I love the idea of an off-grid house but it always comes with too much DIY.
I wish there were sellers with fixed affordable off-grid packages.
You get House A on Plot A for $50,000
You own the house and the plot. It is fully off-grid (except WiFi) and we made smart decisions and installed reliable systems.
You pay your money and you maintain the house.
Unfortunately it’s never like that. It’s all DIY:
Come camp with us for 4 weeks without a hot shower while we teach you how to mix AirCrete and sell you a pump. Get 4 friends and spend 4 months slathering cob incorrectly together. Never cut down a tree before? Buy a chainsaw and start stacking 1-ton logs- you’ll be perfectly safe: nobody has blogged yet about having crushed themselves.
I realize this is contrary to the spirit.
I just want a convention-over-configuration small off-grid house that I can see in models, read specs for, and purchase outright, including the land it’s sitting on.
> nobody has blogged yet about having crushed themselves.
“Hi HN! (waves). It’s Johnny from Loggr.me (formerly timbr.ho). We’re building the world’s first platform to connect loggers (who can chop down trees) and loggees (who have no business doing so). The idea came at me suddenly while I was building my off-grid tiny house in the Sierra Nevadas...”
The best satire is totally believable. He got me for a second too. I could totally picture the responsive web site and About Us page complete with a picture of the guy’s dog captioned Chief Bark Officer.
I live "in the middle of nowhere". I'm not off-grid, but have friends who are. I think there are a handful of reasons that it is difficult to find a turn-key, ready to live in of grid home.
Subdivisions are easy, they are all essentially the same. They have a road, electricity, water, sewer are waiting and everyone (builders) knows how to hook up to them. As soon as you go of grid you have to figure that out, much of it from scratch because each site is different.
Electricity- How much solar do you need? That depends on the climate and the level of comfort the owner wants. Are they good running a generator when the sun doesn't shine or are they willing to shell out for a lot of battery? Are the panels on the roof or on the ground?
Water - do you want to haul your own water or punch a well? That is a big, site specific cost that can be estimated, but is also a big unknown.
Sewer- composting toilet or septic system? Septic obviously costs not and each site needs some amount of design and approval, even here where you don't even need a permit for the structure.
Roads - it is likely to not exist in most properties, the cost to get that done varies greatly.
Ok, so the price can swing - a lot and it isn't so cookie cutter, but why does of grid so often get coupled to DIY? Because when you live of grid (at least around here) you are the one who will plow and maintain your road.
You are the one to maintain your solar system.
Your generator carb needs tuned? Do you drive an hour each way to drop it off and pick it up next week or watch a YouTube video and do it in an hour and have your generator ready and available instead of in the shop?
I can only speak about what I see around me, but it is mostly DIY, self-reliant, prepared people who live here (on or off grid). By building your own systems you are ready to maintain and repair them rather than wait for someone to come save you.
Can't cut a tree with a chainsaw? It might be a while before someone clears the fallen tree from your road. Even old Grandma's around here have a saw and won't let a tree in the road stop them. (I keep a bow saw in each vehicle and have used it. It is slower, but not as slow as waiting!)
It is a mentality that is so different than my old subdivision neighbors.
Basically you have to end up doing a ton of stuff yourself just because of the time to drive to town and back is very high, or the cost to get a repairman out is prohibitive.
One other issue is that there is usually a ton of regulations around building, and a county or state may not allow a developer to do at scale what it will allow an individual to do for themselves.
DIY is very much a necessary part of living off grid. It actually can be quite fun!
I live off grid, I have nothing but reliable systems here. Stuff breaks every single day. Nature happens - we get lightning strikes, floods, fires, freezing temperatures, droughts - stuff breaks.
When we moved here, some stuff had been done by the previous owners. No plans or anything, just "hunt the burst water line under the concrete" and all that fun.
The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is.
If you have an off-grid home that you can't maintain, you aren't going to last long there.
> The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is.
This sounds similar to the NIH syndrome in some software companies. I’m still trying to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. In software, I tend to err on the side of NIH. In life, I am almost never DIY. I suspect I’m out of balance in both regards.
A popular guideline that makes sense to me is to control the tech that you compete on and outsource everything else.
Eg if "search" quality is a competitive differentiation, make sure you implement search yourself. Your goal is to beat the rest of the market in search quality so buying a commodity search product that anyone else can buy doesn't make sense. You are directly rewarded for paying the extra NIH cost to go the extra mile for your customers.
For everything else, there's little benefit to paying the extra cost of NIH. An excessively fancy/powerful support ticketing system, for example, isn't going to help you get more customers. Few people might care how much nicer the checkout/payment page is than on other products, so you can outsource that.
Most areas in real life don't benefit from extra quality either. For eg, the extra quality you might get from hunting/farming your own own food makes little difference to most people, so most choose to outsource that.
My take on it, for what it's worth, is that DIY can go the extreme from building your own tools to just use plug and play tech, doing only the "plug" part yourself. Same goes for NIH, but I'm no software engineer and only recently restarted DIY for certain things.
Living rural, on grid on an acreage and I'm still amazed at how much work it is. Some of it is self inflicted. Redoing my footer drains by hand, building a cistern for extra water storage, land scaping, finish a basement, gardening, tuning teleposts, bobcat, mini excavator, snow fencing to reduce plowing, tree planting and protecting, fencing, too many maintenance and repair tasks to list. There's always another project waiting...
OP might want to go live somewhere sufficiently rural but partially on-grid to try it out and see if it's for him. I'd suggest something with at least access through a gravel road, traditional electric provider, but with off-grid well and septic might be a good start. When you're at the point where you don't need to call anyone to do something for you, then maybe you're ready to live full time off grid.
Me and my partner rebuilt a log cabin into a year-round house over the period of a year. Only bearing walls remained. Re-insulated, expanded and changed the roof, added a bathroom, sleeping lofts, etc. She did most light work while I was holding down the day job to secure the down-payment and mortgage, and I would handle the heavy stuff on the weekends.
The zone is not ideal for wind or solar, so we are connected to electrical. We had a contractor help with bath tiling, he did plumbing and electric hook-ups, an electrician did what was required by code for the electric system.
Every single one of the licensed pros had cut corners.
The electrician did not secure the outlets to the walls properly, just enough for them to start getting loose after 2 years. One weak screw instead of four. I was afraid of electric for a while. Only had the energy to read the code, some books and watch some youtube videos and re-secure all the outlets and set up 2 extra outlets, with channel cable dragging, etc, about 3 years ago.
The plumbing had multiple mistakes as well, wrong tank positioning, wrong main drain placement, no main cut-off to the tank, did not get a filter hook-up or a drain valve, etc, and the hot water boiler did not get a proper set-up for easy maintenance (the magnesium sacrificial anode cannot be removed, too close to the ceiling, you have to dismount the whole unit).
If I had the money and not to have to work during the build process, I would have built a small house first, learning everything about how to do it right and observing the "pros" as they go along. But hey, we have a house that total spend was 1/3 of the market, enough land to build a second one, and I am a different man from the experience.
