room-specific solar lights

We've been considering building a new home in the near future, and have been toying around with the idea of using natural materials and trying to live off the grid. I'm not sure if we'll be able to live completely off the grid, but at the least we'd like to supplement public utilities with natural sources of renewable energy. For power, we're thinking of adding some solar cells, and for water, we'll probably add a rain collection system from the roof. A graywater system would be nice for our garden.

Solar sounds promising but the idea of having to store large battery cells on site bothers me. So I was trying to think of other ways to use solar, and came up with a straight-forward idea for individual room lighting.

When we lived in Colorado, I was surprised to see that most houses are not built with overhead lighting in each room. Instead, many home builders simply install outlets that are tied to a light switch, so that the homeowner can add a lamp. Although it took a little while for us to adjust to that idea, we soon realized that we rarely need bright light and a low level lamp is usually adequate. So I was wondering why we couldn't just add individual room-specific solar lights to our system. I was thinking of using lights similar to common solar garden LED lights. You could encase them in a new custom housing more befitting for a bedroom, and extend the wiring and solar collector to an area of the roof above the bedroom. The cost of LED solar lights has been decreasing, and this would provide soft adequate lighting at night that would last a very long time. It's a rare occasion to need very bright light in a bedroom anyway. Most people choose to dress in front of a bathroom mirror instead.

If you simply install solar power straight "out of the box" it can be quite expensive, although photo-voltaics are slowly coming down in price. But a set of 10 wireless solar LED garden lights will run you less than $60 in most cases. That takes care of basic lighting. Next I need to think about major appliances and these darn laptops. I'm convinced that the key to becoming truly energy efficient while still saving money is to think outside the box and come up with new ways to combine different energy efficient devices.