OFG-HowToFreeYourself.svg

Water

Energy

Houses that put money in your pocket

These days, with so many builders touting themselves as green, the whole idea of a green home can seem like a marketing ploy.  Instead of stepping into someone else’s business plan,  your home can be your own financial survival tool – that is what you can learn from looking at the off-grid way of life.

When a builder markets his homes as environmentally friendly because they feature water-saving toilets and high-efficiency gas furnaces, that’s a problem: You’d be hard-pressed to find a new home without these features. But here’s the thing:  the relative improvements in resource consumption compared to the wasteful old ways are still way out of whack with the way you live if you are harvesting your own power and water, off the grid.   You can live a comfortable off-grid life on 25% of the water and electricity that people regard as normal.  But LEED standards are more like 50% or more – ie half what is “normal” but double what off-gridders would consume.

Read More »

Seed catalogs

It’s the middle of winter, cold, dreary, but something I start receiving in my mailbox makes me long for the warm days of spring, the seed catalogs. Those shiny, colorful pages full of picture of ripe fruit and veggies and herbs. I have already started buying some things, a week ago, while on one of my rare trips to town (it’s a 3+ hour drive to town), I was in a Sam’s Club store, I was about to start heading for the check out lanes when I spotted something green and leafy sticking out from an odd aisle.

Read More »

An overview of the last 4 years living off-grid

This December will be 4 years for us living 100% off-grid, I can tell you it’s been quite the adventure, my only regret is that we didn’t do this earlier. Let me recap what we have been doing these 4 years…

 

Read More »
Community

Homesteading-book review

Homesteading, it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people, back in the day, it meant getting land for free as long as you lived on it and improved it for x number of years. It was a way to get people to move west (in the USA), back when travel was slow and painful, even dangerous.

Read More »
Water

Global Storming

2010 was the wettest year since records began. And it was not just the amount of rain and snow, but the intensity which increased

Read More »
Community

Solar powered clothes dryer

It’s funny how your perspectives change as you grow. When I was a kid, I used to be embarrassed because my mom hung our laundry out on the line to dry. I hated the smell of line dried clothes, sheets and towels, to me that meant we were poor, we couldn’t afford a dryer. All of my classmates had soft, fabric softener fresh smelling clothes, our clothes, towels and sheets were stiffer and to me were just second rate.

 

Read More »
Solar

Solar powered rainwater pump

Pumps up to 100 gallons on a single charge and runs off of a solar rechargeable NiMH battery. Adaptable to most style rain barrels

Read More »

off-grid.net

Join the global off-grid community

Register for a better experiencE on this site!