It was my first experience with engineering outside of software. Trust no one, do your own research, plan, experiment and verify apply even more in "physical world" engineering.
It's nice to become more and more self-reliant with construction skills. I just serviced the indoor plumbing, changed 3 taps, installed a water-filter hook-up and filter, including pipes, and plan to assemble a big water filtration system, myself, in the summer. $ 5K to 7K for filter tank, controller and installation by contractor, vs $600 for system and medium from manufacturer, and install it yourself.
Whether you plan to go off-grid, build, be your own general contractor, or even just buy a property, doing things yourself, provided you can follow engineering principles and values, is always the best bet. You want reliability. The pros want to make a profit.
Life pro tip - if planning to participate in construction in any way, audit the locality and how strict vs smart their code and inspections are.
> ...the magnesium sacrificial anode cannot be removed...
Get a Rheem Marathon hot water heater and permanently do away with sacrificial anodes.
So much about construction drives me nuts. After sweating bullets over microscopic details of software design to find the balance between durability, longevity, readability, reliability, maintainability, security, etc., it comes as a huge shock to see the lack of attention to detail in most "professional" construction.
On the other hand, most people aren't as bothered as I am about spending so much of a lifetime paying for a good that deteriorates to pretty much nil at the the end of that lifetime.
What annoys me the most is regulatory capture by design / moat building as top priority. Incompetent individuals (from an engineering perspective) creating legal moats, such as mandatory inspections that have nothing to do with property value, but provide income from fines for the city / locality.
Construction and materials "solutions" that are by design planned to fail by the end-of-life / warranty, etc.
>the magnesium sacrificial anode cannot be removed, too close to the ceiling
I was contemplating what to do about that with my water heater, but I think maybe the procedure is that you cut it up as it comes out, if it is one long piece, and there are replacements that are segmented so you can get them back in with limited clearance.
It's so close for me, I cannot get the key in to open the lock to the anode. Otherwise, if one has some access space, segmented is a good solution. or, alternatively, an anode that is part of the heating element assembly, if that is at the bottom / accessible.
Some handy individuals have modified their existing assemblies, but I don't have the time nor the tools, and it's not cost-effective to mess around in my case, as a replacement for my electrical unit will be under $300, dealer demo unit, with own installation. Just have to snag one on sale.
It's my experience that if you're living off-grid you're probably remote, and if you're remote and even not off-grid you have to do the DIY thing because you're not going to get trades to come out and do it for you.
Few plumbers or electricians are willing to make a 2-or-more-hours round trip on the road at any price. If you have an off-grid home you're not willing to maintain, you're going to spend a lot of time sitting alone in the cold and dark until nature finally recycles you.
The off grid part is almost orthogonal to the house part. There's plenty of companies making prefab or modular homes. An off grid home is just a conventional home with a different electricity supply. If you build a small, well insulated conventional building it's a perfect off grid candidate.
We currently live in a old watermill in Portugal - and as it flooded badly (over the roof) a bit over a year ago, we decided we needed a Plan B.
This came in the form of a prefab log cabin - that is to say, the lumber is all cut to shape and size, and you're "just" banging it together. "You" in this case being my wife and I.
Total for the structure was just under €20k - includes windows, doors, insulated walls, floor, ceiling.
Total for water is less than €1000 - IBCs for storage, a km of water line, carbon and sediment filters, UV-C reaction chamber, reverse osmosis.
Total for waste is about €200. IBC. Worms. Cheap plumbing supplies.
Total for power is about €15,000 - most of that cost is in a huge bank of OPzS batteries, and then theres victron gear, a dozen solar panels, a dinky wind turbine, and an experimental (failed) waterwheel. This covers both the mill and the cabin, which are about 600m apart.
So, all in all, it's an off-grid house for under €40k. That of course doesn't include labour, which has been about 1000 hours of our time, from digging and pouring column foundations through to transporting everything to site by aerial cableway - so in many cases it'd be much less, as you wouldn't be building on a 45 degree slope with zero access for machinery.
The thing I keep seeing people getting wrong is energy. Literally yesterday I talked someone out of buying used lithium ion cells from EVs, as while they were indeed very cheap, they likely only had a few years of life in them, so the price/kwH stored amortised over the lifetime of the batteries was terrible. Can't go wrong with lead acid OPzS - 20 year lifetime, easy to maintain - two years in and they've lost basically nothing in terms of their potential. For some reason you don't often see them in domestic installs - but they're super common for battery backups at hospitals, battery storage for renewables providers, etc.
Yeah - we had 10cm of rain in 36h, and the mill is on a, uh, dynamic mountain river. It surged from its normal winter level by seven meters - our car disappeared entirely - it's nowhere downstream of us that we've been able to see, so it's probably in the Douro. The drainage basin is pretty small, which means that the water level is heavily influenced by the weather in the immediate area - in summer, it dries to a trickle, in the winter, if there's intense rain on already saturated soil, it can surge pretty impressively.
This winter the worst we had was 3cm in 24h, and the river stayed a good meter below the level of the floor of the mill, so we now have a better understanding of what kind of weather conditions constitute a danger - the rain we had at the end of 2019 was the worst in 70 years or more.
The mill itself is ancient, and built out of enormous boulders, each weighing tens of tonnes, so the structure was entirely unscathed despite being battered to hell by both the force of the water and the debris that came down - everything from trees to trash to trailers. The roof got pretty badly torn up, so we've had a tarp over it for the last year, as we intend to take it off and put a storey on top this year anyway. Overall, while it was a crisis (we waded out in thigh deep water in torrential rain, and had to walk to the nearest village as our car was already gone, cats screaming in their bag... all a bit traumatic tbh), we've turned it into an opportunity - it spurred us into building the cabin, it's shown us what the river can do and what we should therefore plan for with our projects (for instance, I moved our entire battery bank a few meters further uphill), and the damage to the roof has encouraged us to think about building upwards. It's also shown us what we can bounce back from - lost a lot of posessions, and hosing down the house and everything in it was pretty miserable. Oh, and it happened a few days before Christmas!
The cabin is about 30 meters uphill, and about half a kilometer away, on an old agricultural terrace - nightmare doing the groundwork, and getting materials in, but it's so worth it - spring is just beginning here, and I'm sat in the unfinished structure right now, watching birds flit between the treetops at window level, listening to the stream chuckling in its bed - very different to the perennial roar of the weir at the mill.
It's a challenging lifestyle, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Being a watermill, it’s totally uninsurable - so the risk is entirely ours. The place had been on the market for years, as none of the interested buyers had been able to get a mortgage on it, for the same reason. Paid cash, got it for a song - 5ha of land, beautiful old buildings, streams, ancient olive groves and terraces and pools and channels, permission to build as many anythings as we want under 100m2, and all for less than a new midrange car in the U.K.
