We moved off the grid 10 years ago. I wish someone had told us these 5 things before we made the leap.

Everyone's off-grid experience will look different, but our situation offers an abundance of alone time.

We live in a rural area far into the woods on a rough dirt driveway. I work remotely, so it's easy for me to go days on end seeing no one but my husband.

As someone who enjoys solitude, this is often ideal for me. I enjoy writing on my back porch with no sounds but the breeze and birds, but it can also get lonely — especially in winter, when we're spending less time on activities like hiking with friends.

Because I don't have a job that forces me out of the house, I've had to seek out new hobbies and communities that do, like a book club, writer's group, and community clean-up team. Attending these events and club meetings always makes me feel better.

When we first moved off the grid, right after graduating from college, we bought the nicest solar components we could afford and hoped for the best.

If we were doing it again now, I would do a better job calculating our energy usage and needs to avoid coming up short.

During our first winter, we often had to rely on a backup generator to run our water pump, and there were evenings we had to shut down our whole power system to conserve energy. Splurging on a better set of batteries would've gone a long way.

Now, we know that electric bills can be used to calculate your average daily energy consumption in kilowatt-hours (kWh).

With that number, and a bit of other information — like the size of your solar panels — you can figure out how many panels and batteries you'll need to maintain your lifestyle.

Running on a small solar power system with limited battery capacity means that our electricity is somewhat dependent on the weather.

In the summer, it feels like we have infinite power, but we have a lot less over the winter, when it can be cloudy for days on end.

When you're accustomed to a traditional home, it's difficult to remember that almost every little thing we do takes a bit of power. Flicking on a light switch, taking a shower, and running our WiFi all pull from our batteries.

To meet all our needs with our current system, we've had to make some small power-conserving lifestyle shifts, like hanging our wet clothes on a rack instead of putting them in a dryer.

Our hot water also comes from an instant-on propane hot water heater rather than an electric heater. So, instead of just paying our power bill, we have to remember to monitor and refill our tanks, or we run out of hot water.

These small swaps have all become our new normal, but it took a while for us to adjust.

Our cabin's first wood stove was a simple Facebook Marketplace find that fit easily into our budget.

That stove got us through many winters, but on the coldest nights, we often got out of bed multiple times to feed it. If we left the house to go out for dinner with friends, the fire would be completely out by the time we got back.

When we finally upgraded, I discovered that there's a whole range of features that could've been making our lives easier all along.

Our new stove has a larger firebox and a secondary burn system. The latter feature means our stove can burn smoke and gases produced by the initial fire to produce more heat with less wood. It can easily hold a fire all night, so there are no more midnight wake-up calls to keep the house warm.

With a larger firebox, we can fit bigger pieces of wood — and, thus, spend less time cutting pieces down.

People seem to have one of two assumptions when they find out that we live off-grid. They think we're barefoot hippies who never shower or doomsday preppers with thousands of pounds of food in a hidden bunker.

So, when the off-grid conversation comes up, I like to assure people that we have (and use) a shower, and that we're fairly well-adjusted and not overly concerned about the end of the world.

That's the biggest lesson I've learned about off-grid living: that people's assumptions, including my own, are often wrong.

Off-grid living is what you make of it. You can convert a suburban house to off-grid energy or, like us, build a cabin in the remote wilderness.

Either way, it's going to be different from what you first imagined.