Tell Us Your Story! How Did You Make The Move to Off Grid Living?
We know the folks who visit this site are as varied and dynamic a mix of people as you’ll find anywhere. Some live in RVs, some in off-grid cabins in the woods, and some travel the world. Many are still grid-tied but trying to make their way off the grid. Some want to fly under the radar, while others want to be an active member in a local or global community. And, as we found out with your answers here, living off the grid means something a little bit different to us all. This makes us very curious about how everyone is approaching the off-grid lifestyle, not just philosophically, but “in real life” so to speak.
So we’d like to put up some profiles from those readers / visitors who don’t mind sharing their story. You can share your picture if you like, or just a picture of your home or garden, or no picture at all. You can share your name, use a pseudonym, or we can just call you John Smith. But we want to know how you did it and how you’re doing it. Inspire us, and our other visitors! Let those who haven’t been able to make the leap yet know that it IS possible without hundreds of thousands of dollars. Give us instruction. Give us hope. Give us your story!
If you’re interested in being in one of our “Off Gridder Profiles” please use the comment form below to get in touch. Your email will not be published, but is required so we can contact you. You don’t need to write a whole bio (save that for the profile!) but if you could just give a few words about what you’re up to, how long you’ve been doing it and express that you’re interested in sharing your story we will be in touch.
Here’s looking forward to reading about some everyday, inspirational off gridders!
Not currently off grid or even semi off grid but we are actively helping one daughter and her family pursue building a small semi off grid home in rural North Carolina.
However, over 30 years ago we did build a passive solar home in Arkansas.
Will have our first meeting with an home architect over the Memorial week end.
Will update as we hopefully move forward.
Hello Fred,
I read a blog from a young woman who lives in a small cabin in rural NC. It’s called the Oko Box.
Please do get back with us as things move forward. I look forward to hearing more about it.
I’d love to share my store with you. Some of it is located on our blog “Transitioning off Grid”. We are currently trying to sell our home. Then we plan to go into a transitional home and save for a nice piece of land. It is a long process and we are only at the beginning, but we maintain a determined spirit and are excited about our future! I am taking the waiting time to educate myself on the country life and making many homemade things like butter, cheese, bread, etc. Looking forward to sharing more with you.
We’ve been living and building our semi-off grid home in Northern Arizona for two years now. I say Semi due to the fact, that although we have no utilities, we are still tied to the grid for water delivery, and propane. Solar takes care of the day to day activites, but a generator still does the heavy tasks.
We have been off grid since October of 2010. We built our home with earthbags, and have all the neccesities of life, i.e. hot running water(shower, kitchen sink), a refrigerator, washing machine. We have chronicled our story in our blog http://www.montelloalpacacompany.blogspot.com, and invite you to take a look at it. We are living in an area that is open for alternative building, has lots of cheap land ($300-500 an acre), good ground water, lots of sunshine, and wind. There is a small town nearby that has all the essentials. We have a paved highway running through the valley that is open all year round. There are two cities both 2 1/2 hours away, Salt Lake City, and Twin Falls Idaho. There is a Wallmart 1 hour 20 mins away in Elko Nv. The county doesnt enforce building code in our area, so as long as no one complains about your project you can do what you want. I do not recomend mobile homes for the area as they are not suitable for the climate. There are several off grid homes in the area, and an off grid community is in development. For questions feel free to email me at golds_borough@yahoo.com.
Three years ago, we moved out to the middle of nowhere where we bought land on the internet site unseen. We saw some pictures on the internet and thought it was good enough. Now after one heck of a ride, and 3 lifetimes worth of hard lessons packed into 3 years, we have done it. We have learned a lot, and are ready to share what we have learned with others who want to move to this area.
Hello,
This is a valuable website.
Living off the grid does not always have to mean living in remote areas. For instance, I and others have lived under the radar-off the grid through business and personal privacy principles.
Privacy living can enable one to travel, bank, work, and live anonymously while still living in populated areas. However, it always costs more in terms of time, effort, and money to accomplish these goals.
