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.
