Communities

LandBuddy – link with others off the grid

Welcome to the beta launch of LandBuddy ™, a place where you can find new off-grid friends and form groups to share land, acquire real estate  and other resources (no commercial postings please).

Looking for the perfect bug-out location?  Real Estate prices are high. Or perhaps you already have some forest or agricultural real estate and are looking for others to share the land?  But who?

Or, maybe you’re just intrigued by this idea of living off the grid, and you want to meet some folks who are building a community together, and help out a bit.

Whichever your interest, Off-Grid.net’s new LandBuddy service is for you. Real estate prices may have fallen but good land is still out of the reach of most. And finding other people who also want to live in an off the grid community in the same region as you is really hard.

We are here to help change that.…

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Communities

Must simplicity be minimalist?

To date most efforts at living the simple life,  off the grid seem to be an exercise in minimalism — doing without  amenities most people take for granted.

No wonder the off-grid movement has trouble attracting adherents. The biggest appeal seems to be to those who want a simple life away from the restrictions imposed by living in communities.

Freedom is the keynote in many of the articles and books dealing with going off-grid.…

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Communities

Independence or a new dependency?

Off-Grid forum has a new moderator – meet Elnav, and listen to his wise words – he has walked the talk for many years.

“To most people going off the grid conveys the impression of independence but in reality they are in many cases simply exchanging dependence on one thing with dependence on another.
I live in the central interior of BC in the Canadian north where the forestry industry has for a long time been the main economy. Recently an initiative to build a cellulose digester was begun. The idea being, scrap wood leftovers such as leaves, bark and even gardening debris such as grass cuttings is converted into methanol fuel. Wonderful ! It captures something that was previously unused waste and produces something useful.…

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Communities

Cabin Fever

By Tia Meer

My dream home is an oddball. It doesn’t quite fit it. It’s unlike anything in the surrounding neighborhood. It is, in fact, unlike anything in Central Florida.
That’s exactly why I love it.
It’s a beautiful log cabin, just 30 minutes from Walt Disney World, but world’s apart. It is simple living at its best.
My husband, Terry, and I built it ourselves after getting married in 2007. The goal was to make it as sustainable as possible. Three years later, the finished product puts a smile on my face every day.      …

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Communities

Blueprint for sustainable living

katyandleanderfamilyportraitAn off-grid Community in the UK has been awarded £350,000 of central government money to help it spread its low-carbon lifestyle to families across the country.

The Lammas project in the Welsh hills involving nine “ordinary” families living in eco smallholdings in the Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire, has been named by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change as one of 10 low-carbon communities.

Lammas (named after a Pagan harvest festival)  will spend the moneyon a “community hub” building. It is seen “a blueprint for sustainable living” and the money is intended to facilitate educational visits. The local government in the area has pioneered one of the most favorable regimes to enable planning permission for off-grid developments and Lammas owes its existence to this planning framework.

The new building will help launch its low-impact housing initiative and pioneering farming and land-use technologies, as well as promoting carbon-positive food and fuel.

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Humanure – sawdust toilets

Sit, flush and forget, that’s what most of us do, multiple times a day. Composting toilets are the answer.

We use perfectly good, drinkable water to flush our waste —  what a waste it truly is! After we flush, we don’t think about all the water that is used/wasted to process the sewage that is created, chemicals are pumped into our water system, the water we DRINK, so that we can do it all over again.

I’m starting to sound pretty green aren’t I?…

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Communities

Off-Grid update

Winter RoadWhat a great early Christmas gift, I know that to those who get snow every winter, it’s not that exciting, but for those of us that live in places with little to no snowfall, it transforms everything into a winter wonderland.…

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Communities

Off-Grid questions

Every now and again, I get an email with some great questions, this evening I received such an email from a new ‘net friend, Marcy. She has recently taken the plunge to live completely off-grid. She is starting out in a rather primitive way, much like we did. I found her questions very good and decided I would post the email exchange here. Thanks Marcy, enjoy! …

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Communities

A few stocking fillers

SO much pointless stuff gets passed around at Christmas. We’ve tried to suggest a handful of gifts which are both useful and unlikely to be things you have seen before.…

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Communities

Possum Living-How To Live Well With (Almost) No Money

possum-livingI wish I could say that I had read this book way back when, and that was what inspired me to live my off-grid life… but my earliest inspiration was the Grizzly Adams series. If I had come across Possum Living before now, I know it would have also been a great inspiration for me. It  was written in the 70s by a very smart young lady, Dolly Freed. She and her father lived in a regular house, on a large lot by today’s standard, though small compared to homesteading standards. Neither one worked a regular job, yet they lived a full and enjoyable life.

Dolly wrote the book to document their lives and teach other people how to live a more simple life, unfettered by a 9-5 work week. I was re-inspired and excited to find this video about their life on YouTube. It’s a 3 part video, the second and third should play right after the first.

The book and video are dated, it was written and filmed in the late 70s, but I’m here to tell you that this type of life CAN still be achieved, I’m living proof of that. I was thrilled to find out that a revised version of her book is coming out, it apparently has updated info about Dolly, she is still alive and well. I will say that if you look hard enough, you can find a digital version of her original book to download (it’s out of print) , I have read this, but I look forward to getting the new and improved version coming out this January.

Even if you don’t want to go all the way and live like she did (and like I do now), it’s still good information to have, with today’s uncertainty,  unemployment and underemployment, these are good skills to have to help get you through lean times.

Here is her original book, it’s a bit pricey Possum living: How to live well without a job and with almost no money

Here is a  link for the new revised book, at a much better price Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and with (Almost) No Money




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Communities

David de Rothschild loves life off the grid

David de Rothschild has revealed he prefers life off-grid and can’t stand carbon off-setting.  “There is just something more satisfying about living off-grid,” he told me at the launch of the NatGeo control room in London which will be the land HQ for his next great adventure.  “You are much more aware of your resources, managing them …. making decisions about what I can use and when I can use it.

“Especially on an expedition you are really aware that you only have limited resources  – I prefer living off-grid, “ he said.

The aristo-adventurer, and rumored  former boyfriend of Cameron Diaz, is about to set sail on his vessel made from plastic bottles. The Plastiki is a 60-foot catamaran which will be home to David and his crew for an  11,000-mile voyage due to kick off next month, out the Golden Gate and across the Pacific to Sydney Harbor.…

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Communities

2012 and the age of stupid

2012 is perhaps one of the stupidest movies ever made – it has no basis whatsoever- its just an experiment in computer graphics with a few false assumptions about the Universe…

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