Conor here: This might sound increasingly attractive, but would seem to have major scalability limitations. For starters, one would need to have a healthy amount of savings or disposable income to purchase a home with land, solar power system, septic, batteries, tools, gardening supplies, an emergency fund, etc. According to a recent Bankrate survey, only 46 percent of Americans have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses and 24 percent have no emergency savings at all.
This adapted excerpt is from Ryan Mitchell’s Living Off Grid: 50 Steps to Unplug, Become Self-Sufficient, and Build the Homestead of Your Dreams. Cross posted from Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
So, is living off the grid worth it? If you asked me on that particular night, maybe not. If you asked me today, after not having had a power bill in over a decade, I’d definitely say yes. I like telling this story to help others realize that unplugging from society’s standard systems—public utilities, sewage systems, housing developments—and instead creating your own self-sufficient homestead isn’t always the fantasy you imagined. But if you plan ahead and set yourself up for success, you’ll have more good days than bad.
Despite all the hurdles, I now live on 11 acres of land, in a house that I designed and that I power with solar; I get my water from a well, have a composting toilet and septic system, eat from my garden, raise baby quail, and run my own business. My expenses are a fraction of what they were when I paid rent and utilities, and I have infinitely more free time to pursue the things that fulfill me.
I never thought I’d live this way. Like many, I had followed the common path, going to school, getting good grades, heading off to college, and then later to graduate school. I landed my first adult job, believing that with a degree and hard work, everything would fall into place.
This is, after all, the American dream: pay your dues and move up the ranks, earn a good salary, and ultimately receive your reward: a nice home with a white picket fence, married with 2.5 kids, and a red convertible parked in the driveway that you jokingly refer to as your midlife crisis.
That was my worldview right up until six months into my career, when the Great Recession hit. The company I worked for closed its doors one Friday afternoon, leaving everyone standing in the parking lot with stunned looks on our faces while holding cardboard boxes filled with the contents of our desks.
It was there, in that parking lot, that I promised myself I’d never find myself in that position again. I realized that I had been following a script—a script that I had not given much thought to, but instead blindly followed because it’s what you “should” do.
I won’t disparage that lifestyle out of hand because, for some, it works just fine. But I will say that it’s essential for you to be the decider in your own life. You want to be intentional about your choices: where you live, how you spend your time and money, how you interact with the broader world. If you don’t, others will be happy to make those decisions for you, to their benefit.
This doesn’t need to be some boisterous protest against the status quo, but a quiet consideration of what is important to you. For me, simply deciding what I wanted for myself was the most impactful thing I’ve ever done. After leaving that parking lot with my cardboard box, I set about building my new life.
That new life led me to build a house nestled in the woods, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I had decided that by building my own home, I could skirt the need for a mortgage entirely. I chose the location because, after a year of reflection, I discovered I felt most comfortable in the quiet of nature. It was here that I realized that pursuing a simpler life was often filled with complexities.
In my case, I wanted to live in the countryside, away from it all. But that came with its own set of challenges. I found out that city hall wouldn’t grant me a permit for a septic system, but instead wanted me to connect to the sewer lines. The first quote I got was for tens of thousands of dollars and didn’t include the government’s fee of $11,000 for the privilege of installing the meter to facilitate their charging me monthly for utilities.
I also learned that the power company wanted tens of thousands of dollars to run the power lines to my house. All these were significant setbacks because I didn’t have that much money to my name. It was then that I went searching for solutions and discovered a new way to solve these needs: going off the grid.
Your own interest in disconnecting may be different from mine, but maybe you also want something better for yourself: self-sufficiency, empowerment, ownership, intentional living, and a slower way of being. There are many reasons that you might be drawn to living off-grid, from saving money and learning new skills to living closer to nature and shrinking your environmental footprint. Whatever your motivation, make no mistake, this is a lifestyle.
It’s important to realize that pursuing this lifestyle isn’t something that will happen overnight, and it’s not without its challenges, but it’s possible if you don’t shy away from hard work. Off-grid living focuses on developing a self-sufficient life, and eating food is the core of living, which is why I think that producing both your own power and your own food are equally important.
We wouldn’t choose the more difficult path unless we thought it was worth it. While we each have our own reasons for wanting this lifestyle, people often cite a few common motivations for disconnecting from the grid.
Going against the grain is not without its challenges, but I’ve learned that with enough resolve and a little bit of grit, this is all achievable, and the payoff is enormous. When I finally moved into my off-grid house, I went from paying $1,500 a month in rent and utilities to $15 per month. And yes, that is not a typo.
