Living off-grid
Posted on Nov 20, 2007 under Electricity, Off-Grid, Water |
Being self-sufficient typically refers to being able to provide your own food. When looking at utilities, like water and electricity, being your own provider is called living off-grid. While growing crops and keeping animals for food takes a lot of time and work, being able to cover all or part of your electricity and water usage is far easier. After the initial planning and installation an independent power or water system will only require a bit of maintenance every now and again.
People live off-grid for a number of reasons, some choose to, to save money, while others are forced to because of their location. What ever the reason, good planning beforehand can save a lot of trouble and grief down the road. The most important things to think about when planning your off-grid system are location, requirements and cost:
Location
Your location could narrow down the choices you have, running a diesel generator in a one bedroom, downtown apartment is something that I would not recommend. Local building regulations could come into play when you want to build a wind generator.
Requirements
How much power do you really need? Starting point should be your current power usage. The less power you need, the cheaper your system will be, so have a serious look at what uses all that electric power. Maybe there are some things you can do without or different. Things like a dryer take a lot of power to run, you could just hang your clothes on the line to dry and save some power. Electric stoves also need quite some power, a good alternative would be a gas stove. How about that big screen TV, do you really need that?
Make a list of all the electric devices you have and check how much power each of them consumes, they should all have a power rating on them somewhere. If you multiply the wattage of each device with the number of hours you have it switched on each month and divide that by 1000 you will have the total power consumption of your electrical device a month in kWh, which is the same unit of power that you can read on your electricity meter and electricity bills. For each device you should have a good think about whether you really need it or could live without. The devices you do need could have an alternative that uses far less power.
Costs
For most people the limiting factor is costs. You can have all the power you want from solar cells or a fancy big windmill, but these devices cost a lot of money. In the long run they will save you money or even make you a healthy profit, but the high up-front cost is more then most of us can handle.
A lot of people have build their own windmills from scrap with great success and share their experience on the internet for free. Find all the information you can and learn from the mistakes that others have made, so you don’t have to make them. I am still figuring out how much power our family would need to live off-grid. After that has been done, the search for our perfect off-grid system can start.
(note: the windmill picture was shamelessly ripped from The Back Shed)