I did discover that you can totally immerse a lot of modern electronics in muddy water, and so long as you wash (urgh, heatsinks) and dry them thoroughly, they live on. Hard drives in the NAS lasted just long enough to get the data off them - NAS itself was fine. Getting silt out of microswitches is also a PITA. Thought the tv was trash, but after a few months, the water that had gotten inbetween the layers of the display dried out, and now you’d never know.
Our main losses were things like mattresses and bedding, the car, books, and a whole bunch of time - took days to hose the mud off the walls, inside and out, and we had about 10cm of silt to shovel out - it took until summer to dry out! The damage outside was also extensive - lots of clearing of debris and chainsawing of huge treetrunks balanced improbably all over the place - at least the flood delivered construction material for the tent platform, which became our home last year while we worked on clearing up the mill and groundwork for the cabin, and taming some of the utterly overgrown forest. This year, as the flood was much smaller, it delivered commensurately smaller wood - but all in all, enough firewood to keep us going until the nights are warm, and some awesome driftwood that’s becoming light fittings in the new cabin.
So far, spring is gorgeous - the valley really benefits from the floods, leaves the banks super fertile - it’s a strip of luminous green in a grey and brown surrounding.
Around 10 years ago, I did a bunch of research into battery banks for an off-grid solar installation. I looked at probably a dozen very different battery types (some of which were 'coming to market soon', boy were all those a dead end). The option that seemed to be the best choice overall was flooded lead acid, which surprised me.
It's very interesting that even after all the improvements in battery tech since then, this still appears to be the case. I wonder how much longer it will hold true?
Lithium's principle benefit is weight. For mobile applications (handheld devices, laptops, automobiles) that wins out.
Lead is at the other end of the periodic table. It's heavy and dense. But the batteries last and last and last, and are well-proven. The lead itself is recyclable,a nd is the most-recycled material by mass in the US IIRC (the USGS reports on this). About 40% of lead production is from recycled lead.
You can get Lifepo4 for roughly $100 per kWh of storage is you do a group buy on 272 ah cells. This is cheaper than lead and is a better chemistry from what I've seen.
I can't wait for some of the more stable, non-toxic chemistries run through redox flow batteries to become more marketable. For a shelter, I don't care how big the system is, and if all I have to replace is a pump (and I'm trying to figure out if I can use magneto-hydrodynamic pumps to even extend the life of that component) and what evaporates away, the lifespan of the battery is far longer than what we are used to. I'm also interested in nickel-iron chemistries getting hammered out.
We bought ours from an outfit in Estonia, as the baltic states are very experienced log structure builders, and the baltic pine forests give a good and consistent quality of wood. I looked at portuguese suppliers but the offerings were much more "shed" than cabin, and the thickest "logs" I could find here were 35mm - not so much a log as a plank. Our freight cost down from Estonia was about €4k - full lorry.
Ours is 70mm milled logs, fit together like tongue and groove. Generally really pleased with how it's come together, although I need to finish the roof, which got postponed by weeks of rain.
Only thing I'd say is that they can be tricky to get permission for in Portugal, but it really depends where you are. Where we are, in the north, where the fires aren't so bad, pretty much anything goes - I have a signed note from the local council saying "it's your land, you build what you like".
Only other thing is don't underestimate the labour. I naievly thought we'd have it up within a few weeks of the kit arriving, but it's been more like four months, and we're still not quite done. Oh, and don't build in winter :)
Shameless plug, I'm selling such wooden "sheds" (in Italy, but could ship EU-wide if required) with up to 45mm thick walls (mostly garden / leisure / party oriented though) on my website. I'm willing to give a little discount if any fellow HNers are interested (sorry, you'll have to use Google Translate - it's in Italian :)
In Thailand one can quite easily and cheaply buy wooden home “construction kits”. Of course those kinds of houses are often not insulated due to the hot climate in most of the country, most of the year.
Many of these “construction kits” can be seen and bought in a city somewhere on the highway between Chiang Mai and Bangkok (probably Phrae as this[0] company is located there as well).
Pretty sure the place you linked is high end and there are probably much cheaper options. The prices they're quoting for 100m^2 / 1100ft^2 houses is about $120k depending on the model. They look like very nice houses, but not cheap.
For comparison consider that I rent a 45m^2 1 bedroom furnished apartment on the 28th floor of a high rise in the heart of Bangkok for roughly $600/month. I could have a 90m^2 two bedroom in the same building for about $1,000/month.
As someone who lives in rural Georgia/almost Alabama...trends I see here are people having "barn houses" built for them or using some of the huge prefab outbuildings from Home Depot/Lowes dropped on a piece of property and starting with that. The "barn houses" I am talking about are current tech barns built with 2x6s and galvilum (galvanized aluminum) for roof and walls. Generally take out a barn/land loan and then have interior slab and subs come in and turn the interior into a home. A home permit would not allow such an inexpensive build and if tax assessors only come around every five years provides a significant savings...generally 10-15k over those first five years.
That’s the thing- it’s an idea of a house, rather than a house:
* how much does it cost?
* what’s included? What are the specs on the windows? What kind of toilet? What’s the flooring made from? What are the screws that hold on the bathroom mirror?
* how long is the warranty?
* where is it located?
Obviously these questions don’t apply to a spec house listed on an architect’s site.
But more generally you find when attempting to purchase an off-grid house or even a small/tiny house, that they leave as many question marks up to the buyer to DIY as possible.
I’m advocating for the reverse: sell me the cheap Xiaomi phone of houses: something mass-market, with sane trade-offs, and all the boxes checked in advance, including the parcel where it lives.
Go ahead and put a price tag on the whole package, builders. Customization = bad (for me).
If somebody else wants the modular custom-built PC of houses, that’s fine.
You want an off-grid builder-grade house like you’d buy in a suburb, it sounds like. Going to be a long time before that happens. The builder homes work (both price and reliability) because there’s hundreds of thousands of them virtually identical. Trades know exactly what to do, even affordable ones, because they’ve done it 1000 times before. That’s a mature industry producing a stable product.
Until there are thousands of these things and the kinks have been worked out you can’t have that. Every innovative architect home has one (or more) secret horror story/screwed up detail you haven’t heard about. When doing something new you need to bear the mental burden of making the house work, build yes but also maintenance which is also specialized and non-standard.
There will be a lot of customers learning this the hard way as the industry catches up with demand.
There are quite a few tiny complete off-grid houses available as prefabs. Larger ones tend to be custom, but if you want something that will fit on a flatbed truck, that's available prebuilt.
Off-grid power, water, and sewerage do require on-site work, and usually more land than the house alone uses.
It sounds like you're describing a traditional mobile home. That part is already "solved". The other stuff is site specific - well, septic, solar, etc. Perhaps there is a market for setting up sites, but the site development items are so unique to each site in an off-grid dispersed scenario. The actual house part is readily available though, full specs and all.
Woah. That looks like a mashup of container-based structures you'd walk through in Mass Effect games, with Kerbal Space Program - the way that oversized solar panel is just glued to the top of the structure.