Having flipped the script on life, I saw many advantages you can enjoy, too. Here are some of the main benefits of going off the grid:
- Simplifying your life
- Going green
- Developing self-reliance
- Escaping debt
- Eating healthfully
- Living on your own terms
- Building community.
One of the main reasons people decide to live off the grid is that it’s an antidote to the chaos of the modern-day rat race. Many of us are glued to our devices, the world is moving faster and faster, and people brag about being busy like it’s a badge of honor. All this hasn’t worked out so well for us.
People are finding their quality of life going in the wrong direction, and their happiness with it. We’re plagued by debt, unhealthy food is poisoning our bodies, and society is seeing an increasing level of mental health crises. It can be unsettling when we take stock of the state of our world.
Despite these troubling trends, the very fact that there is a growing interest in this path suggests an underlying optimism. After all, people don’t sign up for years of hard work to create their own homestead if they think it will all be for naught. That spirit of building for the future is summed up nicely in the adage: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Even if you’re a cynic, the best practical course of action is to work to build a better life for yourself and those you love—regardless of what is going on in the wider world. As individuals, we may not have the power to change governments or institutions on our own, but we can take concrete steps to improve our situations and those of the people around us. The cosmic joke for a true skeptic is that positive action is the best bottom-up approach I’ve encountered. If enough people take ownership and lead through example, change can filter up.
Taking ownership means slowing down and being intentional. In fact, intentionality is the great superpower of modern life. In an age where we are equipped with endless information at our fingertips, if we just pause long enough to figure out what is right for us, we can leverage that information in the best way possible.
For many, myself included, being intentional leads to a simpler way of life. The idea of simplifying can have many meanings to different folks, but for me, it’s about focusing on the things that are important and reducing the things that are not as important. Figure out what you want more of and do that; figure out what you want less of and don’t do that. It’s simple.
Figuring out what is and isn’t important to you is challenging when you are too busy to think for yourself. I find that it takes at least a few hours of slowness to get my mind to settle before doing the deep work that is uncovering what matters to me. You might be different, but we’ll go through how to do this in a later part of this book.
Living a simpler life takes some adjusting to, especially if those around you are still stuck on the hamster wheel. After moving into my off-grid house, my bills were cut by more than half, which meant I didn’t have to work as much. I was saving more money than ever, but also working less at the same time.
It left me with a lot of time to fill and the challenge of doing it in a way that was right for me. Around this time, I made the jump to working for myself, and I could do it from anywhere; this was before working from home was commonplace. So, I found myself reading books in a cozy coffee shop, taking afternoon walks every day, and grocery shopping at 3:00 p.m., when the store was less crowded.
It was a stark contrast to the way I had lived—and the way all my friends continued to live, working 40, 50, or even 60 hours a week. I found myself chatting with retirees I’d cross paths with on my walks, taking monthlong solo trips at times of year when most had to be at work or school, and I got lost in the books I read.
I had the flexibility to build and tend my gardens instead of struggling to keep the weeds at bay. I could check on my chickens and quail every morning instead of having to run off to a cubicle. I spent more time outdoors and in nature, which left me feeling happier. I don’t think it was just a placebo effect: studies have found that digging in the soil exposes gardeners to bacteria, which helps with serotonin levels, buffers against stress, and creates other positive health impacts.
In short, all those things I never had time to do, I suddenly had time to do. I sat down and wrote my first published book, setting me on a journey I couldn’t have imagined, this book being my eighth. I spent more time with those closest to me, something I barely got to do before this shift because I had to spend hours away on business.
It also gave me a lot of time to think and, more importantly, time to slow down enough to do it with a clear head. I woke in the mornings with energy. I suddenly could make a cup of coffee and enjoy it on my front porch before heading off for the day. I went on long hikes that left me feeling centered and having a better sense of equilibrium. All this was possible as a result of my decision to go off-grid, escape the rat race, and simplify.
Amfortas?
lol.
i wish i had solar/wind.
last big expenditure ere i’m done.
and this dude is right…it takes work to drop out(dropping out is a revolutionary act-wulf zendik).
taken me 30 years to get to where i’m at…many setbacks along the way.
You can purchase a house, but you must build a home: “house” and “home” are very different things, regardless of what some realtors are trying to sell.
I wouldn’t worry much about scalability, as most wouldn’t ever leave the grid (and not just in the physical sense) even if they had the choice. And many who try to do so on whatever whim will toss in the towel after a few years at most and rush to reconnect with their former lives.
