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Living "Off the Grid" - Anybody here done that?
I thought that it might be interesting to hear about people that are living off the grid since some on this board contemplate that it may be in the future of many of us. These might include remote farms or cabins in the woods.
By "off the grid" I mean that the usual public services that we have grown accustomed to are not available. You might want to include comments on what they had as well as what they did not have and how did they go about the usual day.
I will start off with the only one that I know about even though it is a little old. About 1955 (or so) my parents took us on vacation to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins on their farm in the middle of nowhere South Dakota (is that redundant?). We spent a couple weeks there but it was a great experience for an 8-9 year old boy.
My aunt and uncle had a nice farm house in the middle of 100-200 acres that they farmed mostly wheat and corn. They were almost self sufficient. Besides the crops they had a few cows, lots of chickens. What they did not have was electricity or running water. You had to run down to the hand pump to get a pail of water from the well for the house when you ran out. They also had a windmill that pumped water but as I remember that water went into a big tank for the cows.
No indoor plumbing but they had a couple of outhouses about 40-50 yards from the main house. That is a long run at night in the dark. No showers so when you needed a bath it was heat the water to put in the tub. As for lights they did not have electric lights but they used oil lamps. These were the hurricane type with the small wick that could be adjusted for more or less light.
Everyday everyone had chores. These were the before breakfast chores and the regular chores. Milk the cows, feed the chickens, tend the garden, gather eggs etc. It was kind of fun helping out my cousins do their chores.
The only real communication with the outside world was mail. Their mail box was on the paved road which was a good way from the house down a dirt road. They were a long way from town and the local grocery store but they were only a short distance from my aunts pantry. I never seen so much canned goods in my life. Mason jars on every shelf. Canning was a big part of the routine. They also made their own butter. I am sure that there is a lot more but it has been a long time.
Southern California - North Los Angeles area.
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Yah, kenc, we live off the grid. You mentioned you do gold mining in northern California, right? We're in gold country, outside of Downieville, if that means anything to you.
We live 2 miles from town at 4,000 ft elevation. No services. We have hydropower for electricity. When the creek goes down in the summer, we charge up the batteries with a gasoline generator. We have lived without a phone for 9 years, and just last fall got wireless internet so we use Skype. Skype is sometimes OK, sometimes not, but much better than nothing at all. We have a woodstove for heat. Our cabin is very tiny, with no storage, so it looks like a tornado went through. The cabin is 16' x 30' with a loft upstairs for sleeping. We are not self-sufficient, in that we use propane gas for cooking and hot water, and gasoline for the generator, and to get up and down the mountain. Every year I try to garden, and every year I have some adventure with vicious deer and curious bears.
It's an adventure, and I have always been prone to trying unusual things, so here I am. I have a job at the county courthouse.
Been weening ourselves slowly but surely off the grid. The only things left are the washer, dishwasher and a well pump and everything else should be managed by wind and solar power. We're always adding insulation and we heat with wood/solar - here in Minnesota - we'll take heat from wherever we can get it!
We started our "experiment" a few years ago and last year we lived totally on what we grew (and got really tired of zucchine!!), but we felt soooo healthy! With over 30 tomato plants - that wasn't enough to put food away for all winter and till next crops. So this year we are expanding by a factor of 10. We found a low maintenance gardening on MyBackAchers.com so we should be able to manage it without much work.
And, this year we are growing our own food - hay and grains for the chickens, rabbits, goats and equines. We found we needed to design a lot of our own equipment for harvesting since we will not be using a gas powered tractor to cut acres of hay and collect grains . . and we do not want to do it all by hand.
Getting really excited for spring!
EGP
PS - having a large dog can help keep preditors away from gardens . . . or maybe several dogs? We keep ours in nights but just the presence and their scent helps.
EndGamePlayer
We have lived off the grid in Northeast Colorado for 10 years. The climate here provides plentiful power from a hybrid solar/wind electrical system. The Sun also provides plentiful hot water and hydronic floor heat. We heat our 1200 sqft home on less than a cord of firewood per winter. It is well insulated with lots of thermal mass and passive solar design principles. We have excellent water from a 76' hand dug well that is pumped with a solar panel to an insulated storage tank on the hill behind the house.