That is to say, I love the design. But I suspect my wife wouldn't.
I can imagine these as a fantastic "lake house" or other club house like structure on a larger residential yard or no-structure investment property. These are super cool.
It's super-contrary to the spirit of this blog in particular. This is a quarter step away from renouncing barter of any kind. It's also kind of against the idea in the abstract too. "Off-grid," self sufficiency and DIY are pretty closely related.
None of that matters though, and you're right. Punk rock was DIY too. That doesn't mean music companies didn't eventually produce it like any other pop music.
There is a lot of ready made tech for off grid living these days.
E.g. you can buy an island capable solar+storage system from many vendors, not just Tesla. You can buy very efficient and clean log-powered heating systems. "Stückholzheizung" in german.
All the components are commercial off the shelf. So you only would need a prefab house contractor to combine these offerings into a good package.
Add in starlink, and you can indeed be completely off the grid, even including WIFI.
The biggest obstacle for off-grid living is legal. E.g. in Germany you can not opt out of grid connection charges, even if you do not use the grid.
This only goes to show how "off-grid" is a pipe-dream, especially for people who have no experience with it
Hey you truly want to live off-grid and off the land? There's plenty of farms like that in the US, other big countries, and I guess it's doable even in Spain or France for example.
Off-grid is not a choice in a lot of places, it's how things are. Closest "city" is 30min/1h by car. And by city I mean a gas station, a pharmacy and a grocery store and one main street.
Edit:
> I recommend the book How to Build and Furnish a Log Cabin ... that teaches old fashioned methods requiring inexpensive tools. No expensive chainsaws necessary.
Oh boy, if you think a chainsaw is expensive and/or not necessary I'm sure you're going to have a great time building your log cabin. /s
If you're trying to live off grid but has never managed a small backyard (some corn, a small orchard, raising chickens, etc) you don't know what you're signing off for.
A lot of people manage it. It’s honestly not that bad but you can’t be shy of doing the work. The pipe dream is people thinking it’ll be a turn key solution. “All I need to do is buy solar, drill a well, put in septic and build a house, how hard could that be?” It’s amazing how much you don’t know until you try it. My recommendation to anyone living in a city and looking to escape is to just buy a regular house in a rural area, no cabins, no farms, for sure not a yurt. Just buy a bungalow on a half acre and try it out, there’s going to be enough stuff to keep you busy. If you can take all of that in stride while improving the property and not be sick of it or bankrupt yourself then consider selling in a year or two and buying something a bit more daring.
Funny you should mention that. I’m currently in Tennessee buying land to build off grid housing in the middle of no where.
Plan on buying 60-150 acres, building a house off grid, adding starlink, then renting it until / when I’d like to move in.
We’d probably build 2-3 homes and rent out 1-2 and people can bring their families. They can learn to hunt, fish, take care of cattle, etc for a summer.
a lot of homesteading projects start by buying a RV or mobile home and park it on the land until you’ve built something. this solves the problem of throwing 50k in with your free land to get off the ground
What type of internet do you think would be best? Cell? Traditional satellite? Low orbit satellite? Long range wireless? Cable? DSL? Fiber? Actual wifi from a very nearby neighbor?
Not sure about the EU, but last time I was forced on LTE in home at the states, the plan I described above was the best in the US. That was 5ish years ago when I was living in the stix.
Cellular plans from the major US carriers change every couple months. Throw in all the resellers and you have new plans every week. Describing a cellular plan from 5 years ago is like talking about a 286.
I would say at least 1 TB minimum for a home data plan, imo. I've used that much in a month just on Steam games, and each member of a family drives that up very linearly. Any less and you start "rationing" out something fundamentally unlimited.
If you are going to spend hours playing online games / watching netflix then I can't imagine why you wouldn't just stay comfortable in the city or the suburbs. Living off grid you are going to spend a lot of your free time just living. If you've ever camped in a tent it's probably not dissimilar, by the time you've made breakfast and cleaned up afterwards its almost time to think about lunch, or at least it can feel that way.
If you don't have broadband, today, you pretty much have to make compromises. You don't play Steam games and you don't stream much video--probably get DirectTV. Cell is one option in many places. Satellite is another. Neither are great but that's sort of where you are until maybe Starlink arrives.
The last time I was forced on LTE at home in the states, the plan I described above was the best in the US. That was 5ish years ago when I was living in the stix.
Indeed. Last time I was forced on LTE in home at the states, the plan I described above was the best in the US. That was 5ish years ago when I was living in the stix.
I have a friend who is off-grid for everything except for the fiber to his house. He even has to haul his own water in as he doesn't have a well.
I only know people who tried hughesnet, none of them kept it. There are lots of mountains and trees here, so a WISP won't work. Distances are too great for DSL. Cell service (in this area) is lucky to be good enough to send a text.
With starlink this will be a lot easier. I think it comes down to fiber or starlink - and maybe a WISP if possible.
Things will presumably be better once Starlink or other next gen satellite systems are available. But the reality today in many rural areas is Hughesnet... or Hughesnet. None of the people I know who have it like it but it's the only choice some people have. So they just have to live with the data cost and performance and just not use Internet regularly for things like streaming video.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not. It sounds like whaty you are asking for is All the benefits, none of the costs, someone else that does all the work and you get it for a bargain. And nobody has offerred this yet is a mystery?
It sounds like your best bet is to buy a cookie-cutter in the suburbs and a generator.
I had this same thought. Someone who does not like DIY should not be thinking about living in an off grid cabin in the woods. Everything you do is diy, you can't just call in a contractor when your wellhead freezes or your wood shed collapses. Off grid living is hard-ass-work
> I love the idea of an off-grid house but it always comes with too much DIY.
Are you seriously complaining that homesteading is DIY? That's the point. You belong in SV, just buy a copy of stardew valley.
>I wish there were sellers with fixed affordable off-grid packages. (...) I realize this is contrary to the spirit.
You don't get it. It's going to break and if you've got the maintenance skills of a disillusioned tech worker, it's never going to be anything more than a money pit for you. Stay in whatever tech hub you're in.
I watched the first one, from somebody that has been actually living in a van.
A lot of the problems highlighted in those video are about (dumb?) people that expect to get free money in exchange of likes and things like that. Yeah you can live in a van or whatever, but do you really expect a misterious hand to give out money every month for you to go surfing and exploring the wilderness?
The youtubers that blog about working full time are a minority, of course, becasue they are mostly busy working (full time) and making a living.
If i was living in a van while having a full-time job and earning a proper salary, I'd probably be spending my time enjoying life more than informing strangers on the internet about my whereabouts. Yeah I might be posting updates from time to time, but the "algorithm" wouldn't pick me up that much.
It has to do with risk. You know what you're getting into, or if you don't, you're going to have to deal with all of your own customer complaints, confusion, dissatisfaction, &c. As soon as someone sells something to you, that stuff is their problem, and they need to charge a lot more for managing all the risk and expectations: documentation, customer service, insurance, lawyers to write contracts, lawyers to write letters...
