I lived off the grid for 4 years

[wemoon]

I'd be willing to share my expiriences with you all. I have a lot posted on my blog. If anyone is interested I can copy and paste those posts here.

[mountain mom]

Wow, Wemoon, you are a woman of many accomplishments!

We are aspiring to live off the grid.

Right now we are at the beginning stages of our dream. This summer we are going to buy 10 acres of land in the area we hope to move to in the next 24 months, then we are going to salvage material from the extremely wasteful and glutinous city we live in now.

That way we will build our strawbale with reused items and can put that money into panels and windmills.

My dh is an electrician with a sustainable retrofitting company, this is so our dream to live off the grid!


I would looooove to hear your stories Wemooon.

[wemoon]

Cool! I was wondering if anyone cared or not :LOL It is very interesting IMO and I learned TONS of stuff about survival.

I wanted to do a strawbale house. I don't know if that is acheivable right now for me though. My energy is directed elsewhere (business, single-momdom etc)

[mountain mom]

There is a group of people here who build via workshops. You host the workshop and a group of interested and keen people come and learn how to build a strawbale via building your house!

The next couple of years we are going to attend as many workshops as we can to learn and then hopefully we will host one when we are ready!

We really thought we could do it all at once, the land the house the panals, but its just not financially sound for us.

Small steps to the big goal!

Where did you live off the grid? Did you have panals and windmill or small hydro? Or did you live without power entirely?

[wemoon]

Without power entirely. Let me see if I can grab the first entry that might explain the basics.

Here is one that desribed cooking and dishes;

In the winter time all our cooking and baking was done on this barrel stove and in the summer time all our cooking was done on either an open fire, a barrel-b-q, or on a propane camping cookstove. For the first year that I lived in Drag'nwood, we did not have a propane stove, so every single meal was cooked on a fire outside. For ease I ended up making a dish washing station outside, which I had to try and stay on top of daily or the flies would congregate.

Dishes were washed in those *antique* wash basins, it sucked cause to try and buy one was expensive! I would just oogle the antique stores, (or a catalog like http://www.lehmans.com/ ) like one might oogle at Sears for their appliances. Fortunately wash basins were fairly easy to come buy, I found a few at garage sales, auctions, and junkyards. I would have to fix holes in the washbasins from rust. I kinda became the neighborhood washbasin repairer. I used that stuff that body shop guys use to fix up cars, I can't remember the name of it. It created this pinky goop that I would apply to the basins where the holes were (I remember now it is called Bondo). It was funny, FIL had a basin that had a hole and he had stuck a stick in it for it to hold water! He was pretty excited that I could fix it for him!

This is how a dish washing moment could go. Dishes have piled up, they need to be done...now! If in the summer time I would need to plan it out to have hot water heating while I was cooking, if in the winter it was a rare occasion that I did not have the hot water pot on the stove. Now, this is all providing that all my water jugs were full. I usually had 3-5 five gallon jugs, filled with water in my house. I would pour water out of these jugs into my basins to do dishes. To get the water in the jugs, I would put them in a wheel barrel and head on over to the pump house. Which in FIL's house was very close, but once we moved into my own house it was quite a ways. Later on I would put them in my car or truck, but for awhile I used a wheel barrel.

At the pump house I would need to prime the pump. In the summer to prime the pump we had a pot that we kept a little bit of clean water in and then would pour this into the pump. Start pumping, prime some more, pump, prime some more...then water comes out, fill the jugs. In the winter, now this is a different story! I'm in Minnesota, everything is frozen below zero many days. That includes the pump. So I would have to make sure that I had hot water to bring with me to the pump house. Pour the hot water in, pump etc. But you had to pour the hot water in, and then wait a minute so it thaws. And sometimes it didn't, and you didn't have any more hot water...so sheepishly you run to your neighbors house to see if they have some hot water. The best thing was to inform everyone you were unfreezing the pump so they could all come pump too, but that didn't always happen.

