If you have specific solar questions I may be able to help as well, we have a cabin in SW Colorado that is completely off the grid, we have 3 separate solar arrays and controllers (2 are 12 V and 1 is 36 V), and 2 battery arrays (1 with 6 batteries for the 36 V system that runs the well and one with 25+ batteries for everything else). I think we are up to 4 inverters (thou we generally only use 1 at any given time unless we have the table saw or air compressor out or something). Most of the cabin lights are run off DC, but we have AC wiring run everywhere as well. There is no grid power, but we have a microwave (limited use), power tools, TV, a short range cell phone repeater, and whatever else running off it.
There are really alot of factors that can play into what equipment you need, just be careful about hooking your rigs directly to a "cheap" controller, unless you are going to a decent controller I would pull your power directly off the batteries (no matter what the instructions might say, some controllers have load connections some do not).
The more batteries the better, helps stabilize everything. deep cycle and marine batteries are better than standard car batteries. Not that car batteries wont work, but you can get more bang for your buck and they will last longer if properly maintained. We have some batteries that have literally been in service for over 20 years.
If looking at inverters, depending on what you plan on using it for you can probably get away with an inexpensive one, but depending you may want to invest in a full sine wave inverter, most "inexpensive" inverters do not really create a sine wave, it is more like a square wave ( or something in between), this is fine for most things but some things (especially some AC motors) tend to not work as well without a true sine wave
The good thing about panels is as long as they have the same output voltage, you are likely shooting for a 12 volt system, you can pretty much mix and match whatever, but do not assume that all panels put out 12 V, we have some that put out 6 V ( which we have hooked up in series and then parallel to everything else to give us 12 V). Just make sure if you add to the array that you add in parallel (if all are the same voltage as the system) and that you have an appropriate size wire going to the controller to handle the combined load AND DISTANCE, acceptable power and distance ratings for wire sizes is different for DC than for AC, I say this only cause most people have not had cause to make any distance DC runs of any sizable amount of power. This seems to be a decent chart for wire run lengths at power
http://www.windsun.com/Hardware/Wire_Table.htm... Sorry for the long post, just got to typing and didn't realize how long it got, anyway just trying to pass along some insights from previous experience
Bryan