We live 17 miles from Babylon and go their as little as possible. We have two greenhouses (one attached to the south side of the house and one low profile hoop house in the garden). We raise a large organic/biodynamic garden. We have three dairy cows, horses, goats, rabbits and chickens. It is a lot of work but the dirt is clean and we sleep well at night ( no debt, regular jobs, television, or alarm clock). Our utility bill is 50 gallons of propane per year for summer cooking and canning. We would like to get rid of that with a small methane digester. We make bio-diesel from waste fryer oil for the tractor, car and truck.
I am not deluded into believing the fall of Babylon will not affect us, but I am beginning to believe it will actually become a much more sane, equitable world for all. The off grid lifestyle will provide some insulation for the transition period, and hopefully we will be able to help others through it as well.
Spencer
I did that for about 4 years when I was younger and really enjoyed the lifestyle.
My wife and I literally moved to a tent in the woods and built a log cabin from the resources on the property.
Our electricity came from PV panels feeding into a bank of marine batteries, then into an inverter although we used 12 volt in the house where we could. We cooked and refrigerated with propane--heated with wood and had a wood cookstove in the kitchen although it was a pain to use.
The water came from the roof of the house through the guttering system, through a gravel/sand filtering system into a 1000 gal tank burried in the ground. We pumped it back up with a hand pump in the kitchen sink.
We built a composting toilet passively powered by a solar heater I constructed from a piece of insulated plywood, filled with beer cans painted flat black, covered with plastic with intake at the bottom, outlet on the top.
Loved living like that.
Jerry
Cecilia,
It sounds like you are on your way to becoming self sufficient, a lot closer than me.
I do go mine for gold in summer time. Actually, I take my dredge up to the Klamath/Salmon River area near the Oregon border. I am planning my next trip now. Probably be up there for 4-6 weeks this summer. You never know gold dust/nuggets just might be the next currency.
thanks for your response
Ken
Southern California - North Los Angeles area.
Spencer:
That is way cool. I'm in Longmont.
Does Babylon=Denver?
Thanks, Mark
Oh ken, that area is just beautiful. We half-heartedly looked for land up around Yreka and Mt. Shasta, but nothing really struck us. The Marble Mountains are so eerie and wild.
I wouldn't mind getting a dog, but the thing with animals is they own you, you don't own them. We go travelling every now and then, and finding someone to take care of the pet is really a pain up here. After my cat passed away, I have been wary of making another commitment.
Spencer:
That is way cool. I'm in Longmont.
Does Babylon=Denver?
Actually, Mark I live about 80 miles due east of you. Much more wind and a lot less people. I call the sagebrush and cactus a "bliss barrier" as most people would rather go to the mountains. As for the comment about Babylon , that's just the term I use for the civilization we live in today ,what with all the similarities.
I have an off-grid home in Pennsylvania. It is a passive-solar, earth-sheltered design with solar thermal, photovoltaics, and a wind turbine. I have an 1100 Ah 24V set of redundant battery banks and a backup propane generator. Well and septic are also on-site. I use 120VAC, 24VDC, and 12VDC for various loads. I use propane for convenience, but do not depend on it -- e.g. for cooking, clothes drying, backup heating, etc. I receive approximately 20 digital HD channels of television for free over-the-air from Scranton/Wilkesbarre. I use the cellular network (Verizon) for telephone and internet, which is my only utility bill. Being high on a hill, I have line-of-sight to 3-4 separate towers -- I'm looking forward to the 4G rollout for truly broadband internet bandwidth. I'm also planning to create a mesh network with my neighbors which will be kind of like a private internet without the need for ISPs. I have 32 acres of land, about half of it planted in switchgrass and half woodland. I'm in the process of acquiring the equipment to harvest and pelletize the switchgrass for fuel. I could utilize this in several ways -- directly for heat in a pellet stove, in a wood gas generator to produce electricity or power a vehicle, or for sale or barter. The school district has a biomass heating system and will be a customer for the switchgrass. This year I made several gallons of maple syrup from my woods. Last year I had a semi-successful garden, but hope to do better this year. Last year I rented a tiller to prepare about an eighth acre for my garden, but I may pay my Amish neighbor to plow a larger plot this year, and maybe in the future learn how to do it with horses myself. There are quite a few Amish families in the area, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a horse and buggy to drive around and do errands either -- only mine would have air conditioning and a nice sound system ;-) It's only about a mile to town and five or six to the big mall area with a Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Right now I don't have the infrastructure or expertise to keep horses, but definitely would like them to be a part of my self-sufficiency plans in the future. I would also like to produce my own ethanol to power my vehicles.
PassantGardant.com -- Rubbernecking the Global Systemic Collapse
Southern California - North Los Angeles area.