The most important thing about the pump is to make sure, no matter what, if it is winter and you pumped water...release the pressure valve. If the pressure is not release than the water stays primed and will freeze all the way to the top of the pump. This happened once and it was very difficult to get unfrozen. In the summer, releasing the pressure was a sanitary precaution. So the water isn't sitting at the top of the pump. But we always did cover the top of the pump so nothing icky could get in there.

There was one time when the pump was giving us this filthy dirty water. It wasn't very cool. We talked about it everyday... everyday *So hows the water?*. FIL was able to fix it by moving the piping on the pump up and down trying to find good water again. Fortunately he found it. We would talk about where would be a good spot to find water, but really we all knew it was just speculation. Dh(now X) and I actually were going to put a pump in our house, but as you'll soon find out it was one of those *things* that never get done.

So, dishes! Can you see what a huge deal doing the dishes is? SIL and I would complain about dishes all the time. The water has been pumped, heated, and now put into two seperate wash basins. Wash the dishes in one, rinse in the other, dry. But these basins are small, and there are usually alot of dishes. So the water would get totally gross. And remember, pumping water is a pain so you arn't going to be just rinsing a dish...huge waste! So your washing dishes in pretty nasty water by the end, but you keep going, cause otherwise you have to bring the basin out dump it, come back in fill it again. This is the routine I worked out in the end, I would wash and wash till the water was icky, then dump, then put the rinse water in the wash basin, add more hot water, more rinse water and wash some more. Then carry out both basins and dump. During the winter we would have a waste water bucket in the house so I would dump in there and then carry that out.




So that is just dishes :LOL

[mountain mom]

Wowza!
That is impressive, you did this for four years! Amazing! I am so excited to read more about your time there. Did you have a tough time coming back into the city?

[mamabutterfly]

I'd love to hear more, too, wemoon!

[wemoon]

Yes, it was VERY odd to move back into the *real* world. I remember taking showers and just being in absolute heaven, because I used wash basins to wash up in for 4 years (I'll post about that too). It was pretty amazing to just be able to fill up a sink with water and wash dishes and not have to lug icky wash basins outside to dumb.

Also, when I moved back to the city I had NO electrical appliances. So for a week or so I had no lights in my apartment because we had used candles and lanterns for light.

[Wildcrafter]

Wow, dishes!! It's amazing to think how much (house)work it is to go without electricity - but how much healthier and active you are while doing it.

I await with abated breath to learn about laundry!

I have several neighbors who are off the grid and many times we may as well be because we lose our power all the time (our lines go forever before reaching a transformer and are on trees which are forever breaking branches and blowing over etc). When we do have power it aint much.

We are well prepared for outages with a propane cookstove/oven, heating woodstoves, lanterns, plenty of gallon jugs of water (not to mention snow filled basins in winter) and lots of dry goods. We have to be really prepared in the winter because the propane and any other service trucks won't come down our road until spring.

One neighbor has a water collecting tank on the roof so when she does dishes she has a little water pressure for rinsing, using hot only to wash.

I'd like to think we are on our way to being off the grid, but know it's a long way off. It's wonderful to read your posts and dream! I guess the biggest issue for us is water - getting the well dug for the handpump. I wonder if it's possible to convert a electrically pumped well into a handpump.....

The guy we bought the house from was definetly headed down the off the grid road - he handed down to us a southern exposed Florida porch, (it hit 80 degreesF last February), 18 raised garden beds, handmade chairs, handmade compost bins (that wouldn't attract animals), lots of lanterns, etc.
Unfortunately he had emphysema that got so bad he couldn't take the winters or the work of having a home. This guy made bullets with black pepper and old melted down lead fishing gear! Took us a while to figure out what was up with all the black pepper in the workshop! And dude, what's up with all this lead?

[wemoon]

Well, laundry isn't that exciting. I tried to do laundry out there but it was just way too much for me, especially when the poopy cloth diapers came along. So I brought everything to the laundromat, but brought it all home to hang dry. A few times I did laundry by hand out there, but I just didn't have it in me at that point to do it amidst all the other tasks to be done.

