a day with some margin. Your own numbers will differ, so check the appliance labels or use a plug-in energy meter.
Then size the solar array
The battery tells you how long you can last without sun. The panels tell you how fast you can refill it.
If you use 8 kWh a day, the array has to produce more than that, since part of each day’s output runs the house while the rest recharges the battery. As a rough example, an 8 kW array with 4.5 good sun-hours a day at about 80% real-world efficiency gives 8 × 4.5 × 0.8 ≈ 29 kWh. That looks generous, but it’s an average. What matters is your worst month, not your annual total.
NREL’s free PVWatts calculator lets you model production for your address, tilt and orientation. It assumes about 14% system losses by default.
Where the Jackery fits
The Explorer 5000 Plus is closer to a home-backup system than the camping gear the brand is known for. One unit offers:
- 5.04 kWh of capacity
- 7.2 kW continuous output, with 14.4 kW surge
- 120V and 240V output
- Up to 4,000 W of solar input
- LiFePO₄ cells rated for 4,000 cycles to 70% capacity, with a 5-year warranty
The 240V output matters. Well pumps, some HVAC systems, electric water heaters and dryers can’t run on ordinary 120V. Jackery says the system can expand to as much as 60 kWh, so you can start small and grow.
See current Jackery home-power options →
It isn’t the only option. EcoFlow, Anker Solix, Enphase and Tesla’s Powerwall all compete here, with different price and installation trade-offs, so compare before buying.
Grid-tied solar won’t keep your lights on
Many homeowners don’t realize this. A standard grid-tied solar system shuts itself off during a utility outage, to protect line workers. The Department of Energy notes that keeping power flowing requires solar plus battery storage that can detect the outage and run independently, known as “islanded” mode.
So “home solar” really means three different things:
- Grid-tied solar cuts your bill but depends on the grid, and shuts down when it does.
- Solar plus battery keeps chosen circuits running through an outage, with the grid as a fallback.
- True off-grid has to survive nights, winter and long stretches of bad weather with no help from the utility.
For most people the middle option makes the most sense. Use the sun when it’s out, the battery at night and during outages, and keep the grid for the rare week the weather won’t cooperate.
Don’t DIY the connection to your house
A battery next to the fridge is easy. Feeding your home’s wiring is not. Jackery’s Smart Transfer Switch can supply up to 12 120V circuits or six 240V circuits, and the company says a licensed electrician should install it. An electrician will work out which circuits to back up, whether your big appliances fit within the inverter’s capacity, how the panels connect, grounding and bonding, permits, and how to isolate the system safely from the grid.
The panels look like the hard part, but the connection between your power system and your house is where mistakes get dangerous.
The less glamorous side
Hardware reviews are mostly good, but Jackery has its critics. Trustpilot shows about 4.4 out of 5 from just over 1,000 reviews, with roughly two-thirds giving five stars and about a fifth giving one. Praise tends to focus on outage reliability and ease of use. Complaints cover dead units, unexplained battery drain, and slow warranty support.
One 5000-series owner said the hardware held up in an outage, but the software acted strangely with multiple batteries and didn’t always recover cleanly after a full discharge. Another, who uses a 5000 Plus daily in a converted bus, called the unit reliable but disliked that the app needs internet access and keeps logging them out. If you’re camping, that’s an annoyance. If it’s your home’s emergency power, support quality is part of what you’re buying.
So, can solar replace the grid?
It depends what you mean by “replace”:
- Replacing some grid use is easy.
- Making a house mostly solar-powered, with the grid as backup and a sensibly sized battery, is realistic for many homes.
- Cutting the cord entirely, including multi-day storms, is possible but means a very large and costly battery and array.
One 5 kWh battery won’t run an average 28 kWh-a-day house. But a home that’s careful about essential loads, 7 to 10 kWh a day, is a very different problem.
So before you buy anything, calculate how many kilowatt-hours your house needs when nobody is coming to restore the power. Build around that number, not around the biggest battery you can afford. For most people, the smartest move isn’t leaving the grid. It’s depending on it a lot less.
Compare Jackery solar and home-backup systems →