Living Off The Grid

Composting toilets provide a low-water, or even water-free, alternative that also allows you to close the poop loop by turning bodily wastes into organic material ready to go back into the soil. They are perfect for off grid homes, cabins, RVs and boats!

Guerrilla gardening is different from traditional gardening because instead of cultivating a home garden, guerrilla gardeners transform neglected public spaces. By beautifying abandoned parking lots, schoolyards, and alleyways, guerrilla gardeners are the Johnny Appleseeds of the urban landscape.

Just over 5 years ago I moved to Spain with my partner. We live in a remote area with no chance of ever getting mains electricity so we run our home using solar panels and a back-up generator.

Biodiesel is sometimes presented in an oversimplified or misleading way. I’d like to cut through the fog and establish a few simple ideas as factual. This brief article, the first in a series, should start things on the right track. Later articles will talk about how to make biodiesel and how to use it.

Successful off-grid living means constantly monitoring and adjusting the energy efficiency of your home’s systems and of your personal habits. You’re living on battery power, constantly playing the balancing game between power consumption and power generation. That means a life of watching the electrical fuel gauge.

The following features are suggested for any off the grid home. Most of these features are well known and widely used in energy efficient homes – some are not!

Can a fireplace be as good or perhaps better than a wood burning stove? That’s the question Fred Roensch asked himself not along ago, and his answers can be found below. I have also provided a few pictures of our own fireplace insert replacement.

In this post Mr. Roensch discusses some of the problems you may encounter while searching for off-grid property, including water rights, land orientation and the unavailability of proper real estate search tools.

Once I realized how important oil was I decided it would be well worth the effort to figure out a way to make it myself. With a bit of searching I found a hand crank oil expeller and have been making all of my own vegetable oils ever since.

The active ingredient in Draino and similar drain cleaners is sodium hydroxide. It sounds scary – and it can be – but most of us know this stuff as plain old caustic soda or lye, which I use in my homemade soap since it saponifies (turns into soap and is no longer lye) once mixed [...]

Every family should have an emergency preparedness kit. In fact, we should all have several kits: One for the home, one for the car trunk…

What is it about Berkey Water Filters that makes them so popular among survivalists, off-grid folks, and even third-world aid programs? I asked myself that exact question not long ago. I wondered if it was just good marketing, or if the Berkey (I thought they were called Berkley water filters at the time for some [...]

To be snowed-in without phone or power and to see that I have season’s worth of dry wood; several months worth of multi-colored jars of home-canned and dried food in the pantry; a root cellar stocked with potatoes, cured cheese, carrots and apples…

If you live off grid, have lived off the grid in the past, know a lot about renewable energy, or just have a story or how-to you think our readers would like – let us know!

Looking for online solar training resources? Look no further – here is a list of some of the best websites and companies offering PV design and installation courses online.

Our friend Arthur from the Denver Urban Homesteading Group shows us how to make soap using lye, lard and coconut oil.

Microbusiness Independence also discusses everything from idea conceptualization and budgeting to shipping rates and taxes. It has to cover a lot of ground so is more broad than deep.

I think when it gets warm I’ll go out there with him and try to calculate the flow and head. Not being a microhydro expert, I had to do a bit of research on how to figure out the flow and head of a stream.

Those first old-timers – like the wise, hardened and completely lovable Aunt Arie and the cantankerous, ornery moonshiner Simmie Free – were already on the verge of extinction back then and can only be listened to and learned from in the pages of those first Foxfire books.

We’re not expecting this to happen any time soon, but the knowledge that we have a great property in a beautiful location makes my workday in the office that much more enjoyable.