Step 1, determine system requirements

Determining your system requirements is a mixture of soul searching, looking at your financial situation and looking at your life-style.

If you want the solar/wind equivalent of 200 Amp service then it is definitely going to cost you. However, with a little bit of good will you'll be surprised how much of the power that you consume can be cut or shifted to times of plenty (full on sun on a windy day :).

A good starting point to determine your consumption is your electricity bill. If you are currently heating with electricity then that will have to go before you can seriously consider switching to alternative power. As for cooking you may be able to get away with it depending on how large the rest of your consumption is, hot water is an issue all by itself (you can use 'solar hot water' panels for this, propane or a combination).

We have tried to be reasonable about this issue on our end, we looked at our daily consumption, decided which parts we could easily modify (switch from incandescent lights to fluorescents saved us a lot, good quality fridge helps quite a bit too !), and the rest we just left as it was.

This gave us a system with about 3500 Watts peak load, but we lost the possibility of running our electric oven. (no more fresh bread... sniff)

Our batteries were sized to be able to provide us with up to 4 days of power without any kind of charge, and if necessary we can fall back on the generator to top them off again. So far we haven't had any need to use the generator, but I'm quite sure that in November or December there will be some occasion to use it.