[boatbaby]

we were off the grid for about a year on our old boat... but off the grid as in we generated all of our power via solar and wind. So we had some creature comforts. My dad now lives off the grid in Hawaii -- again all solar and wind powered with everyday stuff. He bought ten acres on the Big Island and built everything from scratch, including the road to his little house. Now he raises horses and ducks and grows organic food and stares at the ocean.
We just bought this new boat about 10 days before DS was born last summer. She needs some work. But our goal is to outfit her with enough solar and wind power geenrating stuff to unplug again!!!
Wemoon - Thanks for sharing -- very cool!!!

[Gale Force]

Cool. Thanks for the story.

I think it would be a miracle for us to get off the grid given the house that we have. : But we're working on doing a bit better.

Nice plan mountain mom.

[wemoon]

K here is more...

I would like to continue on with cooking, there are so many aspects.

We had various ways that we cooked. The main way being the barrel stove in the winter time, then in the summer outdoors a lot, and later on a propane gas stove. Summer cooking was quite difficult at times. The first year I lived in Drag'nwood we didn't have a gas stove, so I had to make a fire outdoors for every meal. I really just got used to it, made it quickly cooked and was done with it. I was so used to building fires that I just laughed when Dh had some friends out to our house and they were going to try to tell ME how to build a fire! These pale faced, egotistical guys were gonna show me how to make fire. Ok, go to it man. It seriously failed miserabley. With a few seconds of the fires failure, I rearranged everything and relit and fire.

There were many different fire spots for cooking. The first one being right outside FIL's house, which he later moved to the back of his house. Then there was one in the desert (basically a large sandy-clay type area), then one in front of my house. Later a fire pit was added to Windmill Hill and the Birth Hut, I think SIL had a fire in front of their place too, but I'm not sure how much it was used.

So we would just grill out, but a little more complicated. I'm sure you all know how you love having that grilled *whatever* and it is really good...but every day, every single meal? Um no. So instead of throw on a piece of meat and some potatoes, we would drag bag loads of cooking supplies, ingredients etc. Pots, pans, utensils, seasonings, cooking water if neccessary. You learn to improvise a lot! Instead of running home (halfway across the land) you find a stick that looks reletively clean to stir the sauce and will then just pour it out of the pot onto the plates. Also, I learned a great appreciation for cast iron and any non-teflon cookware. The teflon pans are ruined almost immediately by putting them on a fire. And lucky for me...that is all I owned before I moved out to Drag'nwood, a nice big collection of teflon pans!

Sometimes for cooking, mainly when we were having some kind of meat grilled for supper, we would use what we called the *Barrel-b-q*. It is a barrel, with both ends cut off, then stood up on one end and you light a fire in it. Or I should say you light the fire then stick the barrel-b-q on the fire to be techniqcal. Then you stick a grate on the top and your ready to grill! We also had a big domed top to put on it so we could get that smokey bar-b-q taste. To control the airflow into the barrel-b-q you allow air into the bottom, so create a little airspace by moving the sand away from the barrel. Holy crap, that sucker gets HOT!

For winter we used the barrel stoves in our houses. The barrel stove is a double barrel. We actually used this same exact kit for our stoves. Vogelzang. The only difference is that FIL converted the top barrel into an oven. How that is done, is you need two barrels (if I was good at remembering numbers I would be able to tell what size barrel). The oven's length is actually only two sections of the barrel. FIL would cut off one section on both of the barrels. He would then insert the smaller barrel into the larger one, and somehow seal it (I don't know how, I never was around when he made these), and then put a door on it. Now when fire is lite, the smoke goes around the small barrel, contained in the larger barrel, and heats up the inside. Close the door and you can bake cookies, bread, a roast, potatoes...anything. That sucker can get HOT too! It was so hard to maintain though. One second, the temp is 350, then the next it jumped up to 500, or down to 200. The way to maintain the heat is to use the air flow vents below the door. Wide open vents and that fire will just burn hot and fast, low or closed vents the fire burns slow. The trick we found when baking was to have it wide open hot until there was a really nice pile of coals, then to close the vents and bake. That was the most consistant heat. But every baking was different from the last one, it would seem as soon as you found out a system, then it didn't work anymore!

