Off-Grid Solutions — Building Lighting
Off-Grid Building & Cold-Storage Lighting in Alberta
A steel building with no power out to it does not need a grid connection to have light. We build small, honest solar lighting systems with cold-rated LED high bays and self-heating lithium, sized for a five-hour December day so the lights are there when you flip the switch.
Call Us Directly
(587) 330-7502
Free 15-Minute Design Review
Tell us the building size and how you use it and we will size the lights, the array and the battery and quote it.
Light for a Building the Grid Never Reached
Plenty of Alberta buildings go up with no power to them and none planned: a cold-storage shed for equipment parked over winter, a shop at the far end of the yard, a barn a long way from the service. Running a line out to them can cost more than the building is worth in electricity you will barely use. Lighting-only solar is the practical answer, because lights draw very little and the whole system stays small.
The catch is the cold. A naive off-grid kit puts a lithium battery in an unheated building and, the first time it tries to charge below freezing, the battery is damaged. The whole design turns on handling minus forty properly: cold-rated fixtures, a self-heating battery that will not charge until it is warm, and an array sized for the shortest day of the year. Get those right and the lights simply work.
Ground-mounted panels need an electrical permit; there is no building permit for a ground mount, and off-grid skips the FortisAlberta micro-generation step entirely.
How We Build It
Cold-rated LED high bays
UFO high-bay fixtures rated for minus forty Celsius operation. LED output rises in the cold, so the diodes are happy in an Alberta winter; the rating is about the driver. We switch them in groups so you can light half a building instead of all of it.
Self-heating lithium, protected from the cold
A 48-volt self-heating LFP bank with low-temperature charge protection in an insulated enclosure. Lithium must never charge below zero, and this bank warms itself before it accepts power. The insulation keeps that heater energy tiny, around a third of a kilowatt-hour a day in winter.
A small AC system, not a science project
A 48-volt pure-sine inverter with near-zero standby draw, an MPPT charge controller, and low-temp-rated wiring and disconnects. The inverter only powers up when the lights are switched on, so it wastes nothing sitting idle.
Array sized against December
A rectangular grid of LONGi panels at a steep roughly sixty-degree tilt on the south wall or a small screw-pile rack. The steep tilt catches the low December sun and sheds snow. We size the array to the darkest month, not the sunniest.
Why We Run AC, Not a DC Lighting Circuit
A pure 48-volt DC lighting circuit with no inverter sounds simpler and it is tempting. We looked hard at it and chose a small AC inverter instead, for reasons that hold up. Cold-rated minus-forty AC high bays are widely available and proven in Canadian buildings; equivalent 48-volt DC high bays for a building this size are not. And pushing 1,200 watts at 48 volts the length of a 160-foot building means thick, expensive copper to keep the voltage from sagging.
The inverter we use sits in standby at near-zero draw and only powers up when you flip a light on, so there is no meaningful round-the-clock idle loss. You get proven, serviceable fixtures and sane wiring for the cost of a small, efficient inverter. That is the honest trade.
Sized on Eleven Years of Alberta Weather
We do not guess at the December sun. We run the building through eleven years of hour-by-hour Alberta weather data and dispatch the array and battery across the whole record, calibrated down to match what our installed systems actually make in the field.
1.5 kWh/day per kW
December yield at a steep sixty-degree winter tilt, the binding month we design against
About 0.6 dark days/yr
Lights available essentially every day; worst case a single three-day run once in eleven years
About 11% low point
The worst December battery low point in the whole record, so there is margin left in the bank
Three Worked Examples
Every lighting system is sized to the building, the light level you want and the hours you use, so we quote on request rather than by the watt. These three show the range, from a single-bay shop to a full cold-storage building.
Small
A single-bay shop or garage
A workshop or a garage that needs a few hours of light on a winter evening. Two to four high bays, a smaller array and a smaller lithium bank. The whole system is modest because lighting is a light load; the cold-weather battery care is the same as the big build.
Typical
A cold-storage building, the reference build
A newly built 9,600 square foot steel building, 160 by 60 feet, unheated, with no power to it and none planned. Eight 150-watt cold-rated LED high bays give about nine foot-candles average, well above the roughly five foot-candles the standards list for bulk storage, switched in two groups. A 3.3 kilowatt LONGi array feeds a 15.36 kilowatt-hour self-heating lithium bank. Simulated over eleven years it ran about 0.6 dark days a year.
Large
A bigger building or added loads
A longer building, a brighter work level of around fifteen foot-candles, or a plug and a block heater added on. More fixtures mean a bigger array and battery. We size all of it against the December day so the extra load does not quietly pull the bank down when the sun is lowest.
For farms and businesses the Clean Technology investment tax credit is a 30% refundable credit that solar equipment is expected to qualify for. Confirm the details with your accountant.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Light That Building Without Trenching In Power
Book a free 15-minute design review. Tell us the building size, what is inside and how you use it, and we will size the fixtures, array and battery and quote a system built for the cold. Typical installs run two to six weeks out.
Lighting cold-storage buildings, shops and barns across Alberta.