Before solar, Tracy Esun was spending up to ₦10,000 a day on petrol and relying on an inverter that shut down seconds after every power outage.

Today, she sometimes doesn't even realise the electricity is gone.

That's what reliable power has changed for her.

Predicting when the power will go out and planning your day around it is a skill many Nigerians have had to master. Tracy used to be one of them.

Now, she often has no idea when the grid goes off.

“My sister and I were coming back from church and realised there was no electricity in the area. I had no idea they'd taken the light. I only knew because everybody outside was talking about it.”

Even during our conversation, she only realised the grid had returned when she heard it come back on outside.

That's a long way from where she started.

₦10,000 a day, and an inverter that couldn't keep up

Before solar, Tracy's home ran on a mix of unreliable grid power, a generator, and an inverter that didn't work.

The generator was the expensive part. With children in the house, going without power at night wasn't an option, so it ran overnight. “We were spending at least ₦10,000 every single day on petrol,” she says. Over a month, that's more than ₦300,000 gone, on fuel alone.

The first inverter was meant to fix that. They bought it in a hurry from someone who was relocating, because they needed something fast. It worked for about two weeks, then fell apart.

It got so bad that whenever electricity went off, we could count ‘one, two, three’ and the inverter would already be shutting down. It wasn't reliable at all.

So she stopped improvising. “I said, ‘Please, somebody save us. Let's work with people we actually trust.’” That's when the family moved to their current SunFi system, a 4kVA inverter with a lithium battery. Since then, her answer is simple: “I don't think we've ever been out of power.”

The word she keeps coming back to: relief

Ask Tracy how the switch felt, and one word comes up again and again.

For a while after the installation, I just kept saying, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ over and over. Getting this system felt like relief. That's the word I'd use. Relief.

It's the contrast that makes it land. With the old inverter, the moment there was a power outage, she knew she was in trouble. Now, even when the grid collapses, Tracy has no cause to be alarmed.

Working from home without the daily gamble

Tracy works remotely, and during the worst stretch of grid instability, that got hard. “Even the famous Band A people were complaining,” she says.

Her laptop battery could last most of the day, so that wasn't the problem. Everything else was. She was paying about ₦4,000 a day for co-working spaces just to get power and a quiet spot for meetings. Her internet depended on it too, her FibreOne router needed electricity, so whenever there was a power outage, the internet went off with it. She had to face the same dilemma everyday; pay for a workspace, buy petrol, getting frantic at the thought of the petrol being used up.

Now, those worries are gone. Reliable power does so much more than just providing light. It frees the mind of anxieties that comes with planning around unstable electricity. It also helps to plan well financially. The money that used to vanish into fuel goes somewhere better. “Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of Naira on fuel, that money can go towards things you enjoy.”

The low-level stress is gone too. “My laptop could be on 15% and I'm not scrambling. If something's running low, I just stand up and plug it in. There's no panic.”

The small things she didn't expect

For Tracy, the change showed up in the little habits she didn't realise she'd built around unreliable power.

The clearest one was the constant charging panic. In Nigeria, you learn to keep every phone, laptop and power bank charged whenever there is electricity, because the moment there is power failure, you are not certain when it will be restored. It might be a grid collapse, that will take a while before it gets restored. Tracy lived like that too. "My laptop could be on 15% and I'd be scrambling," she says. Now she doesn't think about it. "If something's running low, I just stand up and plug it in. There's no panic attached to it."

Then there was the part she's most relieved to be done with: relying on other people's power. When her own supply failed, that often meant tracking down whoever had a generator running. "I'm not looking for the neighbour who's turned on their generator so I can quickly charge something," she says. "I'm not knocking on someone's door to ask if I can plug in my laptop." That quiet dependence is gone.

"They're small things," she says, "but they're the kind of things that quietly make life easier every single day."

Her honest advice

Would she tell a friend to go solar? “I'd tell them to try it. Don't decide based on what people say in the comments, go and experience it yourself.”

Her practical take is that you don't have to do it all at once. “Not everybody needs a massive system. You can start small and upgrade over time.” For a remote worker who mainly needs to keep a laptop, router, fan and lights going, a compact option like the VSolaris V1200 portable power station covers the essentials, and it charges from a wall socket or a solar panel. For a busier household like Tracy's, running more through longer outages, a larger unit like the ColaSolar 3600 Plus carries the heavier load.

And the cost question, to her, is simpler than people make it. Fuel isn't free either. “If you buy fuel today, you'll still need to buy fuel tomorrow. But if you invest in solar, you're building something that keeps serving you.”

Tracy isn't alone in reaching that conclusion. More and more families are making the same switch, for the same reasons she did. And if you want to understand how it all works before you decide, our complete guide to solar in Nigeria walks through the essentials.

Then the line that sums up her whole experience:

Once you've experienced not having to think about power every day, it's very difficult to go back.

Tracy runs a 4kVA system, but the right setup depends on how you live and work. Explore SunFi's solar options and find the one that fits your home.

Don't know how or where to start from? Speak with a SunFi representative today or call 02018871099