But there’s a lot to be said for leading a simple life, or a simpler one. Reducing one’s exposures to costs and expenses is huge, and a lot of that is tied to space, material stuff, personal obligations, and/or lack of effort and self-discipline.
Even when one desires to lead a simple life, you might find that the cards are stacked against you, but given time, you can win that game. And to me, it’s totally worth it– the author of this piece mentions some of the rewards, and yeah, they’re delicious!
My clear impression here in Australia is that going off the grid by yourself (or family unit) is a very right-wing ideological fantasy. When lefties want to live out of the system, they fantasize about doing it collectively (small community).
Myself, I think that the very concept of going solo when you are going to depend on parts for your equipment that are made at the other end of the world is a bit, let’s say, simplistic. However, given a choice between the two options, the leftie communitarian one seems more realist to me than the libertarian ideological spasms of the right.
If you listen to the right-leaning types, at least in the US, they’re often very much interested in local community. By necessity, if nothing else. It’s usually the federal government that catches their ire. They often have issues with big monopolistic corporations, too.
That’s interesting.
Yes, my impression is that the right in the US is a more complex thing than here in Australia, with room for political projects that just don’t exist in the Australian right.
Worth exploring.
:-)
I second the communal approach. Advantages of buying in bulk, including the initial solar panels by the pallet, batteries less so because not completely mature tech. Have enough cleared land to ground-mount. DC appliances are appearing. Helps to have retired electrician and plumber in the community, and a communal workshop with a good tool set bought from a retiring mechanic. Buy a couple of car-share used EVs (Chevy Bolts are roomy enough, can even tow a light trailer, and under $10k each) for occasional grocery/hardware/medical trips, although car insurance requires planning.
Also, solar panels are cheap and reliable (essentially the output degrades over time, rarely a complete failure) whereas so much of the connected electronics is unrepairable.
So go for more panels and simpler, less efficient downstream equipment, with redundancy. For example, generate and store hot water in two locations in the property to minimise pipe from tank to point of use. Add manual valves so that if one dies, the other can supply the whole house.
A spare electromechanical power relay will work fine in 50 years… if you power up an inverter that has sat unpowered for 25 years, some of the electrolytic capacitors will probably go bang.
This article is interesting, so far as it goes. Yet many of the other commenters here mention having children or elderly relatives to take care of, and some information about the ramifications of commitments is missing from the article.
I found, while still living in the U S of A, that the biggest levelers — that increased my available time and quality of life — were working for myself as a free lance at home and getting rid of the car in favor of a car-share service. (Not a ride-haling service like Uber.) A third major factor was that I was living in a viable neighborhood in Chicago — many neighborhoods in Chicago are either (1) worn down by poverty or (2) tarted up to bourgeois standards that preclude having laundromats and hot-dog stands.
One piece of info missing is the size of the house and complications of building it. I am reminded of the industry of Anglos in Tuscany (and it’s always Tuscany) writing about that little place they found by chance (by chance, in Tuscany?) that they then renovated with the help of many superhuman Italian tradesmen. Only to admit later to throwing 500 000 euro at the “little” house with seven bedrooms and a swimming pool.
Also lurking is a car. There is no grocery store sitting at the end of the driveway of his eleven acres. So he drives.
When my father retired, he and my mother moved from the inner Chicago suburbs to Harvard, more or less exurbia. That may be the path for many, a smaller town that still has schools, a sizable hospital, a good bakery. Northern Illinois has a number of such scenic towns like Stockton, Marengo, Savanna, Oregon, Mount Carroll, Mount Morris.
Here in the Undisclosed Region, there have been some incentives to move into the valleys, where so many amazing villages are trying to attract new residents after the demographic collapse due to economic changes after WWII. I was at an event with a presentation by the woman who founded the “New Worlds” festival. She faced the dilemma that the population of the four villages sponsoring the events had declined from 5,000 a century ago to some 1,100 (collectively) nowadays.
But the result is this wonderful event:
https://www.italybyevents.com/eventi/nuovi-mondi-festival-piemonte
[The semi-mytical “one euro” house does exist in Italy, but I have seen only one on offer in the Undisclosed Region — and these houses always require much, much work.]
In short, making this big change requires much planning as well as some money. These are hindrances for many.
Small world. I vicared in Marengo, and knew the Lutheran (Missouri) pastor in Harvard well.