THANKS for a great site!
We are currently making the transition from a semi-. self-sufficient lifestyle to an off-the-grid lifestyle, which is involving the purchase of a lot of hand-crank household gadgets and many more hand tools. We will have gravity fed water from the spring to the house and barn and water power for electricity, maybe some solar. We are going as completely self-sufficient as possible (raising chickens, lamb, beef, grain crops, vegetables, fruit trees, berries, herbs…making our own laundry soap and other cleaning products, shampoos, bar soaps, lotions, herbal medicines, breads, canning and drying all our food, sewing a lot of our clothes, knitting our socks, spinning our wool, hope you get the idea) would love to share more about our situation so as to encourage those who are also getting started or thinking about it.
SimpleHaven evolved into an experiment in off-grid lifestyle choice. It has been almost 10 years now since I started. Some people invest in old cars which they work on every weekend. I have SimpleHaven. I was inspired by the book by Scott and Helen Nearing, “Living the Good Life”
SimpleHaven is located on 40 dry high plains acres adjacent to state trust land at the base of a mountain on the front range of the Colorado Rockies. It started with recycling a ~950sqft cabin. Which was moved to this site. I designed a solar wind hybrid power system using my background in electronics and a book called “Living on 12 Volts”. It has been adequate and reliable. House was wired for 110v so DC is converted to AC for use on all house sockets. Parts were not so readily available as they are today. There are somethings I would do differently, with the knowlege I gained over the years. Water is hauled now, due to almost 10 years of drought, methane drilling pulling out ground water and two dry wells. The 1200 gal underground cistern gravity feeds to the house, where pressure is boosted via a 12 volt pump for faucets, shower, etc. Hot water is on demand, heating via a thermostatically controlled propane “wood look” stove and blower. I have posted a link to my FB album, hopefully it allows viewing access.
We have been living off-the-grid in upstate NY for 12 years now. Our home was a hunting camp in the state forest and we have been remodeling it and working on it ever since. You have been to my other blog, Homesteading On the Internet, where I write about our lifestyle. A lifestyle that I call “Modern Homesteading.” We use solar and soon will be adding a wind turbine. I believe the way we live will be the way of the future, high tech, with some old fashioned methods of long ago. My site Solar Baby details our system, which is affordable for most people. Little by little adding to it as we can afford it. Soon we hope to have running water in the house, and some other changes are coming also.
Thank you for sharing. I think your lifestyle is just amazingly wonderful, and I hope that my husband and I can get there with solar.
I pray everyday that we can somehow get off the grid.
We live totally of grid in the backwoods in Southern California.
We have a small portable solar panel to charge our laptops and phones. We have satellite phones (there is no cell service here), nor is there electric service. We have a propane refrigerator. We have a wood stove for heat, cooking and to heat my fashioned iron. I have a treadle sewing machine, hand operated washing machine with a hand cranked wringer, and a clothes line to dry our laundry. We have oil lamps for lighting. When it is hot we cook outside. We have a solar shower
outside, and an outhouse bathroom. We have a well with handpump
for our water. We have a garden and fruit trees. We hunt and fish and gather wild food too. We have a dog and a couple of horses. We are planning to raise some cattle in the future. We tried raising chickens, but the coyotes ate them. Our cabin has one very large room downstairs and a large sleeping loft upstairs. We have sky lights in addition to our windows for daytime lighting. My husband commutes to the city to work.
I stay home and cook, sew, knit, crochet, tend to the garden, animal care, and when I have time I do leather work as my hobby. We have everything we need and want. We live a very happy life.
I have been living off grid with my wife and kids for 3 years and we love it! It is a way of life now. The straw that broke the camels back was when the electric company wanted 9K to run power to our home (power runs in front of our property)so we decided to invest that into alt energy.
My family of four moved off grid 8 months ago and laugh at how easy it is. We wanted to get out onto our land to begin building our homestead complete with a cordwood house. We currently live in a garage with a wood cookstove as our heating and coking source. We are just now putting in a hot water heater.
