# Forum Home Renovation Solar Electrical Systems  Mid-floor apartment

## bluebone

Good afternoon all, 
I just bought a mid-floor apartment in Cairns which has two great balconies which both face about 15 degrees North. I'm interested in exploring a minimal independent solar setup, for example powering my home office during the day would be a really nice start. Rooftop isn't an option and I'm not necessarily interested in connecting to the grid (guessing I probably can't because of strata etc). 
It's early days in my learning journey and I realise this may go absolutely nowhere! So feel free to tell me I'm dreaming! 
However what I'm thinking is something like this:
* Fixing panels on my balcony
* Inverter, monitoring system, app etc
* Battery which may take me through to the evening when working a bit later
* Ability to manually (automatically?) switch back to mains when the battery dies
* Something which is either tough enough to survive a storm or easy enough to pack away if needed 
I bought a power meter with the hope of figuring out how much my power my desk area uses. The desk consists of two laptops, mini soundbar, one large monitor, fan, two phone chargers and a tablet. The power meter for the desk area seems to sit around 60-80W most of the time and the highest it's recorded so far was 158W. 
I'm less interested in the money saving aspect (within reason of course!) and more interested in finding a practical way to make use of these great balconies to reduce the footprint. Considering I spend 50+ hours per week in the home office (maybe 80% during the day), it seems like a nice option to try and find a solution for. 
Any help appreciated! Be it product advice, suggested learning pathways or just a hard reality check that it's not going to work  :Biggrin:

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