Health care is the issue about living in the country, as my family learned from personal experience. We had a toddler daughter go into seizures on a Sunday afternoon in Marengo while I was leading an evangelism class. My wife called me out of the class, and we made a mad dash to the nearest hospital in Woodstock. I just checked, and that’s rated a 16 minute trip. If so, that’s the longest 16 minutes of my life. In Woodstock, we ended up in the same ER where Bill Murray keeps trying to save the old man in “Ground Hog Day,” but the doctors were unable to stabilize her. Then she was put on a helicopter to Rockford, with all the Woodstock ER nurses crying, for they felt she had encephalitis and might not survive the flight. Ahead of us was a 50 minute drive to Rockford from Woodstock, the longest 50 minutes of my life.
When we arrived at Rockford, a member of my vicarage congregation, whose wife I had just visited in that hospital the day before, met us at the door to tell us that the phenobarbital that the Woodstock anesthesiologist had managed to get into her little, constricted vein had brought the seizures under control on the helicopter flight, and that she was now stable. She went on to be fine other than the side effects of the phenobarbital that she had to keep taking for a year in gradually reducing dosage.
Now here’s one of the good sides of living in the country. The congregation had purchased a cheapie insurance policy for the vicar and his family with a large deductible. They raised the money to cover that deductible and more until the pastor had to say, “No more.” And that was after I had been there only a couple of months.
Living in the country usually means much longer travel times to medical centers. I think of the scores of visits I’ve made, and most of them were 10 minutes away at the main campus of the hospital where all services were available. It was quite a burden on my wife and often my granddaughter to get me to all those appointments, but what would it have been like if I’d lived an hour away as Marengo is from the big medical centers in Chicago?
Yes, living in the country is not easy. There are plusses and minuses. Most people live in the city (suburbs) because that is where society has evolved. With abundant electricity, clean water availalbiltiy, and the local grocery store it’s a relatively physically easy life. Until it becomes too congested, too impersonal, too frenetic, and mostly too expensive to live casually.
I grew up in the 50’s when California had 10 million citizens. It now has 40 million and the countryside that was once 15 minutes away is nearly unreachable! Everyone could afford a modest house in the suburbs and work at a stable job to pay off that home. That is no longer the case!
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I was part of the ‘back to the land’ movement in the ’70’s. My Whole Earth Catalog days. Left for Oregon with some friends who owned land there. Learned how to make a Sioux Indian tipi ,cover, found/debarked lodgepole pine to support the canvas cover, oriented the entry to the East, worked with a local rancher to earn money, played guitar with famous musicians, etc. But eventually a friend enticed me to take the tipi to the mountains of Triumph, ID. The tipi was too cold for my first severe Idaho winter, so I gave it away. Built a geodesic dome on a vacant concrete pad that eventually became the chicken house for Stubby Street’s (Picabo’s dad) ‘farm’.. Moved into a winter condo in Ketchum and have lived in a normal abode since.
Going back to the land is for the young. It’s not easy.
I did learn alot. And put it to good use later in life:
http://www.land2plan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PV-House.pdf
I’ve been living off the grid in my summer cabin in Mineral King for almost 15 years now, and that’s the way it is for everybody-and some have put solar panels up in a small way to power up their Jackery battery banks and have Starlink.
I’m cognizant though of the value of silence and a lack of electricity, so it’s a propane powered life for me, with a propane fridge, propane lamps and propane heater. Hardly off the grid, heck wi-fi is a 100 yard walk away if I want to indulge at the only place you can spend money on a 25 mile long road with 698 significant curves, there’s a blind curve around every other corner as you’re ascending 7,000 feet to Mineral King Valley.
Where it has done wonders, is my ability to read books. Before the internet i’d devour them, but probably like everybody else, our attention spans got winnowed down to a narrow window of time, sometimes online an article will inform me how long it should take to read it, imagine the same advisory on books?
I would highly recommend watching Skote Outdoors, which are charming videos currently being posted by a couple in Newfoundland who are building an off the grid homestead. They are paying for it with proceeds from the videos they post. So, even though the home they are building is off grid, they are online in a very selective way that supports their project. Maybe this a template others could use.
They are currently in the last stages of adding a kitchen. Since they started the kitchen build out, they mentioned that they have heard from many of the experienced electricians who watch their videos, teaching them the correct way to do their wiring.
I find that wonderful and encouraging. We CAN do this, and we can learn how to from each other, tapping into all the collective competence still out there to help each other, by using modern tech to serve us instead of enslave us.
Living off the grid. Self-sufficiency. Community.