I think I have the actual cooking part totally taken care of now....how about....refridgeration? Can you maybe see why winter might be my favorite season? I have a hot fire for cooking and baking always going, always hot water, and always refridgeration. I hated the summer! How do I keep my food from spoiling? We had coolers filled with ice and we bought ice about every other day. Mostly I tried to get as much as I could of food that wouldn't spoil, and then drove to town a lot for the rest. Let me tell you though...your really learn exactly what needs to be refridgeratored and what doesn't. I cold probably go through my fridge right now and pull out about half the things in there and just leave it on my counter. Of course there would be no freezer.

You might wonder what would I pull out of my fridge. Well, I would take out any condiment that has vineager in it UNLESS it also has eggs. If it has eggs it has to stay in the fridge. So all ketchup, mustard, tamari, b-bq sauce, steak sauce would all be out. Any pickles or olives would be out. Eggs would be out. Juice would be out, except for citrus juice. Pretty much any fruit would be out, I would tend to keep berries cool, but usually they didn't last more than a day anyway so I would just leave them out.

So what would be in the cooler? Meat, veggies, any dairy (we didn't drink any milk so just cheese, yougurt etc), any orange or grapefruit juice and that is about it. If there was room I would put the eggs in.

The winter time was so much easier! Our entry way was the perfect refridgerator! We would just have shelves in our entry way and stack our food on shelves. It was always so nice, cause then I could have things like cream for my coffee, extra meat on hand, just extra of everything. I could go shopping once a week instead of every other day!

[AngelBee]

Did you already have your babies when you lived off of the grid?

[meco]

wemoon,

I did not know this about you, very cool!!!


I would love to hear more.

[willow83]

so cool to hear about this, incase u didn't see my post about starting a community, me and DH are creating an intentional community in north cali, we will be living in an RV until we get the permit to build a cob/cord wood home. We have one solar panel, a generator, and a new baby girl Julia. We haven't moved out there yet, so I am trying to mentally get ready for this adjustment. I live in a large house in town now, and this will be in the middle of nowhere *half an hour from town* but I did live in a school bus for a while, and it was a cool bus conversion too! We put a van sawed in half on top of our bus so it was like a loft, where we slept (and where Julia was concieved)! But we had running water and electricity so it wasn't really off the grid.
We did recently find a spring on our property were moving to, we just have to figure out how to tap it and get it pumped into our living structure. But, anyone interested in joining our community, please view our site!

[calpurnia]

Wow!

V interesting!

[wemoon]

Very cool Willow! Your lucky to have a spring, really, really lucky! The spring can also be used for refridgeration if need be, I used to have (or still do someplace) instructions for how to do it. My X used to make fun of me because I would say in a dreamy voice... *If only we had a spring* :LOL

Angel, my kids were born out there. There was a mention of the *birth hut* in the previous post, that is where my son was born. We built a little hut-type thing, screened it in (for mosquitoes) and DS was born there. My DD was born inside our house. Both times the living situation was the same, for the first birth my MW was slightly freaked out, but tried to remain calm about it since we prepared very well for it.

Meco! Now if the end of the world should happen after we move together I will be able to save us :LOL

[darkstar]

wee-moon WOW I would have not thought. How awsome.

darkstar

[cozymama]

Wwwwwwooooooowwwwwwwww. Wow.

I don't watch TV but I am an avid reader and I have to say this thread has me SO sucked in. Wemoon, I love hearing your excerpts- I feel like I'm waiting for a new chapter each time I log on.....I'm lived in a tent for short bit and lost our electricity more times than I care to remember (single mom a the time, no $ ) but you are really, really inspiring.

Can I ask for you first came to LOTG? How everything started? Or is it in your blog? (I get there through your sig?) I am reall ycomputer illiterate, sorry.........

All you mamas are so cool