Even in the German country side, sometimes water is coming from your own well for ages. Usually houses are connected to electricity, phone and maybe TV. Waste water tends to be on site as well. My uncle is living between two farms, next to my late grandparents house, and that always has been their set up.
Edit: Heating used to be oil, replaced by wood pallets. Heat pumps are a nice alternative as well.
Today we can generate electricity on site, which leaves phone an internet.
I've ridden the RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) three times. Each year, a different route brings you and 15,000 of your closest friends through small towns like Marne and Manilla. The chosen communities always enthusiastically rise to the occasion by providing food, water, beverages, entertainment, fun diversions, historical themes, hospitality, well wishes and much more.
Riding out of town after having a stack of pancakes at the firehouse or a piece of pie from the local Rotary Club, you have plenty of time to think about what it takes and how remarkable it is for some of those towns to accommodate everyone.
The RAGBRAI is a great way to experience the State of Iowa.
When I did it one year, we went through a town with an official population of 6. Everyone was out helping, and apparently from neighboring farms/towns.
Alaska discourages people coming to Alaska without preparation.[1] "You should have a round trip ticket and cash or credit card resources ($2,000 for temporary and $3,000 for permanent work) to live on while looking for work. Many who arrived short of cash encountered serious hardship and shattered dreams. Public assistance programs cannot be counted on by persons relocating to Alaska without adequate funds. Homesteading is not available now. The climate and unpredictable summer weather generally discourage camper or tent living for extended periods."
I think Chris knew these things deep down inside, but his affluent upbringing clouded reality.
The wealthy think there’s a safety net, even in the middle of nowhere.
They grow up with the Luxury of taking chances because that emphatic family, usually dad, bails them out. They can afford to take chances, and buck the system?
I have read Krakauer’s book a few time, and watched the movie a lot. And thought about Chris way too much.
I think Chris’s biggest mistake was not having a partner.
I know a few homeless individuals. The ones that didn’t lose their mind in a few months, or die; had a reliable partner.
Most of the time the partner was same sex. It was just someone to help, and bounce ideas off.
I’m interested in McCandless because I identified with him. I didn’t have the affluent background, but was unhappy after college. The last thing I wanted was to look at a screen, and hang around people whom were kinda dead inside.
I think Chris would be alive today if he partnered up.
I’m a complete loner, but the times I had true friends, I was so much more successful.
"Affluent upbringing" or in more plain terms "spoiled kid who always wants to do 'crazy' stuff because he knows dad will be there with the check-book/lawyer to bail him out". (Of course it's more complicated than that, but to the outside, that's what it looks like)
Well, you can't have your dad bail out a bear. You can't live off the land if you can't tell the difference between an orange and a grapefruit in a supermarket. (Edit: the 'theories of malnutrition' on his wiki page are a very good summary of theories, and a lot of things we take for granted in our day to day)
I don't see any point in glorifying people who died for doing something (obviously) stupid who had multiple chances to give up and absolutely zero sense of foresight.
I can see the appeal of living in nature, off-grid, but I see a few problems that are really hard to solve for such type of living:
1) healthcare access - you might be hours away from medical assistance. It's all nice and good until you need it.
2) social activity - it's nice to be by yourself, or with a few people, for a few months; but would you live like that for decades? Wouldn't you miss social interactions?
3) work - not everybody can be a software developer. What kind of work you could do if you are so far away from any community?
4) sense of community, sense of belonging - this is the hardest I think. Humans are social animals, there's no way around it. Some of us are perfectly fine living in a semi-isolated state; but at least for me, that would become a problem eventually. One thing that Covid has taught me is how important my social interactions are.
Edit: also on HN today you find "What Makes a Community? (2020)". Interesting read. [0]
I grew up in the absolute middle of nowhere in Africa (bus ride to school took 50 minutes one way), so I have some experience here.
1. Most things can be taken care of to a point where a lengthy journey to help is possible. In an extreme case you can get a helicopter in on the radio. Of course the US makes this challenging, because you have to pay for healthcare. That's a hurdle for sure.
2. People that live isolated lives choose it because it's isolated. I ended up in London but am still happiest on my own. Until I met my girlfriend my most meaningful relationship was with my dog. No guile there.
3. That's the point though, isn't it? Sustaining yourself and yours becomes your work.
4. Again not so hard. The people drawn to this life like the solitude. Sure they will find their way to a store or post office every now and then where they'll see enough people to remind them why they're out there and isolated.
Did you meet her in London, or did you meet her when you were a hermit? I'd guess the former. Another good reason why a large community provides certain things that living in quasi-isolation doesn't.
In any case, thanks for your thoughts; I value them, despite my comment above.
I completely agree. I'm a big city person myself. I like having access to culture, art, music festivals, restaurants, social events, economic opportunities, etc.
However, it can wear on you a lot. I would absolutely love to own an off-the-grid second home. That's very appealing to me.
But to live like a hermit out in the middle of nowhere full-time seems crazy to me in the long-term.
A lot of people in cities barely know their neighbors. Living rural you'll likely be part of a community where everyone knows everyone. I'm seven years in and going to town the other day took an extra hour just because I was chatting with people I ran into. In a city you are more anonymous.
I don't think it's that extreme. What do you mean exactly by shut out? You'll always be able to transact, put your kids in school and participate in society. A hard example - parents of a teenager that murdered an innocent child in a small nearby community still live there and still operate a business that services that town. I'm surprised by this.
I love reading these articles just for the fantasy material. Camping is one of my favorite hobbies but it’s generally car camping and not without some fairly straightforward luxuries (I’m probably not one to hunt and forage).
Still, it seems like it could be worth it to have some land that will be less affected by climate change in the future, especially if you have children you can leave it to.
The title of the link is a bit misleading. It might be better to say:
"Ways to get land in North America without paying" as it lists some techniques you can use: committing to building a house, taking care of a farm, or via squatters rights to obtain land in Canada and the US without needing to buy it.
As there are substantial non-monetary obligations attached (for example, the need to build a house), I wouldn't call this "giving away land". And as most of these programs have been in place for a long time - in some cases dating back to common law - I wouldn't frame it as news. Rather, it's another set of life hacking tips.
There's plenty of places in rural WA state where you can buy 20 acres for $20,000. In some really beautiful remote places. With starlink and much lower costs of photovoltaics, and better batteries in the past 3-4 years, a high tech life off grid isn't technically hard.
But I would budget at minimum an additional $50k for septic system, water well drilling and setup, and PV+wind+battery setup. Before you even start with the cost of laying a foundation for a house.
In a part of Europe I’m familiar with many families still have (often inherited) family cottages in the country that, in modern times, serve as summer houses.
Many still have hand dug wells and septic tanks. Composting outside toilets are not unknown and were normal within living memory.