Between the hydro company and the pole contracter, we were looking at 15k plus a lifetime of bills. instead we invested in our solar system and there is in going back. Very little sacrifice with a lot of rewards.
I homesteaded 5 acres of land in east central alaska. this land was staked under the old federal homestead act of 1860. i built a small cabin on the land and lived there several years summer and winter. the land was 4 miles from the highway up into the mountains on a very rough trail. difinitely off the grid. that was my second cabin to build in alaska. i’m looking at nevada for some off grid living. i prefer a state or county where i can build a nice little place without all the gov interference. the first cabin that i put together was a log cabin 15×35 feet in which my wife and i and my 3 sons lived for 2 years with 7 years all together in that remote area. i wouldn’t trade off grid living for anything. Anyone can build a nice place to live in. doesn’t have to be the taj. i want to go solar and mouldering toilet and gardening. and be pleasant to my neighbors if there are any.
Terrence thanks for sharing your story. I hope you find the right place in Nevada or wherever you end up. I had to look up ‘moldering’ toilet on Google. We call them composting toilets. I thought perhaps there was a different option out there.
Just a heads up on the toilets. Most composting toilets are bucket affairs and are dumped when full onto a compost pile. Other have small holding tanks that give an end product. It is an alright way to do it. Moulding toilets have comtainers that when full are switched to another container. The full one is left to sit for 2 years, at that time you can use it on the vegatable garden safely.
I moved off-grid in 1976, to our land in West Virginia. We had no electricity, used a gravity feed spring and propane for cooking and hot water, heated with wood. We grew most of our food, raised a lot of animals as well as sorghum molasses and other crops. Then my first husband and I divorced. I went to work, remarried and continued the same lifestyle until 1989 or so when we had electricity put in. We drilled a well then too (the spring had gone dry) and I was in college. We stopped almost all farming and attempts to be off-grid for about 20 years. But I missed the freedom of self-sufficiency and we started back down that road. Now we have free natural gas, we raise almost all our food and I provide most of our income with storytelling performances and through selling vintage stuff on ebay. We’re not totally off-grid but we’re at a good balance for us at our age (60). We raise herbs, turkeys, chickens for meat and eggs, honeybees, and many vegetables and fruits. We also forage for wild food. I love this life, and would not trade it. I’ve tuned out the media–no TV here for years–and don’t read newspapers. I just live my life, my way. Uncle Sam still digs into our pockets from time to time, but this is a manageable lifestyle and one that allows so much freedom.
Granny Sue thanks for sharing your story here and on the post about what living off grid means to you. It sounds like you’ve had a rich, wonderful life so far. Here’s to many more years of the same!
E.
We moved to the Ozarks in April of 2011. We bought a small unfinished cabin 12X16 with 20 acres. We enclosed the covered porch to make our cabin 16X20. We purchased 2 100watt solar panels and 5 12V batteries. This has worked to provide plenty of electricity for our lights, tv (we don’t watch much but do use a regular antenna which gives us 5 channels as clear as cable), misc. other small appliances. We have a propane stove and oven and a nice wood stove for outside. We use a composting toilet(and an outhouse outside, haul water, and use water catchment barrels on the cabin and the barn.
We both work in town (30 minutes one way) at least for now. We didn’t have time to get a good garden spot started when moving here but plan a large one for the upcoming season. We have goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, horses, and dogs.
We left high paying jobs, a large house (4-5 bedroom), and a lot of stress to come and live in this calm and rewarding lifestyle. I could go on and on about all of the things we have accomplished and some of the small failures that backed us up a few steps to begin again.
I’ve become more and more interested in leaving the city life for something closer to nature. I live in Atlanta, and this city is really starting to make me a bitter person. I’d like to buy land in North Georgia so that I can stay near to my family. Has anyone here moved off the grid in Georgia or maybe North Carolina/Southern Tennessee?
I’m completely new to this whole concept, and fascinated to know that there are so many others who share my mindset. I’m 28 years old and looking to build my future away from the city.
Thanks!
Oct 5th, 2011 at 5:20 pm
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