For those of you truly wanting to live off grid

We have a micro hydro electric system, called a Harris wheel. We use an Outback invertor, an array of batteries and when we moved to our place we took money out of savings to buy a Sun Frost Refridgerator which is hardwired into the system. There are no land line phones that reach our place and we use a satilite internet connection which is a lot like using the old fashion dial up. Log on, wait, make some tea or do a chore come back and then try not to get booted off by the system. We use Wildblue which has had its ups and downs over the last seven years. We are unable to use skype due to the poor quality of the speed of our satilite system. We do not live on a piece of property with a clear exposure the southern sky so that precludes us from wasting money on a supposedly faster rate at double the cost. I can text my husband from my workplace to let him know if I am unable to make it home due to snow or rock slides on the highway. If I can find some photos of the hydro system I will add them later. We get our water from up the mountain via a spring we have forest service permit for.

Our little house was totally a wreck when we first bought our place. My husband has spent a lot of years upgrading the place. I am so thankful for a skilled carpenter for a husband. : )

We have finally put in the garden, after my husband built a fence system that withstand the elk and bears.

Bears love compost and any fertilzers so we have learned the hard way how to keep them out of the bears reach.

We have enough power to run our lights, refridgerator and we can run our coffee machine and toaster if other energy sucking appliances are off.

For TV we have the Okie model. A glass faced wood stove. We have a propane stove and dryer. But we don't use the dryer much, mostly we use drying racks. For heavy drying for items such as area rugs we take them to town to dry if needed. Which happens about once a year.

The hardest part of living off the grid is being ready for wild land fires. My husband has a fire pump, hand tools, and a sprinkler system for on the roof and under the eaves.

Yes, living off the grid takes time, money and know how. We are blessed to live in a part of California with a lot of experienced back to the land type folks who have mentored us in how to set up our system.

As we have aged we realized how much we cannot stand excessive heat and our power system is able to support a small swamp cooler. It was a bear to get it up to the second story and attached to the wall.

We also got a solar charged attic fan which cools the attic crawl space very well.

 

Welcome to the true off grid club. Speaking of wild blue, I too have been on it for years now,..... until just last week. I have a complete system for sale if you know anyone interested. Great condition. As far as drying your clothes, have you ever considered a propane dryer ? Fairly cheap elec. wise to run and you can get the 25gal bottles at lowes for cheap. They are still manageable to an extent anyway. If that is your house, it looks great from here. Take care and Thank-you Nadja

 

We do have a propane dryer.

I just hate to use up the propane for drying clothes when I have my drying racks.

We got the racks when I worked for Fish and Game as a Creel Census worker and needed to dry out my gear each night.

The house was very, very trashed when we bought the place.

It had only two walls that were covered in wood slabs, the rest was roofing paper and plastic covering the windows.

Dear husband spent two weeks and about fifteen truck and trailer loads of garbage to the dump.

The renters had a mini grow happening and had lots of commod food bags that were full of rat crap and such.

Ghost wore a full on haz mat suit to clean out all the rat debris due to the hanta virus being in our area at the time.

He slept in a tent in the structure to deal with the mice and bats at night.
As we have aged we have gone soft.

Finally have a great septic system in and a grey water system for the shower and sink.

We finally invested in a rented 300 gallon propane tank.
Ghost is getting too old to be hauling the 80 lb tanks we had used.

He has totally closed in the house, rebuilt the roof, done the plumbing and electrical and insulated and drywalled the place.
It is small, cosy and very nice to live in.

The only drag is the very long commute I make to work.

I have loved not driving anywhere for the last six days of winter vacation.

You could not pay me to travel to anywhere else for my vacation.

As in other areas of our great country, when you live in the sticks/boondocks/bush, you make your shopping list when you go to town and if for some reason you forget something, then oh well... and make do.

It is not as isolated as living in rural Alaska or the high plains, but it is still a far drive to the coast or up to Oregon for the major shopping.

I applied for a job up in Alaska teaching in a bush village. While in Anchorage I checked out how expensive it was to fly in supplies and was impressed with the well set up system of totes and such for supplies via mail/ups.

We decided not to take on the job due to my Dad being ill and the lack of ease in getting him to medical care.

The rock/landslides here abouts can be a real drag for my commute.

I hate getting stuck on the wrong side of the slide.

Locally we have an air ambulance service which is great when they can actually fly in or helicopter in for critically ill patients. I had to take a very expensive land based ambulance ride one year from work and that was way too costly for us. Now we pay $60 a year for the back up plan.

During the 1964 floods our area was isolated for two months.

Red Cross and OES deems are area as pockets of humanity. Which means we cannot expect help in any fashion for a long while. In some ways that can be lifethreatening and in other ways in may actually end up being a good thing.

There are way too many pot farms and meth labs in this neck of the woods.

Another negative is that this area is close to urban areas where weekend warriors/hunters are familair with our region.

So dealing with survivalist wannabe type folks might be a problem.

Most of the locals have been here a long while and know the ins and outs of living here.

When we first bought our piece we could not live on it.

We dealt with theft and vandalism.

Living here full time has been the key to building relationships with our close neighbors and being able to learn who we can count on and who we cannot count on if push comes to shove.

 

Morning and Merry Christmas. Sounds like you folks really have it together for sure. Just one question for you though , who has to go outside and shovel on really bad snow days ? LOL Keep up the good work. Nadja

 

W e are looking at the Sun frost products right now. Monday Ill be calling them for price quotes. Siskiyoumom, Our place was wreck too so I share your pain.Kingfish

 

How loud is it? I have the perfect setup for hydro and the price looks appealing..

 

Makes perfect sense.. likely it will be low flow, high head. It's an old cut into the hillside aquifer made in the 1960s when they did logging roads on our 300 foot (above the HWY) ridge line. They only took the old growth giants and it is still heavily forested. I have found 14 foot diameter Western Red Cedar stumps on our land from that. Worst case is several gallons per minute with 250 feet of head. Maybe we can dig into the hill further and get a higher GPM, not sure yet. I'm currently thinking even a 60 gallon plastic water barrel would work as the head source, right at the spring source. Just dig a nice hole alongside the spring and channel much of the water to it, then the overflow can be redirected right back into the stream. The generator would be about 400 feet from the home. My main concern is not attracting attention (with sound) from the road, below

 

Thanks.. I will calculate the final output in the worst conditions (late summer/early fall after we do some digging) and since plastic water line is so cheap, might as well go for maximum head w/250 foot drop

I don't think a large housing is needed.. just enough to protect the generator/impeller unit from weather.. lower profile is better. It's pretty dry earth wise near the stream, some cinder blocks set on driven in rebar will raise it just fine

I figure that most of the year there will be some over flow from the barrel into the tiny but steep stream, and that will just overflow into the stream from the barrel, at the top. Deer and other critters use it, so it's a good thing to keep, as much as possible

 

I hope so.. again, I need to find out what the actual DBs will be, every hydro install I have heard is VERY loud and that is the last thing I need