Modern families often bring bottled water for drinking and brushing teeth. No matter that bottled water is expensive, it is massively cheaper than investing in a bored well etc.
So I have no idea about “code” and other aspects of the US system or WA in particular, but i would put the cost on working water and waste at about $100 if you are the kind of person cut out for living off grid remote self sufficient and don’t mind grabbing a spade while the rest of us hang out online :)
It’s fine to hand-dig a well when the water table is 2-3m below grade, but when it’s 20-30 or more, you really need to have it bored. That said - if you’re ok hauling in water, you don’t need either.
I did SERE school near Spokane during the early spring and it was already pretty miserable out in the woods. I literally can't imagine camping/living off-grid there during the winter lol. I think it would be hard mode personally, compared to a winter in like Arizona or something ;P
Camping and living are pretty different. Camping for a few days just requires the right gear and knowledge of using it. Living in a cabin, you'll probably want to have a wood stove that you keep fed and some warm blankets. Obviously (most parts of) Arizona in the winter are easier though water is a bigger problem there.
Pretty much what the other reply said: very damp and cold. Having lived in Spokane for a few years too the summers are also fairly brutal. That region has pretty extreme temperatures both ways.
From experience with the area, probably very wet, very little sun, and miserably chilly (not deathly cold, just the kind of ‘ughh this sucks’ wet-cold).
I lived in Buffalo for years and cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone move there. Crime is rampant. Police are the most racist I’ve ever experienced anywhere in the world (and I very, very rarely use that word). Oh, and yeah, it’s cold as shit in the winter.
While I don't doubt the police are racist, crime isn't actually that bad compared to other US cities. I live right outside of downtown and feel safe riding or walking almost anywhere in the city.
Winter is something to embrace like other cold weather cities - easier when you have snow then rain and mud like some warmer places. And in my opinion it makes the spring and summer all the more glorious.
Buffalo has had faced some hard times but the bleeding has stopped and past decade has seen the biggest improvements in years. It's legacy has left housing stock, infrastructure, architecture and culture that far outpaces other similar sized cities, at a similarly low cost.
Whenever I see a random example of an American describing their local police as really racist, from an outside-of-the-usa perspective I mentally translate this as "astonishingly, incredibly racist in ways that would make your jaw drop".
I thought as you did, but a friend in the U.K. tells me there are very racist racists there as well. I was saddened when he told me this — but having watched the U.K. a little closer over the past decade it comes as less of a surprise to me now.
I think the difference comes from the (seemingly, to someone who has never been to the USA) generally higher level of violence. Here in Germany, racism is usually (not always, there are several worse examples) just racial profiling.
You don't have to go that far, once outside of Buffalo things get really nice. Niagara Falls is a little sketchy but east of that it gets nice real quick.
At least for one of your factors anything north of the 40th parallel would be excluded (With a few coastal regions as exceptions). As a Canadian I’m offended.
I’m into nature, diy construction, being frugal and early retirement etc so I should be the target audience for this, but it doesn’t exactly sound great. I’ll take living in a house in a regular low COL area an direct my energy to something other than fighting off cold and scratching out a frontier life.
It's there in the saltwater electrolysis diagram on the right hand side, but probably worth calling out in big scary letters. Separating saltwater this way produces chlorine gas as a byproduct.
A number of towns in Kansas on the list. I've lived here for many years and I've only heard of one of them, and that's because they're giving away free lots or houses or something.
I'd be really careful about building the type of house described in the article in Kansas. Obviously places in Tornado Alley have that to worry about. Not every place is like that - we've had one tornado since 1966 - but there's nowhere in Kansas you can escape the heavy thunderstorms.
Spent half my life in Kansas, tornadoes never worried me. They're so ... focused. (Here I am in California and it's the earthquakes that freak me out, so widespread.)
You're correct about the thunderstorms though. Something I miss all the time.
Looking at so many places from Kansas reminded me of this video by a Geography nerd who went down census numbers from every state to try to explain patterns.
I once went to an almost deserted town in Kansas because my mom was tracking down some old family history in obscure graveyards. They had one restaurant in the half deserted town. The silverware was mismatched, the food was literally microwaved tater tots. It was quite the experience. I rarely remember restaurants I eat at, but that one left an impression.
> The silverware was mismatched, the food was literally microwaved tater tots. It was quite the experience.
This made me laugh. This is an extremely common situation, from dead zone rural all the way up to ordinary suburban and midsize city. And it's not hard to find in hopping metropolis San Francisco either.
Unrelated, but there used to be an ironic-downmarket diner in South of Market. It didn't last long, but (for a while) people packed the place to eat trays of frozen macaroni and cheese.
You could get a slightly better version of the same dish (but still distinctly microwaved) in a dozen places elsewhere around town, but people went to this place for the hipper decor and music, and to know that they were eating (and enjoying) the same food ironically, expensively, a few blocks from work, and just down the street from a wine bar where they have such creative ideas of how to infuse a vodka tonic!
I despair. In the UK land is so parcelled up, monopolised, and held for posterity that you need serious wealth to buy anything even low grade. And now that we've left the EU it's not like it's even possible to move elsewhere. I despair.
Adverse possession is probably not realistic for most people. iirc it kicks in after 20 years after you build something on that land or surround it with a fence, plus it would take years and hiring an attorney to get it through the court system.
So yes, it's technically free land, but after 25 years. I'm sure some states have slightly different rules about adverse possession though.
It’s single digits in some states, but all it takes to end up with nothing is for the owner to notice you and file eviction one day before the end of the period. Actively hiding from the owner also invalidates an adverse possession claim.
The main point of adverse possession isn’t squatters. It’s to give you or your descendants good title after a certain amount of time. There’s a bunch of reasons you can end up with imperfect title even if you think you validly bought or were gifted your property. Adverse possession clears up your title once enough time passes as long as you actually use the land and no one comes along and tries to assert their right.
It is reasonable if you understand the spirit of the law. It was not made to re-distribute land or property; but rather for land or property whose owners have "vanished" or have no more interest in that property (by even giving it away).
Actually the main reason is to limit claims of fraudulent transfer.
If adverse possession is 10 years in your state, you don't need to worry about the seller's grandchildren suing you claiming that you defrauded their ancestors when you bought your land from them. This also acts as a backstop for title insurance: title insurers are essentially off the hook for policies older than the adverse possession time.
The main goal of adverse possession has always been to protect people who bought the land from ancient+stale claims that they bought it through fraud or bought it from somebody who wrongfully claimed they owned it. Otherwise you'd have to keep documentation and proof for all eternity. At some point it has to be okay to no longer have evidence and documentation beyond what's in the public record. Torrens title systems don't change this: the point is to prevent egregiously stale claims of fraud. Fraud is the explicit exceptions to Torrens indefeasibility.
The much-publicized "squatters got free land" phenomenon is just a side effect.
A guy built a castle, and hid it for four years behind straw bales - on the basis that if nobody complained for four years he'd be able to keep it. It didn't work out that way, and he had to demolish it:
I grew up near two villages listed in the article (Pipestone and Scarth, Manitoba).
