I live off grid. We started with a stone hut in a deep valley without cell signal, and no infrastructure, and now we’ve all the power we can use, all the water we can use, and 140Mb/s internet.
The whole “oh, we only need 3L of water per day and 500Wh is enough” lifestyle is unsustainable. I know, I’ve tried it, and I’ve seen many others go through it - you go gently mad spending your days managing your limited resources, and eventually give up.
Power: we’ve 4.8kW of solar panels, a hydro generator that makes a continuous 280W through the winter months, and three small 150W nominal wind turbines, which also help in the winter. Storage is 84kWh of OPzS lead acid cells. 2x 5kW Victron multiplus for triple phase output, and their MPPTs for the various inputs. I also laid 500m of 18mm2 SWA cable from our powerhouse to the cabin we built, so we can have power here too. Stuck a 1:2 transformer at each end to get more carrying capacity.
Water: there are a number of muddy, sulphurous seeps in the side of the valley. In the winter there’s water, in the summer, mud. Laid tubing with simple pre filters on the intakes down to a chain of IBCs 70m above the valley floor - 50 micron, 10 micron, 1 micron, carbon, then store in the IBCs. At each house (there’s both the mill and the cabin) I then re filter through a 1 micron sediment filter and a carbon block, as algae tend to grow in the tanks. For drinking, we have a simple reverse osmosis setup along with a UV block under each kitchen sink. As our fallback, basically for august when the river runs dry and the mud turns to dust, we’ve a submersible pump next to the hydro intake, which is a low spot in the bedrock and holds a pool of increasingly stagnant water in the summer. Still, our water treatment system makes it perfectly good for everything.
Hot water, I took inspiration from someone on here, and built a pair of big damn heat exchangers - excess heat from stoves in winter, or from power in summer, gets dumped into 4000L of water in a heavily insulated bunker. I aim to keep it at 85C, as above that I risk melting things. There’s then 200m of coiled tubing in each bunker, through which flows the high pressure cold water (7bar), which comes out somewhere around 40-60C, depending on the season
Sewerage, we are using above ground vermi composting tanks built from IBCs (IBCs are dead handy, very cheap used) - works a charm, no smells or anything. Grey water just goes to a soakaway.
Internet: I’ve talked about this here before. Solar powered mast atop the valley with an atheros w/ openwrt, LTE with an LPDA antenna as our nearest cell mast is line of sight from there but 20km away, Wi-Fi relay using yagis to each point of consumption, and then APs dotted around so we have coverage over our few sq km.
Heat in both houses is from a log stove. We’ve 11ha of forest, which we are clearing the dead but still standing trees (ash, oak) from, both for the sake of the forest and for the sake of us not freezing in the winter. We’re insulated up to the gunwales in the cabin, and the mill has a huge thermal mass.
We have a dishwasher, a washing machine, home theatre with surround (and oh boy you can crank it when your nearest neighbour is 20km away), all the modern conveniences. Sure, it all had to be carried in by hand or on the aerial cableway, as the one thing we don’t have is road access, but I’m one who’s strongly in favour of “effort now, easy later”.
What else… I use an rpi running openhab to monitor and control everything, from power production and consumption to water levels and quality, to the weather. I can’t control the weather, to be clear.
Other things… our chainsaws are battery powered (makita’s 36V stuff packs an amazing punch, and no two-stroke screaming in your ear), as are our brushcutters, polesaws, everything. Only thing that uses fossils is the truck, and that will change.
This year I’m planning on more infrastructure - probably a small monorail, as I’ve got bored of injuring myself carrying stuff up 45 degree inclines, and a large pond up the hill, for water storage, and possibly hydro, possibly pumped. I’m also thinking about building myself a proper workshop, as at the moment I just drag equipment around the forest and cover it with tarps for the weather, which is also getting boring! Oh, and I’ve grand plans to turn our ‘88 hilux into a strange beast - remove the elderly million mile diesel, add hub motors and as many batteries as I can cram into the engine bay and under the flatbed. That’s the main thing making me want a workshop.
So, anyway - my point is sustainability. I’ve invested significant time and resources here over the last two years so that our life here is a sustainable one - ecologically, sure, but also for us - it’s enough work just being here - I don’t want to have to always be worrying about resource management too, and I want to be able to still live here when I’m a feeble old dodger.
