Different properties need different systems.

A grid-tied system puts panels on the roof and an inverter between them and your distribution board. Through the day the array carries whatever the property is using, and the meter slows down. When the array cannot cover the load, at night or under heavy cloud, the grid picks up the difference and you do not feel the handover.

There is no battery in it. That is the thing to understand before you choose it, because it decides what happens when the power goes off. A grid-tied system shuts down with the grid. It is not a backup system and it will not carry you through load shedding.

What it suits is a property with a big daytime load and a supply it can rely on. Offices, workshops, anywhere the lights and the machines are on while the sun is up. It is the least hardware of the three.

This is the same generation with storage behind it. The array feeds the property, the surplus charges a lithium battery, and a hybrid inverter decides moment to moment whether the load runs off the sun, off the battery or off the grid.

When the grid drops, the inverter moves the property onto the battery. Lights, plugs, routers, the fridge, whichever circuits were specified when the board was wired. One set of hardware generates through the day and holds through an outage.

Every rent-to-own package on this site is built this way. How long the battery holds depends on how big it is and what you leave switched on, which is why sizing starts with your bill and finishes with an engineer on your roof rather than with a package name.

Off-grid means the property runs without a municipal supply behind it. Generation and storage are sized to carry the entire load, including the nights and the run of overcast days, because there is nothing to fall back on when the battery is flat.

That changes the specification and not only the size. The array is bigger, the battery is bigger, and the design has to survive the worst week of the year rather than the average one. Individual loads start to matter: a borehole pump, a geyser or a workshop can decide the whole system on its own.

It is the right answer for a property with no supply, or one where the supply is unreliable enough that being connected is not worth much. On a working grid connection it usually is not, and we will say so.