Definitely low population but growing up there I never felt I was missing out. Spent lots of time outside adventuring around. I still sometimes miss how dark and quiet notes out there were.
Interesting threads here got me thinking about the fact that “off grid” is clearly not synonymous with “not being on the internet”. There’s like “the grid” and then “The Grid”. I wonder how many people would argue that being truly off grid means exactly that - no mains water, electricity, but also no internet. I don’t know enough about these sorts of communities to hazard a guess.
Plot twist, many of the people dreaming of an off grid lifestyle really just need to get away from the stress caused by being on line 24/7 and wouldn’t find any reprieve by moving to the woods while continuing to be jacked in.
We spent a couple of years living in the middle of nowhere in a corrugated iron shack - it had electricity, borehole water, etc - but REALLY slow internet. It was wonderful.
"We Are As Gods" is a book about the back-to-the-land movement in the 70s. Easy and interesting reading. It will make you appreciate your urban life really quickly!
I’m a middle roader. We need both simplicity and complexity. I wouldn’t want to completely cut my internet connection but it’s more conducive to my productivity to confine it to a single room or device.
I appreciate my current life in a rural setting more than I ever did living in large cities.
I read off grid in general as being off terrestrial utility connections of any sort. So (maybe cell), satellite TV, and satellite Internet. But no power grid, water, sewage, or wired broadband.
I like the general idea very much. unfortunately in Germany where I like it is almost impossible to achieve. outside of city limits it is forbidden to build a house, even if the property is yours and inside city limits and a permit and that one you can not get with off grid concepts. connection to the road, electricity, water and waste water is mandatory. even people who produce zero waste MUST pay for waste collection. saw an article once where a family planted a tree in the waste bin. Still had to pay for having it not collected.
Construction permission is different from state to state. At least in Bavaria, water and waste water can be independent from the grid. Electricity is funny, because off grid is allowed, you still seem to have to pay taxes and grid fees (I could be wrong here, never dug to deep here). Having a road, yeah, you want to get to your house, don't you?
Cabins and such need a permit, or have to grandfathered. There is even a way to treat them as a "non-permanent" building.
That sounds quite harsh. It generally fits with the idea that “Europe is a museum, the US is a factory”. You aren’t allowed to mess up the museum, you’re just supposed to appreciate it. However I can’t imagine that Germany doesn’t allow cabins, lake houses, weekend homes etc anywhere?
For cabins, the property has to be zoned as a recreational space. On agricultural land the structure you build has to be with an agricultural purpose and you can only apply for such a building permit when you are a registered farmer.
Pretty much everything is regulated in Germany which sucks at times, but also this is the reason why things work quite well even though we are densely populated.
You also pay for the waste you probably produce, gypsum/metal, not the waste pickup specifically. I pay waste fee on three properties, it's ok I guess if those services weren't around it would be harder to take care of my waste.
Took a look at the New Richland Montana one - they are charging you 25,000 for the cost of putting in roads and such. So A: not off grid. and B: not free. Not sure how well researched the article is.
The time it takes to aquire this knowledge is underestimated too. Sure it's all in books and on YouTube but it's knowing which advice to use in a particular circumstance and the devil is in the details. Much like software development in these respects.
Even without living off the grid. What's it's like living in this places in the US? I'm looking at New Richmond Minnesota that's mentioned on the blog and there are only 1,200 people living there.
I wonder if you can live there as a single in your 30's as someone who grow up in a small country where all cities and major places are just very close by.
You are a 30-45 min drive away from a city with a hospital, movie theater, full size grocery store with cheaper prices etc. Most people will drive to a bigger city 1-4+ times a month
Even the poorest people around me have their own transportation. It’s often old, constantly breaking, and inefficient but it’s an absolute requirement in even a semi-rural area.
I live in northern Arkansas, in a town of <15k people. It’s the county seat and the largest town nearby, but I grew up in an even smaller town nearby (current population 271).
I’m happy to discuss this sort of thing in further detail if anyone is interested.
Some thoughts:
I think it’s going to be foremost on the minds of a lot of HNers, but race/ethnicity isn’t as big a consideration as it might appear from the outside. If you look like the people here it’s going to be a bit easier to assimilate, but I would strongly argue that this is more of a visible marker of someone being an “outsider” than something based on race. In fact, if you’re white, your accent, mannerisms, and perspective on the world will be a bigger deal. For example - pretty much no one here is going to care if you’re a man who prefers the company of men, but if you walk into town with bright green hair, covered in rainbows, and have a giant Biden sticker on the back of your car you’re not going to be well received.
What’s more, it seems to me - again, from the outside - that people who appear obviously “foreign” have a slightly easier time fitting in. Yes, there’s the initial “you’re not from around here, are ya?”, but your differences also make you memorable. Treat others with kindness and kindness will be returned, and your external differences will mean that people remember you. Note that my perspective on this is shaped by my knowing and having spoken with people who have moved in to the area: mostly of Hispanic ethnicity, which is increasingly common, but also a family from Iraq that moved here as part of a compensatory relocation program after the father had served several years as an interpreter for the US Army in Iraq.
The biggest consideration in my mind is that you have to make an effort to understand and assimilate to the local culture.
People here wave if we recognize each other, including people you only sorta/kinda know. I live in a small subdivision and know the vehicles that belong here; if I see them coming in and out of the neighborhood I wave. If I see them driving around town, I wave. None of this means I know their names.
If you see someone who needs help and you’re able to offer it, do so. If the guy across the street from me is working on his house and I see him sawing a board with a hand saw in his driveway, I go out and offer to let him use my power tools. I don’t stand around and wait for him to return them, either, I trust that he’ll put them in the (unlocked) storage area on the side of my home or in the front seat of my (also unlocked) Jeep when he’s done. If I’m trimming trees in my yard with a hatchet, someone is almost certainly going to stop and offer to let me use their chainsaw. If you’re borrowing a tool and it breaks, you fix or replace it. If you can’t afford to do so, you politely refuse the offer.
If you have adjoining neighbors, you stop and chat with them when you see them outside. Sometimes that’s “Hey! How are ya? Good, good - I have to run, I’ll talk to you later.” Sometimes that’s a half hour of listening to their complaining about politics. Whatever. You don’t have to agree, you just have to listen. Social accommodations like this are the lubrication required for our society to operate.
Do all you can not to have disagreements with your neighbors - that’s never a good time, but it’s particularly bad when you’re far from others. It’s better to implicitly agree to mostly ignore each other than to be at odds. If you go that route, you still treat them like you’re good friends in the situations where you do have to interact.
In short, your goal should be “I’m one of ‘us’ now”. Thinking in terms of “us” and “these people” is counterproductive.
Social stuff aside, living outside a city is different from a practical perspective as well. I’ve heard it said that “One hundred years in the US in a long time; one hundred miles in Europe is a long distance.”