Back to my favorite example of ‘off the grid’ living: the Amish communities here in south western New York, reaching down into northern Pennsylvania and west into Ohio. They range from the very very conservative to the more ‘modern’ groups who have solar panels and ride push bikes and have a telephone installed at the corner of their land.
Most importantly, they are not ’self-sufficient. They spend a lot of time and energy cultivating their community and maintaining ties with their more far flung extended family members. After all, who is going to feed your chickens and milk your cow when you slip on the ice and break your leg? And, who is going to cut and transport and stack your winter supply of firewood when you get too old to do it yourself?
And, what do we, and the Amish, do when our kid develops cancer? Off to the nearest modern hospital with trained medical staff and the latest in cancer cures, developed by scientists and researchers trained in top-notch universities. And, how do we get to these hospitals? On trains, built by factory workers, that run on steel tracks maintained by guys who work for bosses and go when and where they are needed.
This is a factor we don’t consider enough: the Amish off the grid living, as well as any ‘English’ off the grid life style, depends heavily on those workers who are still ‘on the grid.’ The factory workers who process the iron and steel that then go to the stove-making factories who produce those lovely wood stoves. The mining and extraction industries that produce the kerosene, or the propane, that light the lamps and fire up the one and two burner stoves, as well as make the glass for the kerosene lamp chimneys.
I keep chickens and have a large garden and try to act as responsible steward to many acres of forest and field (which involves a lot of work with hi-tech chain saws and the use of fossil-fuel-powered tractors dragging brush hogs) while keeping the ravenous deer under control. I love it and feel most fortunate that I can live this way but I am retired. Along with the physical labor, a large part of my time is spent talking with my neighbors. And persuading them to talk to each other. They range from rabid Trumpers to the blueist of liberals who think Hillary should be a candidate for sainthood. I have not been as successful as I would hope.
Our dream may be to live ‘off the grid,’ but this relatively slower-paced life style depends on the continued exploitation of other workers all over the planet, who provide the underpinnings for our rejection of ‘modern’ life.
Eclair:
I’m sorry to go somewhat off topic, but I was intrigued by your comment that stated:
“Along with the physical labor, a large part of my time is spent talking with my neighbors. And persuading them to talk to each other. They range from rabid Trumpets to the blueish of liberals who think Hillary should be a candidate for sainthood. I have not been as successful as I would hope.”
Sometime I would love to hear your descriptions of why, as you say, you have not been as successful as you would hope. I have been involved, for a significant period of time, in a similar endeavor.
I’m an enthusiastic advocate for living simply, but of the touted bullet-pointed benefits of going “off grid” have only a peripheral relationship to actually disconnecting from central services such as electricity power, sewer, etc. I’ve personally achieved these points in my own life (what constitutes “going green” seems overly subjective) but am yet tied to the electricity and sewer grid.
I live without debt in a house walkable to downtown of a tiny city surrounded by forests – a rare situation, but for me it proved attainable. I draw many lines in the sand consumption wise – just different ones than the author of this post has drawn.
Off grid rural life relies on automobiles and is vulnerable to infrastructure disruptions. (Try repairing washed out dirt roads and culverts without heavy machinery). Moreover, it is just as tied to the global supply chains as my own lifestyle.
We are all tied (enslaved by) to global supply chains and governmental systems of various sorts, both for better and for worse. Individual “freedom” is a matter of perception and preference rather than where one draws the line of engagement with modernity.
Essential ingredients are indeed a degree of financial independence (mine came about from habitual frugality and saving religiously, avoidance of having children, and having passed through the years of having to manage elderly parent care.). In the end, it is probably not universally attainable, but worth valuing and working towards.
One of the traps with solar becoming reasonably cheap is that the general attitude is to keep power consumption high because solar.
I like the passivhaus approach which is to minimise power consumption by house design, reducing reliance on heavy duty electronics such as 5kW inverters and enormous battery banks.
My approach is stay grid connected, have small solar which maintains modest battery storage, and don’t attempt net zero or to have enough solar to run everything at once. Instead, plan to remain comfortable if the power goes off for a month. This is much easier with a well insulated house, because the heating/cooling energy is minimal.
Similarly, collect rainwater (choose a metal roof) for gardening use and backup household supply.
Again, as others have pointed out, all this is planning for those who can afford to build from scratch. And while you’re at it, choose a less obvious location and ensure that the resiliences don’t make the house an obvious target. After all, the tougher people say that it isn’t necessary to stockpile a year’s worth of food if they can outgun a Mormon family who has…
Sorry to tell you, but the couple of Mormon families I know of are gunned up.
