Off-Grid 101

CNN devoted an hour to one of the hero’s of off-grid living, Graham Hill. The TV Channel visited his place on the Hawaiian island of Maui’s north shore. (Our thanks to Claudia Rothschild for making the edited transcript)

“My vision is to try to create a fully off-grid, luxurious, sustainable way of living that doesn’t cost too much, and then try to get friends and maybe even make it a bed and breakfast and have people come through and understand how incredible it could be to live off-grid,” said Hill.
“Off-Grid means you have a water catchment, there is enough rain that you can get all your water from the sky. Solar and wind are really good on Maui, so basically, make it entirely energy independent.
Because I design my life virtually, I am able to work from anywhere. So when it is freezing cold in New York, I am able to come here for two or three months and work from here. So it is a fantastic setup.…

Rather than standing out from the landscape, Three Glens is almost invisible from across the valley. Its massive stone walls link to a dry stone wall that seems to flow right through the building; on another flank the oak cladding merges with a small stand of fir and birch beside it.

The owners, Neil and Mary Gourlay, wanted a farmhouse that “belonged” to the land it stands in. Stones for the walls have been collected from the fields, the oak is from wind-felled trees on the farm and the wool insulation is from the Gourlays’ own flock of blackface sheep. Three Glens is one of a new breed of “eco-farmhouse”, costing its occupants nothing to run, an important consideration when upland farming has become such a marginal occupation.…

In homebuilding, innovation in materials technology and energy efficiency is everywhere, but construction methods seem always to lag behind as many contractors stick to the familiar and sometimes the cheap. The Guardian reports that choosing a home has become “as simple as picking furniture from the Ikea catalogue” for residents of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where a neighbourhood of affordable architect-designed kit houses has just been launched. If you can’t afford pricey designs that does not mean settling for generic or uninspired aesthetics, inefficiency and mid-grade craftsmanship.

Author Sheri Koones champions this alternative path – prefabricated housing – that she has been promoting for years in a series of books about this option. The latest is “Pre-fabulous and Almost Off the Grid,” which features more than 30 homes built using some sort of prefabricated components.…