The nearest town to me that I would consider a small city is Springfield, MO. It’s 75 mi / 125 km away. That seems like a long way, but it’s about an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive - basically like driving to the other side of a large city. My town has a half dozen grocery stores, but they’re very class specific: poor people and the elderly tend to go to the old Harp’s downtown and Cash Saver; middle class people go to one of the new Harps’ outside of town; upper class people and the elderly go to Hudson’s. Everyone goes to Walmart. We have everything in town that you need day-to-day, and we drive to neighboring cities when we want to “go shopping”. For clothes I usually end up in Branson, MO and for electronics and big-ticket items I’ll either buy online or go to Springfield, MO.
If you live in an outlying community (like New Richmond), you quickly learn to make your trips “into town” count for a bit more. You’ll find you’re not going to the grocery store nearly as often, buying more when you’re there, and will sometimes swing by and pick up a couple of stopgap things that sit on your mental list when you happen to be nearby for other reasons. In a smaller town like that there is usually a gas station or something that also serves as a “general store” and has essentials. They’re more expensive there, but cheaper and faster than driving into town. If you’re even further out, you learn to buy more than you need of everything and do without some things that you used to think were essential. The idea of going through a drive through for a cup of Starbucks every morning is pretty laughable to me, even living in a town where there are a couple of coffee shops. When I lived in a truly rural area, it was something that I considered a rare luxury for when I was traveling.
... this has grown to be a much larger comment than I was expecting. I’ll stop here and go do something productive. If I can offer any insights or answer questions, let me know. I’ll check back :)
Yea, as someone who grew up in a similarly rural area (45 minutes drive to the nearest small city), the above description is really accurate. I think one of the biggest misconception about people who like to live in these sparsely populated rural places is that they're anti-social hermits. Quite the opposite. You kind of have to know everyone around because that's it--that's your entire support network if something goes wrong.
Hilarious. I’m good friends with some one from Springfield who does not want to live in middle America. She has made Springfield sound like a completely different place. Looking at some online maps, it is indeed a typical suburban city.
My wife grew up in Springfield, until she was 14. She sees it with entirely different eyes as well.
I can completely understand how someone who wants to live an urban life would be unhappy with Springfield. From that perspective it’s kinda the worst of both world - too urban to have the benefits of a small town, but too small to have most of the benefits of living in a city.
That said, you should tell her that some random guy on the Internet said she’ll miss “real” cashew chicken if she moves away. If you don’t have the context, she’ll know exactly what I mean. :)
I've tried this a couple of times: move to the woods with some like-minded people and start a little Permaculture village. All the physical stuff really works: composting, rocket stoves, etc.
In my experience the problems are always people. ("Hell is other people." ~Voltaire or somebody.) Drug and alcohol abuse or just plain crazy can bust up a venture.
I did meet a group of people who were living very very well in a communal village. They did things like holding hands in a big circle and singing grace before meals. They are probably among the happiest and most fulfilled folks I've ever met.
- - - -
One thing I would add to the list: Aircrete dome houses. Cheap, easy, fast, beautiful, durable (fire- and earthquake-proof.) Start at https://www.domegaia.com/ for a group that teaches how and developed a backyard-scale foamer. There are lots of DIY videos and information out there too.
I think it will be interesting the day that a local community bans central banks/fractional reserve banking and starts to sell houses in Bitcoin/Gold. People will be able to afford houses in cash without going into life time debt.
People will be able to remote work due to internet technology, local work hubs will appear where you can have social interactions.
>People will be able to afford houses in cash without going into life time debt.
Well, sure, if the only people buying houses are the ones who can afford them without getting loans, you could technically describe it that way. But perhaps you could explain a bit further how hard currency / ban on fractional reserve would make housing affordable?
Agree such a system would make it harder for people who cannot afford to save for a house to buy it.
I speculate that house prices has increased mainly due to credit expansion. If you limit credit expansion by using hard currency house prices would be more stable over time like hard assets.
-> I speculate that house prices has increased mainly due to credit expansion.
This is probably true, but not everywhere. There are still many places where the cost to build a replacement home (cost of labor and materials) is higher than the price of an existing house+land. Some societies try to solve this problem by forcing people to move.
Remote work is becoming more of a possibility for many workers without a doubt, but there are still huge numbers of jobs which literally cannot be moved online.
This article gives a decent description of the 'how', but I'm more curious about the 'why'. Yes, it is possible to avoid paying money for land, food, housing, water, sewer, etc. Considered on a basis of how many hours you have to work for a given standard of living, however, it's not very attractive.
Living off the grid doesn't mean never interfacing with it. If you have a home with a well and solar panels and satellite internet (or you go to town to use wifi at the library), you can still write your blog.
I’m moderately “off-grid” because I have a septic tank even though I have a city sewer connection at my curbside. The sewer was run after my home was built, and it doesn’t make sense for me to dig up my front yard (to run the new line), my back yard (to remove the septic tank and drain field), and my crawlspace (to reverse the direction of the plumbing) just so I can pay money every month to the city for a service that I’m currently providing for myself without a recurring fee. I’m in a neighborhood though so I’m connected to city water, electric, gas, and trash.
My previous home in this area has electrical service only. We had a septic tank for sewer and took care of everything else ourselves.
There were three homes in a “bunch” in the middle of nowhere, with a small plot of land that was technically owned by one of my neighbors but served as a community resource. That plot had a small pump house for the shared well, with electrical service from the neighbor’s place. On that same lot I kept a semi-enclosed utility trailer where we would all put our trash. Twice a month or so I would hook on to the trailer and haul it to the dump (a half hour drive) on my way to work and put the trailer back when I got home.
Every month or so we’d all sit down for coffee and bring our receipts. We’d figure up how much water, trash, and internet had cost us that month, split it proportionately, account for any expenses, and make everyone whole. Because I took care of the trash and was both young handy enough to be the one who did repairs on the well when necessary, it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk away with a few dollars in my pocket. It was like our own informal HOA out in the sticks :)
Yea, I guess that works. Not sure of what the canonical definition of living off the grid is, but I always pictured it as complete isolation and separation from all grids, not just power. But seems like that might not be right.
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I wish there were sellers with fixed affordable off-grid packages.
You get House A on Plot A for $50,000
You own the house and the plot. It is fully off-grid (except WiFi) and we made smart decisions and installed reliable systems.
You pay your money and you maintain the house.
Unfortunately it’s never like that. It’s all DIY:
Come camp with us for 4 weeks without a hot shower while we teach you how to mix AirCrete and sell you a pump. Get 4 friends and spend 4 months slathering cob incorrectly together. Never cut down a tree before? Buy a chainsaw and start stacking 1-ton logs- you’ll be perfectly safe: nobody has blogged yet about having crushed themselves.
I realize this is contrary to the spirit.
I just want a convention-over-configuration small off-grid house that I can see in models, read specs for, and purchase outright, including the land it’s sitting on.