See my link above.
After divorce I took what I salvaged from home equity and purchased 3 acres 4 miles out of a small interior bc town. I am on grid but have a tiny home- actually a 40’ factory built container fully wired and plumbed. Small addition, septic, and much labour. My recommendations are these, make sure you know where south is as come winter solstice you may find you have been in the shade for a month already with another month to go. Mountains also will steal sunlight. Also find out where the deer winter as the climate will be better where they go. I made the mistake of buying too high as I’m at 4,000 ft and winter comes a few weeks earlier and leaves later in spring compared to town a thousand ft below. As mentioned above medical facilities should also be part of your requirements. Our hospital here seems to keep its emergency department open a lot more than surrounding hospitals.
Living off the grid or rural is a privilege reserved for those with financial resources. After retiring from 32 years as a civil servant I was able to sell my 25-year old Silicon Valley-adjacent home for quadruple what I paid for it. With the proceeds I was able to build a home of my own design a mile-and-a-quarter down a private gravel road in a rural area economically dependent on farming, tourism, and wealthy retirees.
We’re connected to a user-owned co-op running on 100-percent renewables, pumping a community well, with a greenhouse to grow much of our own food year-round, while obtaining most proteins from local farmers and tribal fishers. We depend on a 9-year old pick-up and a small AWD wagon to go the 6 miles into town, both running on gasoline. It’s all quite peaceful and bucolic.
We are ridiculously privileged to live this lifestyle. The UN reports that nearly 60 percent of the world’s population are urban dwellers and that number will be closer to 70 percent by 2050. The vast majority of human beings lack the financial resources and physical space to live our lifestyle.
There’s also the problem of aging off-the-grid: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2025/sep/13/folie-a-deux-diagnosis-psychosis-illness
It occurs to me that, given housing is unaffordable everywhere without exception, urban life is expensive, that off-grid is probably the only thing many people can afford to do, including probably the only thing many can retire to. As in buy vacant land, build your own house with no mortgage, probably making your own lumber from the local trees. Kinda like people did in the old days, interestingly and ironically enough. You were able to sell your house, others may not have a house to sell but might have pitiful savings which barely amount to enough to buy a parcel of vacant land in some far off place, and the further away it is, the cheaper.
I wonder if the coming years will see a mass exodus from the cities as AI eliminates all desk jobs.
How do country gardeners deal with moles/voles? I have tried poison, flooding their burrows, and those battery powered devices which supposedly make a sound moles don’t like. Nothing works, and my veggies keep disappearing into the ground…
My mom swore by sprinkling paprika powder on their holes, try that.
a stick of juicy fruit gum in the hole.
and cats.
shovel used kitty litter in the holes, smellier and grosser the better. there’s a use for everything…
I don’t have problems with voles and moles, but friends who do have had to dig up their garden beds and line the bottom with wire mesh before putting the dirt back in. The mesh wraps up to the surface at the edge to the bed, where it can be attached to removable above-ground meshing or fencing. Sounds like a pain, but it works.
Gopher wire under every bed and in some places above ground netting, row covers or a fully wired walk-in enclosure, depending on your wildlife. Gopher wire, which has smaller holes than poultry wire, is available at diggers.com or groworganic.com.
It’s easier to wire raised beds. If you can construct a cage to keep something in, you can construct one to keep something out, up to and including bears and beehives.
Thank you friends for the advice!
Living off-grid in the North Coast mountains of California for more than 20 years, my wife and I dread the day we can no longer meet the challenges of maintaining fences and follies while holding nature at bay, and driving 200 miles to the hospital–but we gird our loins and stay put. I can’t help it. Living in beautiful nature is in fact addictive, and not only because you know whenever you leave that you won’t go to a place as nice as where you are already. The gift of peace and relative solitude is to a degree estranging. It’s a little unbalanced, to be cradled by nature’s opulence while the world below makes itself ever more miserable. But we don’t feel guilty, much; we feel lucky. It took us years to accrete our comforts, but nature is always comforting and embracing. I used to invent arguments that our lifestyle saved us money and was therefore rational. But we didn’t do this to be rational. We did it to be happy, which is sometimes impractical. And I won’t swear we saved money.
Hello Conor Gallagher. Living “off of the grid” is a decision based on a principle, (that now I am going to be totally-free.) Why do I need to whole-heartedly adopt a principle obviously coined by someone else? I am already free. I prefer to go day-by-day, and see what the opportunities are. Growing fruit and vegetables is a seasonal project, and then there is too much harvest to eat as fresh. I can buy a fruit or big carrot for 20 cents, and get another one any time I need it.
