Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Some days I wonder what it must be like to live off the grid in a truly warm climate, like California. Sunshine year round, no snow covering your solar panels and I bet their generators never get jammed up with ice. While living off the grid in a cold climate has its challenges, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
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Living in a remote off-grid cabin about 200 miles from the arctic circle is not for the faint of heart. I thought we had rough winters here in Vermont, and I get cranky about our 100-day growing season. That’s nothing compared to the short 7-week growing season they have in northern Canada.
This guest post comes from Sarita Harbour at Off Grid Life. Sarita is a business and finance writer, blogger, homeschooling mom, and fledgling homesteader. She lives with her family off the grid in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
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Connecting to the power grid was one of the worst decisions we’ve made on our homestead. This is the story of how we connected to the grid only to voluntarily choose to live with it off, and still operate our homestead independently. After nearly 5 years living completely off the grid, here’s how we came to find ourselves living off the grid, even with a grid connection.
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Living off grid doesn’t mean giving up modern conveniences. There are a number of companies that make specialized off-grid appliances, and while they cost a bit more at the start, they’re built to last a lifetime. Our off-grid cabin has all the modern appliances, and while some are specialized for off-grid use, others are just efficient versions of standard household appliances.
Wood cook stoves at Bryant Stove and Music in Maine.
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It was our first summer living off the grid, and of course, we had to get chickens. Our established flock of ducks moved with us from our previous home, but we were starting fresh with baby chicks. We did what we’d always done…bought spring chicks and set them up in a Rubbermaid tote with a heat lamp. A heat lamp pulls a lot of electricity, and it only took a few hours for that heat lamp to completely drain our batteries.
Clearly raising chickens off the grid is a bit more complicated than a standard operation. It was time to re-learn how to raise chickens without electricity like our ancestors had for most of history.
Our cute baby chicks, enjoying the heat lamp in the first few hours after coming home, before the batteries were completely drained.
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When my husband and I found our off-grid homestead, it was more or less by accident. We were looking for our forever homestead, far back from the road and with plenty of space to stretch out. As it turns out, it’s hard to enjoy the type of privacy and independence we wanted when you’re tethered to a power pole.
I’m constantly asked how on earth you find an off-grid homestead, and there are fewer resources than you’d think. Plenty of people are looking for off-grid land, but traditional realtors are focusing on the suburbs. As preparedness becomes more mains stream, and more people leave the city for their homesteading dream, off-grid real estate sites are popping up right and left.
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After 6 years on our off-grid homestead, we’ve learned a thing or two about managing our systems to make sure they’re as dependable as possible. My husband and I both earn our living off the grid, largely from remote work that requires dependable power. No power may mean a quiet day in the garden or by the wood stove, but it also usually means no income that day which can’t happen too often.
For about 9 months of the year, we have a power surplus. We’ve been able to run a surprising number of luxuries off-grid, when we initially expected that we’d always be strictly budgeting electricity. Still, our off-grid setup is a bit undersized to get us through the winter, and when it goes down we cant make a living.
A dependable off-grid system is essential to living sustainably out here, especially while we still have a mortgage on our homestead.
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I’m in love with our attached greenhouse. When we found our off-grid homestead, I’ll admit the greenhouse was one of the main selling points. Finally, a convenient place for starting all my seedlings for our summer garden! I had no idea that the greenhouse would become such a part of our day to day lives, and truly essential for running our homestead.
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When my husband and I found our forever homestead, we had saved a sizable nest egg, but nowhere near enough to purchase it outright. We were in our 20’s and had no intention of waiting until we were middle-aged to start living the life we’d dreamed.
Taking on debt is never an appealing prospect, and we’re both opposed to it in principle, but we were willing to make an exception for a mortgage. We hadn’t planned on moving off the grid, but as we searched for property it, we didn’t have much luck with traditional properties. The only affordable properties were off the grid.
If we could find a way to make a stable, full-time income off grid then we could change our lives and circumstances now, not 20 years from now.
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When we found our off-grid homestead, we knew next to nothing about off-grid systems. We wanted to move to land in the country with room to stretch out, and we knew plenty about growing and preserving our own food. The thing is, it’s hard to find a property that’s remote and private that also has a grid connection. Or, more specifically, it was hard to find an affordable homestead with privacy.
We had a lot of preconceived notions about off-grid property. And there are a lot of things I wish we would have known going in.
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