<p>The off-grid photovoltaic (PV) system is considered particularly suitable for remote locations where grid extension is not feasible. However, because of the intermittent nature of solar insolation, power output is quite unreliable. Large battery banks are required to strengthen the reliability of system leading to enormous impact on installation cost. Also, the traditional unregulated use of electricity in such cases further leads to several ill-effects like frequent load shedding, increment in tariffs, etc. Therefore, to mitigate all these problems, an enhanced scheme for demand side management (DSM) has been proposed in this work to design the off-grid PV system. DSM program has been developed for priority-wise load shedding. Another distinguished feature is that a flexible criterion for determining load priorities has been included where critical load differs for day and night. A special scenario where power generation just matches the load demand has also been considered. DSM program instilled a distinct feature in system to work under power deficiency scenarios and ensured reliability to critical loads even on a rainy or cloudy day. The proposed DSM approach overcomes the weakness of existing strategies and maintains uninterrupted supply to critical loads during their peak hours even under poor PV generation. Designed system efficiently compensated the shortage of energy of 5.44 × 10⁵ kWh for night-time application. Separate DSM-based MATLAB programs are created for day and night respectively and the performance is thoroughly analyzed under different cases of insolation for six different types of loads with and without DSM algorithm. </p>