Thanks for sharing, great story! I like that you touch on living there when you get old, a lot of the younger off-griders don't seem to have a clear plan for that, or are not talking about it.
I'm curious if you have thoughts on how you can deal with the inevitable medical issues as you get older:
- medical emergency, needing an ambulance right away
- a serious medical issue that needs frequent hospital appointments, say kidney dialysis or chemo
- more common stuff like needing a cane to walk, or no longer being able to climb a mast to fix your internet
In short? Children, and making stuff as resilient as possible.
Re: medical emergency, we’ve already had a few of those - it’s a 30 minute drive to the nearest emergency room/hospital, and we keep a well-stocked first aid cabinet that can cater for most trauma, and have stuff like a defibrillator, tourniquets, epinephrine in it, as you never know when I’m going to stick a pitchfork through a power line or fall off a roof, or stick an axe through my hand (that was the first emergency) or when my wife is going to get swarmed by hornets again (we discovered last year that she has a severe allergy).
I’m also putting some stead in the idea of EVTOL being a normal and affordable thing by the time I’m in my dotage, which will make our current inaccessibility moot.
Oh man, this is a great writeup! I really like your practical approach instead of a proof of concept that most off grid endeavors try to be. Do you maybe have a blog or pictures of your setup?
Nope - I’ve been in full time gulag mode since we got here in 2019, and while I’ve been intending to document this stuff, mostly so my wife can also run it if I fall off a roof or get crushed by a tree, it’s not my top priority - as and when I do, though, I’ll be sure to share it on HN - it’ll likely be a wiki rather than an episodic thing, part how-to, part instruction manual, part madcap adventure.
I’ve always had the attitude of go big or go home - half measures usually result in pain and expense down the road, and I’m not shy about buying good gear rather than inventing it myself. All of this, from land to the cabin to the infrastructure, has cost just shy of €100k, which in my view is pretty affordable for “never pay a utility bill again”. The cabin and the hydro turbine were the two big ticket items, at €25k and €15k respectively. Sure, I have expenses like filter cartridges, spares for repairs, but it doesn’t amount to all that much.
That sounds like a reasonable amount of money. Hell, you can't even buy a modest flat for that kind of money in most of EU major cities. Do you have reading recommendations for anyone that is interested in building such a robust off grid system? Oh, you talked mostly about energy and water, but what about food?
We had an abandoned olive grove as part of the land - it's superb soil, as the river floods it every second winter or so, so we've interplanted with various fruit trees (it'll be a good 5+ years before they start to give a reasonable yield), and have set up half a dozen hugelkultur beds, which we irrigate with buried drip hose. Using some very simple little soil humidity monitors (arduino, LoRa, dinky battery) to trigger the valves for the irrigation. Same architecture as I'm using for all the remote sensing - tank level monitors, river level monitors, insolation monitors. Last year was our first attempt, and it didn't go too badly, but learned plenty, about what crops do well where. Hopefully this year will give us a better yield and more than one harvest - we started late last year, and the summer heat here is way too intense for much of what we planted up.
So, we're nowhere near self-sufficient for food, but we did manage about 100kg of dried beans, and made a mountain of marmalade from the quinces that grow wild all over. I guess food is one where it's more about being able to be self sufficient if we had to be, but it's not so critical - we've a big chest freezer, which is currently mostly full of boar (we let the hunt association hunt on our land, in exchange for a cut of their proceeds - and we've no shortage of boar - we had huge sounders working their way up the riverbed every night last year) and I go out to provision every few weeks.
Reading recommendations... not really - I've spend hundreds of hours watching other off-gridders on youtube, taking note of what works and what doesn't, and then for each element I've just researched and researched until I've reached what seems like a sensible solution. Batteries, for instance, I put together a spreadsheet to figure out what gave the best TCO over a 20 year period - and unsurprisingly ended up with the same solution as grid scale solar operators use - OPzS cells. Power kit, Victron is king, unquestionably - their stuff is great, hackable, reliable, easy to install and use. The battery sheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1Qh... - you'll note it's purely lead acid, as other chemistries compared so unfavourably on TCO that I just ejected them from the equation. People talk about lifepo and Lithium and nimh and what have you, and if you go for a really small capacity then the equation can be favourable, but for any capacity over about 40kWh lead becomes much more economical.
