July 1, 2015

Everyone has their motives for moving off-grid. Mine can be boiled down to freedom – and saving money.

This post is a very dirty assessment of how off-grid living has saved me money and can help you do the same.

All my estimates will be for an average 4 person home in the United States. While the results will vary based on country, and locality, the overall premise will remain the same.

Alright, so my disclaimer: I’m not a scientist. I don’t pretend to be and I would rather never be one. I am an average, albeit hyper-logical, American so for my purposes, all of my numbers are very crude. I literally Google searched averages and I used the data from the most reputable looking website that came up. That said, we aren’t working on nuclear fusion, so I think crude logic is enough for our purposes here. Take all the averages with a grain of salt.

Also, I am using my home for the final calculations and comparisons. It is a 1400 sq ft earthbag construction open floorplan home, 50% bermed into a hill, with south-facing windows, and an energy efficient design.  Your home may be bigger or smaller, so again, your numbers will vary.

Land

I will start at the beginning. Land. For our purposes, I will assume both properties will be on the same land. While in real life, someone living off-grid has very different land needs than someone linked-in, land varies in price so much from place to place that we will leave it as a constant in this example.

So both our example houses are built on a $20,000 20-acre plot of land. Difference= $0

Construction of linked-in home: (US avg) $200 per sqft x1400sqft = $280,000

Construction of Off-Grid home: (mine) $36 per sqft x1400sqft = $50,000

Savings: Off-Grid $230,000

Mind you the construction process was much slower and I had to do almost all my work by hand, the savings from construction of a home made of dirt compared to one made of conventional wooden frame and insulation are obvious.

Next are the infrequent expenses.  Listed below are the appliances and expenses that one will have different than the other.

Difference: $27,765 in favor of conventional homes.  Ouch. The Linked-In setup has a much cheaper initial set-up price but if we look at the difference in cost of construction from above, I think we have this extra expense covered. Let’s see how we do when we look at our long term living expenses.