In the mean time, I do have a piece of land. It is only 4 tenths of one acre, not 11 acres. Where I live there may be 5 or 6 descending layers of rural. Each layer has a smaller community, (older too as the youth have left). I now live on the first layer of rural, and my land is on the 3rd layer. You have to go to 5 or 6 to get totally isolated, in the forest or mountains. Actually this is an investment too. It is deeded as 4 building lots, each 20 x 20, connected becoming 20 x 80. In the future I could easily sell one or two lots since the deeds are already prepared and the survey posts are in. It is only 45 meters behind the country road. In the back are many hectors of farming and then mountain views on 3 sides.
For instance, convenience stores are all over our country, walking distance from my land, and there is a regional hospital 2 kilometers and a big art museum 1 kilometer. Country restaurants and small groceries are on every street. Small builder’s marts, everything you need, (no supermarkets, but country farmer’s market-days every week.)
I have no intention to move “off-of-the-grid”. Although I buy water from a private well, 18 cents for 1,000 liters. I buy electric from the same guy, my meter is below his meter. There is no gas here, only LPG. Neither do I have the intention to build a house. I have a house that suits me fine. (Maybe some day?) I am building an orchard and a mini-farm. I’ll put in a storage shed and with a tank and water pump and a toilet inside.
This is all very recent, say – since May 3rd. It started because if you hold land you are taxed as an investor. But if you plant something, you are an agriculturist, with basically no tax. We put in 60 baby trees for tax reasons. It was high summer so I had to water them every day. Then I thought, I am out here every day; I might as well DO SOMETHING. I decided to put in watering faucets at opposite ends of the property, 80 meters wide. I ended up hand digging 100 meters of trench, about 40 – 50 cm deep. All with a pick and shovel. I wasn’t going to dig that again, so I put in electric in the same trenches and on the watering posts.
Now I am grading the fall of the land, removing tons of big rocks and laying in some topsoil in a few spots. The topsoil I see as almost symbolic, (“this is the garden area”). You could plant on the soil below, although it is rocky. Our 60 trees are doing well. I am also putting in 6 drain boxes and connecting them to a 40 cm waste-water channel. I work with hard labor from 9 to 5, 7 days a week since May. I see no end to this project.
So when this author say he has leisure time with 11 acres, I find it unbelievable. Even if half of his land is forest, trees grow so fast, there is abundant work to cut them back and dispose of the cuttings. Of course with me, I hire no helpers. WHY?
The land is only part of the project. The bigger project is my body and re-integrating my musculature with my old worn organs. It is working since I feel stronger every day, (although my muscles are sore at the end of the day), by tomorrow I regenerate.
Wow; I am addicted to it, and basically have left all my old activities, and cut way back on Internet time.
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True, off grid is not really off grid these days – thankfully – as lifespans were much shorter when the US was largely offgrid.
Here in Southern California, almost all our veggies come from our garden and protein from chickens (carrots are trouble for me, but I keep trying), yet it relies on water provided by society—population densities in California are unsustainable in the face of collapse (let’s pretend a Carrington event) and a mandatory return of society to the offgrid.
In any case, it took several years to tune the system to grow enough on a small patch – my advice, practice now and reap the benefit in health, taste, pride, (and savings) of knowing where your food comes from because you grew it yourself. If society is forced offgrid, your knowledge will be invaluable to your community.
I note a tone of disdain for off-gridding, as if it’s a conceit. I suppose it’s becoming one, being merchandized nowadays as plug-and-play freedom, but when the off-grid movement first took off with civilian solar panels and practical inverters, for decades it was a way of living comfortably deep in nature. Nothing to do with negotiating for power lines or haggling over sewage; county planners and code enforcement officers often became enemies; you wanted to live deep enough that they wouldn’t find you, or trouble themselves to trouble you. That movement has been devoured by production for affluent plug-and-players, of both political wings and none. It’s a shame, because what’s vanished with the market for simple unplugged living is the moral order of simple living, since schlepping civilized standards into the wilderness was expensive and stupid. Conservation came first. Now it’s cheap enough that the stupid reigns everywhere, and off-grid is conflated with electric intertie. Once there was a time when the goal of off-grid living wasn’t to stay middle class. (But I’ll admit it was to be free.)
aye.
in my case, i began this because i knew i wouldnt be able to hold a job, one day.
and because i have long foreseen the demise of empire.
and because i loathe living in town…let alone a big city.
the first two have come to pass…and i would be in bad shape if i hadnt built a working farm.
and i get to work naked…then sit out here at the bar of an afternoon and have a margarita naked, too.
only thing im really missing is a woman to share it with.
