This is a very non-techical question. We just moved into our offgrid home and I'm trying to wrap my head around all this solar stuff. I think we're all right with the baics and the solar installer will be back in a couple of days to answer questions but...I really want to know how much power we're using. Do any of these gadgets - charge controllers, inverter,... - tell us that?

there is really no way to discuss electricity without getting technical. All appliances,lights,etc are rated in watts. If you had 10 100watt lamps lit up for 1 hour continuously that would be equal to 1kilowatt /hour. Somewhere on your inverter or a separate utility meter will display kw/hr that your system is producing.

I can see on the inverter how much electricity the system is producing - not much in this cloudy weather but I was hoping for a button on the remote for the inverter or the solar controller that tells me how much power we used in a day.

A Kill-A-Watt or similar, larger meters can do that.

I've used a kill-a-watt before on individual things but what I'm wondering abput is how much we use all day, for the whole house. I just thought there must be some screen on something that would tell me that but maybe not.

Are you going AC for all your appliances and lights? if so, it is relatively easy to monitor total usage from the the inverter and display it on the computer. If not, you will have to have a system for DC and one for the AC appliances.

This is a simple one and there are many others like it:

http://www.simpleenergyworks.com/envi_energy_monitor.html

I like and use TED (The Energy Detective) for whole house monitoring.

It can be a bit finicky to set up but is very sensitive and accurate. Mine can reliably discern the 4 Watt delta that occurs when I unplug / plug in a small AA cell battery charger

See also http://www.eguage.net/ .  $757 is cost for to be set up to what you want to do, and, installation is pretty straight forward if you, or someone you know, have some amount of DIY skills.

See too http://www.welserver.com .  Everything here is a la carte.  About $750 will accomplish the same measuring you'd be able to do with TED or eGauge.  DIY effort is (significantly) higher than the what's required with TED or eGauge.

Best regards,

Bill