Thinking of moving beyond the power grid? The experience will change you. Since leaving the dusty plains of eastern Colorado to hand-hew our own off-grid log home in the Rockies, my wife LaVonne and I have aspired to a lifestyle that would have seemed quite foreign to us 10 years ago. A better lifestyle, to be sure—we're as content living off-grid now as we were during those first few months in 1999 when the novelty and excitement of the endeavor emboldened us like a powerful elixir—but it was one for which we were not entirely prepared.
In hopes that you might be better prepared than we were, here's a smattering of what I wish we'd known.
Living off-grid is, first and foremost, a hands-on enterprise. No matter how well designed your system is, there are always chores you will be required to perform to keep things running optimally. I think everyone who seriously considers the idea of moving upstream from the last power pole understands this, at least to some degree, and anticipates it. But chores they remain, and they can be as easy or as tedious as we make them.
Routine battery maintenance always seems the most odious task to neophyte off-gridders, even though the time you spend bending over the battery box—whether to add water or to check for rare corrosion on the terminals—is less than the time you will spend making seasonal adjustments to the angle of the solar array. Or cleaning the modules and sweeping snow from them. Or changing the oil in the backup generator. Or periodically checking the wind turbine to satisfy yourself that all the bolts are tight and the blades are not being dangerously decomposed by the elements.
The Ewing's off-grid log home's solar array has been expanded three times over the past 10 years and now provides over 2,000 watts of electricity on sunny days. It is supplemented by a 1,000-watt wind turbine. An array of 30 evacuated tubes (hidden behind the roof dormer) provides domestic hot water. Photo: Rex Ewing |
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It all goes with the territory and when the day is done, the routine duties required of you will seem insignificant to the sum of the changes that will take place in your life, both practically and philosophically, once you leave the world of grid power behind and become your own homegrown power company.
Whether or not you spend much time studying the weather in your current circumstances, once you move off-grid you will quickly develop a keen interest in meteorology. It may even become an obsession. Since (as you are soon to discover) clouds will decrease the output of your solar array by anywhere from 20 to 95 percent, you will find yourself paying close attention to the different types of cloud formations and the ways in which they move—most notably the ways in which they move between the sun and your expensive solar array. On partly cloudy days when you are low on energy, it will seem as if every tiny cloud shadows the sun in a purposeful way. Conversely, if your batteries are already charged, the sky will relent and a cloud will rarely cross the sun's path. Is it just your imagination? You will never know.
If you intend to erect a wind turbine to supplement your solar array, your attitude toward wind is about to change forever. When was the last time you found yourself wishing a wispy gust of wind would morph into a gale, or hoping a calm, cloudy day would suddenly turn breezy? From here on out it will become a persistent desire, even if it is so contrary to your former conditioning that you have trouble admitting it in polite company.
Every season arrives with its own unique weather patterns. You've probably observed them before, but you may not have scrutinized the way clouds overhead move differently in autumn than in spring, as if through invisible corridors in the sky, or how the prevailing wind will shift direction from summer to winter. But you soon will.
The preservation of stored energy is a persistent theme in the life of every off-gridder. A light left on in a room—even if it's only a compact fluorescent—is an egregious sin, as is lingering too long under a hot shower, or running the clothes washer after the sun's gone down.
To keep track of how much energy is going in and out of your battery bank, consider installing a Tri-Metric meter from Bogart engineering. It will save you a lifetime of hand-wringing guesswork. For monitoring the energy usage of individual appliances, invest in either a Watts Up? or a Kill-a-Watt meter. Just beware: once you discover how much hard-won energy your old cathode ray tube tv consumes you may trade it for an LED model. Or develop a fondness for reading.
If you work from home as LaVonne and I do, with one or two computers and printers running all day, the production and conservation of energy will become an even more pressing enterprise. While your neighbors are away at work consuming someone else's energy, you'll be home using two or three kilowatt hours every day, rain or shine, just to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Some mornings even the thought of powering up the home office will seem to provoke a painful moan from a work-weary battery bank, but you'll do it anyway.
For this reason and a thousand others (mostly unforeseen), leave room to add more solar panels and batteries later on. Everyone does. Whether you initially underestimate your energy usage or you add new appliances (aka energy-sucking devices), there will eventually come a time when your system is too small for your needs. Over the years we've doubled the size of our battery bank and expanded our original 1,140-watt array to 2,320 watts of capacity. Some of our off-grid friends have added more than we have, others have added less. But all have increased the size of their systems. It's an unwritten law.
A couple of years ago, when new landowners brought power lines up the winding dirt road below us to drive their energy-intensive (and, I daresay, noisy) lifestyles, the off-grid family nearest to them found themselves within a few thousand dollars of limitless power. They abruptly jumped onto the grid-power bandwagon.
It was just as well; off-grid living certainly isn't for everyone. For some it's a means to an end: a stopgap measure to get by until civilization finally (and thankfully) catches up with them. For others, an off-grid system might be a clever means to power a weekend cabin, but a poor substitute for the coal- or nuclear-powered lifestyle most Americans have grown accustomed to.
Then there are those who seem born to live off the grid; people for whom the challenge of providing a fresh supply of watts to their homes each day is an invigorating exercise of wit, ingenuity and perspicacity—adventurous souls with something akin to a hunter-gatherer mentality, accepting of the fact that today's abundance may or may not carry over into tomorrow.
Should you find yourself determined to throw in with this disparate lot, get ready for some changes. The world that is so familiar to you now is soon to shrink in some directions and expand in others. No longer will you be able to consume electricity as if it flows from an infinite river; the off-grid life is a frugal one where acceptance of what nature gives you is tacitly understood. And though thoughts of your home's energy status will always linger somewhere close to consciousness, a large fraction of the time those thoughts will be pleasing ones. Off-gridders seldom fret about their energy problems, they simply solve them, and it's this kind of attitude that engenders in a person an easy sense of independence so rare in today's high-strung plug-and-play world.
Once you leave that cosmetic world of instant gratification and entrust your well-being to the seemingly chaotic forces of nature, you will begin to sense the myriad rhythms that flow through all things, and in a million subtle ways you will adjust your life to nature's unheard harmonies. Accept it; you can never change her. But she will change you, in ways you can scarcely imagine.
Rex Ewing is the author of Power With Nature and Crafting Log Homes Solar Style, and the newly released 2nd edition of Got Sun? Go Solar, a best-selling book that painlessly explains renewable energy options for grid-tied homes. His books can be purchased at the Countryside Bookstore or at www.pixyjackpress.com.