As a wise man once said, “If a man can’t pee in his own front yard, why the hell does he live there?”
Since there are too many people for very many of them to be able to go off the grid, most people will stay on the grid regardless. On the various survival grids, really. But they could live ” lower down the grid chain” than they currently do. At least some of them could.
And off-the-grid people had and may still have some ideas and technologies which can help the grid-based majority to live lower on the grid chain than they are currently living.
One thing I have learned living off-grid is that about 90% of the electricity we use on-grid does nothing to improve our standard of living. It’s just waste. Waste that we take for granted because on-grid electricity is cheap and we don’t have to work as individuals to maintain it.
I love those hotel rooms where you put the room key into the activator switch that turns the power on when you enter the room. You need to take the key with you when you leave, so the power is turned off in the whole room while you’re not there.
Wall warts, internet routers, electronics on ‘standby’, smart home systems, abandoned cloud storage, not to mention transmission line loss because the power is never made where it is used… there is no profit to be made by reducing consumption, so here we are.
long time since i dug into it, but as much as 40% of whats generated under our current hydraulic despotism model, is lost in transmission.
just radiates into the air.
via those high voltage transmission lines.
better, smarter, to have a distributed commie grid, methinks.
Most you have seen my posts on being off the grid. After around four years, I’ts been worth the investment. I’m at ROI. I didn’t take any of the government money. It was all pout of pocket. There are other factors that greatly affect the performance of a solar application. Some of these are: Where you place the panels. Where you place your dwelling. How you insulate and use passive solar. I had to build my dwelling. So I used Insulated concrete forms for the foundation as an example. How you well is configured is important. My well pump is set at 300 feet. I pump in to a 1100 gallon cistern and use a secondary pressure pump to pressurize the water system. This setup saves a lot of energy. I have lots of wood so I use it as the main heat source. I have radiant tubing in all the concrete slabs. These are connect to a electric hot water heater and circulation pump in winter to heat the slabs when the sun is out. The slabs also preheat the water used for domestic hot water. I use propane hot water, cooking and the clothes dryer. In winter, the living areas with no heat stay around 50 minimum. I designed my septic system to feed in to a man made small wetland filled with pea gravel and cattails. In the summer, I use an evaporative cooler. I’ll be adding some small minisplit ac units for some addition cooling, in that I have lots excess power in the summer. In area and the the house is situated I only need AC when the temp is above 90. Don’t need it at night. I 30 panels and a rack of 6 100 APH LIO batteries. I’ll and another rack next summer. This will extend my dark days. So with planning off the grid is a viable option depending on location.
Again, here’s a link to my energy conservation optimized Eco-Home design:
http://www.land2plan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PV-House.pdf
Design and built as a Ranger Residence in a state park: passive solar design (full south oriented window glazing, natural ventilation through operable clearstory windows. 2×6 walls with r-40 insulation. insulated foundation footings with suspended floor with insulation. Central hydronic wall-base heating units throughout; propane powered, wood stove for focused heating in living room. Propane refrigerator and potable water heater. High density tile flooring as solar insolation heatsink. High efficiency lighting. 12 75w mono-crystal PV panels attached to a tracking rack (for seasonal solar orientation adjust). 24V sine wave inverter. 3KW standby propane generator (code required) that automatically activates at PV power loss. All internal house voltage is 110 AC for use with standard appliances. Project designed in 1990 with 12v lead/acid batteries, since converted to Lithium. PV panels have seen only a ~10% reduction in output over 30 years. System maintained by trained maintenance staff. Still going strong.
The long term low voltage loss is impressive. Which contrary to a lot of the solar opponents are sighting for power lost figures. I’m seeing about the same. Would help it I time clean the panels more often. I run in to a lot of people wanting to do solar. I tell them, they don’t need to go full solar the get real benefits in lowering the cost of grid power. Just having 10 400w panel system will run a common house AC. Here the summer AC bill is around $500 per month. I know people in the south where it’s over $1000 per month. So in southern areas just using solar during the the day will just the the expense of a small array panel system. Over a period of 5 years or less the system will have paid for it’s self. I hit ROI in 3 1/2 years.
By “clearstory” windows, do you mean “clerestory” windows?