The use of off-grid solar infrastructure has boomed in Africa over the past decade, with the technology being widely used by communities living beyond grid electricity connections. Aid agencies and start-up companies have played a substantial role in driving this solar expansion. Rhetorically these organisations tend to frame solar as a static infrastructure that (after installation) requires little maintenance to provide ongoing electricity access to energy poor off-grid communities. Drawing on research in the Ashanti Region, Ghana, we challenge this framing with AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure” to show how the lives of off-grid infrastructure are entangled with messy, evolving social life and social relations. To illustrate our argument, we draw on two case studies from our research. The first is on solar streetlights implemented –across off-grid communities in the Ashanti Region in 2016 –in the lead up to an election. Many of these streetlights ceased to function as planned with a year or so of installation. Nevertheless, different communities have found ways to repurpose these streetlights, hacking into the infrastructure to provide different forms of communal and individual access to electricity, in particular for mobile phone charging. Our second case focuses on itinerant traders in Ashanti (usually from the Niger and Burkina Faso), and how solar objects have been increasingly included in their bicycle trading networks. Overall, we show how material artefacts of off-grid solar is repurposed by different social contexts within Ghana to provide incomplete, contested and varied solar electricity access geographies.