I made an off-grid power record for my own system, then opened it up to humans and agents
TL;DR
I have lived off grid on Hawaii Island for 25 years. My power system was assembled over that time, and the record of it lived in a shoebox of receipts, a phone full of photos and my memory. GRID COMMAND at minigridmap.com is the record I wanted: every component by its label, what feeds what, what the loads cost, what is due, and the manuals, on my phone, with no signal. It needs no account and keeps your data on your device. I built it for myself and then opened it to other owners and to their AI agents.
"Monitoring tells you what your battery is doing. It cannot tell you what you built."
The Problem
You need the fuse rating at the worst possible moment: on a ladder, after dark, in the rain, with one bar of signal or none. My system is 1,780 W of panel, a 60 A charge controller, a 314 Ah lithium bank and a 3,000 W inverter, plus ten pieces of equipment in between, and none of the monitoring apps that came with the hardware knew about any of the others. There was no single place that said what I owned, how it was wired, or which number on a spec sheet anybody had ever actually verified.
Why It Mattered
An off-grid system that is not documented is a system only one person can maintain, and that person forgets. It cannot be handed to an electrician, sold with the property, or claimed on a warranty. And a figure off a spec sheet and a figure you measured with a clamp meter are not the same kind of fact. Treating them as if they were is how systems get mis-sized. When the inverter trips at 2,600 W and the label says 3,000, you want to know which of those two numbers is real.
What I built, in order
Step 1: Document my own system, honestly
I photographed and dictated every component on my property and put it in the app first. Six views over one system: Overview (how long have I got), Equipment (every component by its label), Wiring (what feeds what), Appliances (what the loads really cost), Manuals, and Maintenance (what is due and what was done).
- Every component carries its label code, nameplate figures, serial, install date and cable run
- The wiring map is drawn from the components you own, array to controller to bank to load
- Appliances show draw and hours against your inverter and your bank, sorted biggest first
- Each value can say where it came from: read off the label, measured, worked out, or from the manual. If you have not said, the app shows nothing rather than inventing a source
Step 2: Make it work where the system is
There is no signal at the array. The app is an installable web app that precaches every screen, so a crew loads it on wifi and can still open every view off grid. Data lives in the browser's own storage on the device, and photos and manuals are stored as real files there too.
- Runs in the browser, installs to the home screen, works with the radio off
- No account, nothing to cancel; the data never leaves the device unless you ask
- Photos are re-encoded on device and stripped of location data before they are stored
- Manuals are real PDFs on the device, badged On device, Needs signal, or Included
Step 3: Get my own hardware out of everyone else's app
I was wrong about this one, and it took a sentence to see it: the app worked provided every new user had the exact same system as me. My 314 Ah bank and 3,000 W inverter were compiled into the arithmetic and into the screens. A van owner with a 200 Ah bank was being shown a homestead's numbers as facts.
- Every figure now derives from the owner's own components; a missing value is a dash, never a plausible default
- First run asks whose system it is: Van/RV, Cabin, Homestead, start empty, or restore a backup
- Template values are tagged as estimates and carry no serial numbers or inspection dates
- The safety check shows nothing until it has actually run. A check that says you are fine about equipment it has never seen is the worst thing this app could do
Step 4: Put an AI inside, with the limits stated
Ask your system a question in your own words, or run Check my system and it looks for mismatches between your components. Your equipment list goes to the server and on to Gemini to be answered; photos, documents and long notes never do. Nothing is stored. It is a second opinion, not an electrician.
- Answers only from your data, names the missing field rather than guessing, shows its arithmetic
- Says plainly when something needs an electrician
- Suggested questions are generated from the equipment you actually own
- The same question endpoint answers as JSON, so an owner's agent can ask it too
Step 5: Make the record survive a lost phone
Export Everything writes one zip: every component, appliance, log, maintenance task, photo and manual, byte for byte, with the PDFs named the way you named them. Import brings it all back. Off-device backup is optional, so a lost phone or a cleared browser is not a lost system.
- One zip, round trip verified: photos and PDFs come back identical, not re-encoded
- Off-device backup is the one optional extra; what it costs is on minigridmap.com
- Customer backups live in a versioned storage bucket, not on the app server
- A Request a feature button asks one extra question: would you pay for it
Key Metrics
6
Views over one system
None
Account required
Yes
Works offline
100 / 100
PageSpeed, 08-30-26
Key Technical Stack
The Result
My own system is fully documented in it, and that record is the proof on the landing page: every screenshot is one real installation, not a mockup. A stranger with a van, a cabin or a homestead now starts from their own equipment and sees only their own numbers. On 08-30-26 the landing page measured 100 in all four PageSpeed categories on mobile and desktop. I expect to be wrong about some of what people want from it, which is why the feature request button is the first thing I built after the backup.
Open it, or have me build the record your business is missing
GRID COMMAND needs no account. If your business runs on a system that lives in one person's head, I build the record that gets it out.