No matter what the eco-magazines state, living with electricity from the sun is completely different from plugging in to the grid and burning watts like there's literally no tomorrow. This is especially true if there's any kind of economic restraints involved when shopping for a system.

Before considering a low-budget solar setup, one has to do some serious speculating.

Second, to make the most out of the precious solar amps, it is advised to completely forego the conversion of the 12V DC power of the panels to household AC 110V.
This procedure, done by an expensive inverter, can waste up to 15% of the electricity you send through the machine. Most loads that are on for prolonged periods, like fans, lights and computers will thus use far less energy if you feed them straight with DC power. To make this work, off course, one will have to plan the entire house for DC, and only use appropriate appliances. More on this another time.

Third, prepare to live with the seasons.
In the winter time you take advantage of the brief sunny spells to watch DVD's, vacuum, make smoothies, create websites and so on.
When the weather turns to typical winter conditions, gather around the solitary compact fluorescent bulb for dinner, briefly check your email, then go to bed early and read long, good books by the LED lamp.
We have prolonged weather inversions in our mountain valley, creating dense fog under thick clouds week after week. During such times of sun depravation we go into extreme saver mode. No computer use and only LED lights and candles, shutting off all other electrical things.

Well, you think, just run the generator when needed. This certainly helps, and pretty much has to be done to help preserve the batteries when it is really dark and grim. But fully maintaining a healthy system this way is extremely wasteful and time consuming, not to mention esthetically unacceptable. It is better to regard the generator as an ineffecient back up source of dirty energy, used sparingly.

Living like this is not for everyone.