This, for instance, is what we followed for our vermi composting systems - http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/design-construction/ - but I haven't found any site or resource that is reliably useful across all aspects - someone will know what they're talking about with power, but will be dead wrong about water, and someone else will know water, but will have a laughable power setup... so swings and roundabouts.
Mostly, the solutions have been led by problems, and then a search for a way to solve that problem. We've ended up with a few less-than-optimal waystations (year one we used butane for hot water, had to run a generator in the winter, froze our asses off in the mill, flooded up to the roofline and had to run for our lives), but bit by bit we've optimised and optimised. I'm sure I've got gotchas I've yet to consider or encounter, but that makes it interesting, and I can't help but love the process of continuous improvement.
I'd also be fascinated to read some of your wiki once you publish it.
In the interim, I'm very curious on two specific things.
The LoRa / arduino controlled irrigation valves - it sounds like you're doing exclusively gravity fed, and this has been a stumbling block for me. Mechanical ball valves are not too expensive, but appear to fail way too often, and in non-safe ways, to rely on. Both non-latching and latching solenoids seem to want more pressure than I can muster (perhaps 10 metres static head).
What are you doing, and would you recommend it?
Second - fruit fly control for quinces and other orchard plants?
Ball valves for us - I’ve used off-the-shelf agricultural valves and a little wooden mount (for now - want to replace them with something more robust) with a solenoid and rod to open and shut them. Means I can also just do it manually if I want to. So far, so good, and if something fails open, I’ve an alarm set in openhab if there’s an unexpected delta in tank levels. Hasn’t happened yet, and losing all of our water isn’t too big a deal in winter - that’s happened a few times due to burst pipes, as it’s brutally cold here at the moment, and I haven’t buried everything yet - hundreds of meters over inhospitable terrain. We’re at 7 bar - 70 meters - so when something goes, oh boy does it go.
Fruit fly control - nothing. We’ve enough that we can share with the bugs and the birds, although fruit flies don’t seem to be a problem for us, as I think they’re getting parasitised by native ophid wasps. We also don’t have too many of the same type of tree near each other, which likely also helps inhibit pest spread.
Thanks for that. I need to brush up on how to get solar + battery units attached to a nylon ball valve, with lora,to do something like this. We get to -5 periodically through winter, so not as problematic as you have to design for.
We're 250km north west of Sydney, AU - so otherwise probably comparable climate.
Any chance you are located in Spain? If so, do you have any advice or recommended resource related to finding and buying rural property in Spain? And even if you are not in Spain, it would be interesting to read something about how you ended up in a place like this, if you are willing to share.
Portugal, right up in the northeastern corner. We ended up here after doing a few laps of the globe considering different low cost of living countries in which to reside, and with regards Portugal specifically, after looking at Centro and the south and deciding it was already heaving with off-gridders and had commensurately rising prices, we went to the part of the map where there’s supposedly nothing, and no property for sale, and drove around asking people what was available. We found here through a chat with a guy in a café, and as we paid cash (€30k for 15ha, the mill (which has a habitation license), and a ruined outbuilding) we completed within 48 hours of shaking on it. We are “The Foreigners”, as this is an area that seems to have been completely overlooked - our member of Parliament came to visit us a few weeks after we moved here, and has proven a handy ally - “It’s your land, you build whatever you want”, she happily put in writing. There are advantages in moving to an area that everyone else is abandoning.
There are sites (idealista, olx, pureportugal) which can give you a good idea of what’s available, but really the best way is to go pound the ground, and look for hand-painted for sale signs, and to talk to village people.
> The whole “oh, we only need 3L of water per day and 500Wh is enough” lifestyle is unsustainable. I know, I’ve tried it, and I’ve seen many others go through it - you go gently mad spending your days managing your limited resources, and eventually give up.
So very true. I lived in a bus for almost 5 years. I've met tons of people in the vanlife/RV/off grid community. Both from my personal experience and observing others the biggest problems are limited resources and places to park. For a home on wheels you always need external resources. Fresh water needs replenishment, waste water needs dumping, trash disposal, etc. Having the largest resource capacity possible doesn't solve the issue but it makes it much less stressful.
It's highly romanticized by people who haven't experienced it. They think simple = easy but it's the opposite.
I made friends with the owner of a business in the nearest town - he’s perfectly happy to receive everything from documents to 300kg cast iron stoves in exchange for us using them for all of our insurance, and the occasional gift, and we also have a PO box.
I swiftly learned that trying to get anything delivered here was a fool’s errand.
The whole “oh, we only need 3L of water per day and 500Wh is enough” lifestyle is unsustainable. I know, I’ve tried it, and I’ve seen many others go through it - you go gently mad spending your days managing your limited resources, and eventually give up.
Power: we’ve 4.8kW of solar panels, a hydro generator that makes a continuous 280W through the winter months, and three small 150W nominal wind turbines, which also help in the winter. Storage is 84kWh of OPzS lead acid cells. 2x 5kW Victron multiplus for triple phase output, and their MPPTs for the various inputs. I also laid 500m of 18mm2 SWA cable from our powerhouse to the cabin we built, so we can have power here too. Stuck a 1:2 transformer at each end to get more carrying capacity.
Water: there are a number of muddy, sulphurous seeps in the side of the valley. In the winter there’s water, in the summer, mud. Laid tubing with simple pre filters on the intakes down to a chain of IBCs 70m above the valley floor - 50 micron, 10 micron, 1 micron, carbon, then store in the IBCs. At each house (there’s both the mill and the cabin) I then re filter through a 1 micron sediment filter and a carbon block, as algae tend to grow in the tanks. For drinking, we have a simple reverse osmosis setup along with a UV block under each kitchen sink. As our fallback, basically for august when the river runs dry and the mud turns to dust, we’ve a submersible pump next to the hydro intake, which is a low spot in the bedrock and holds a pool of increasingly stagnant water in the summer. Still, our water treatment system makes it perfectly good for everything.
Hot water, I took inspiration from someone on here, and built a pair of big damn heat exchangers - excess heat from stoves in winter, or from power in summer, gets dumped into 4000L of water in a heavily insulated bunker. I aim to keep it at 85C, as above that I risk melting things. There’s then 200m of coiled tubing in each bunker, through which flows the high pressure cold water (7bar), which comes out somewhere around 40-60C, depending on the season
Sewerage, we are using above ground vermi composting tanks built from IBCs (IBCs are dead handy, very cheap used) - works a charm, no smells or anything. Grey water just goes to a soakaway.
Internet: I’ve talked about this here before. Solar powered mast atop the valley with an atheros w/ openwrt, LTE with an LPDA antenna as our nearest cell mast is line of sight from there but 20km away, Wi-Fi relay using yagis to each point of consumption, and then APs dotted around so we have coverage over our few sq km.
Heat in both houses is from a log stove. We’ve 11ha of forest, which we are clearing the dead but still standing trees (ash, oak) from, both for the sake of the forest and for the sake of us not freezing in the winter. We’re insulated up to the gunwales in the cabin, and the mill has a huge thermal mass.
We have a dishwasher, a washing machine, home theatre with surround (and oh boy you can crank it when your nearest neighbour is 20km away), all the modern conveniences. Sure, it all had to be carried in by hand or on the aerial cableway, as the one thing we don’t have is road access, but I’m one who’s strongly in favour of “effort now, easy later”.
What else… I use an rpi running openhab to monitor and control everything, from power production and consumption to water levels and quality, to the weather. I can’t control the weather, to be clear.
Other things… our chainsaws are battery powered (makita’s 36V stuff packs an amazing punch, and no two-stroke screaming in your ear), as are our brushcutters, polesaws, everything. Only thing that uses fossils is the truck, and that will change.
This year I’m planning on more infrastructure - probably a small monorail, as I’ve got bored of injuring myself carrying stuff up 45 degree inclines, and a large pond up the hill, for water storage, and possibly hydro, possibly pumped. I’m also thinking about building myself a proper workshop, as at the moment I just drag equipment around the forest and cover it with tarps for the weather, which is also getting boring! Oh, and I’ve grand plans to turn our ‘88 hilux into a strange beast - remove the elderly million mile diesel, add hub motors and as many batteries as I can cram into the engine bay and under the flatbed. That’s the main thing making me want a workshop.
So, anyway - my point is sustainability. I’ve invested significant time and resources here over the last two years so that our life here is a sustainable one - ecologically, sure, but also for us - it’s enough work just being here - I don’t want to have to always be worrying about resource management too, and I want to be able to still live here when I’m a feeble old dodger.