Bees are constantly searching for nectar and pollen, so make sure they can find plenty of flowering plants in your garden. Plant many different kinds of flowering plants, so the bees will find something in bloom from early spring until autumn.

You can also provide them with housing. A chunk of wood with holes drilled into it makes the perfect home for mason bees. If you want something that is better looking, you could get a ready made bee house or make one yourself.

In addition to housing and flowers, bees need water. A nearby pond or bird bath is not a safe water source for bees: they can get trapped in the water’s surface tension. A small container filled with sand and water is preferred. Keep the sand wet and the bees will be able to drink from it.

The best place to start saving precious tap water would probably be the toilet. A few gallons of water are washed down every time you flush the toilet, often needlessly. Saving water and money can easily be achieved by reducing the amount of water that it flushed down the toilet.

A standard toilet will empty it’s water reservoir each time you push down on the lever or yank the chain. All we have to do is modify the internals of the reservoir a bit to let the toilet flapper cut off the water flow as soon as you let go of the handle. The exact modification needed depends on the type of flapper installed in your toilet.

Some flush systems have a floater that keeps the toilet flapper open. If the floater is attached to the flapper, you might be able to remove the floatation device altogether. When the floater is integrated into the flapper, drilling a hole into the float will disable it. You could also add some steel washers or other weight to counteract the floatation device.

The flapper in our toilet is the float and it couldn’t be drilled without making the flapper leak, so I had to add some weights to it. The toilet now only lets the water flow as long as you hold down the handle, as soon as you let go the water stops. This saves a lot of water and still leaves you with enough flushing power for the big boys.

Some companies sell special weights or other devices to achieve the same effect, but I think it is ridiculous to buy these if you can simply use some old junk to accomplish the same. The reason you want to use less water to flush your toilet is either because you want to save money, live a little greener or both. Not buying a commercial device for this purpose will save you money and save the environment because you will not have the packaging to dispose of.

Our water usage is a little over 400 liters (or about 110 gallons) a day. Our household supports two adults and two kids. Looking at the average water usage for Germany, which is just under 200 liters a day, per person, we aren’t doing too bad. Comparing our use to the 575 liters per person, per day, for the average US citizen and just under 500 liters for Australians, I’d say we are doing pretty damn good!

Still, 400 liters is a lot of water! This is not just plain water we’re talking about, it’s grade A drinking water that pours out of our tap. And how much of it do we drink? Let’s see, most of our beverages are bottled, so the only water we drink is what we use to make coffee and tea, maybe 2 liters a day, 3 liters tops! Add to that the water used for cooking and brushing our teeth, I’d say about 10 liters a day would be plenty of drinking water for our family of four.

The other 390 liters a day are wasted on showering, washing dishes and clothing and flushing the toilet. Now I would prefer somewhat clean filtered water to wash myself, my clothing and the dishes, but it does not have to be drinking quality. And to flush the toilet, just plain water from any river or creek or untreated rainwater would do just fine.

Since we have a huge rainwater tank (12.000 liters) I’m going to look into using some of that free water. I’m sure we are not paying to water the lawn next summer, but I’m also going to look into the cost and labor involved in using the collected rainwater to flush the toilets. That should save quite a few buckets of drinking water.

If you are interested in average per person water usage in different countries, have a look here

These past 2 months have been very eventful, but we are about settled now. The first 4000 liter fish tank has been set up inside the greenhouse. For now it houses goldfish. We’ll have to see how temperatures develop in the greenhouse throughout the winter. I will probably build a shed around the fish tank and connected grow bed and equip it with a grow light to be able to grow some veggies this winter.

Sorry, no pictures at the moment, as the USB cable for the camera is still in one of the unpacked moving boxes…

Solar energy, for instance, will be paid at a higher rate than power generated with a diesel generator because it is obviously much cleaner energy. In Europe you will also get a better rate if you burn vegetable oil instead of diesel, but you will have to show proof of the origin of your oil, so waste vegetable oil collected from restaurants will not get you the higher rate, although the collected oil will be cheaper than buying new vegetable oil, possibly still making it an interesting alternative on the bottom line.

The amount of energy you can sell back also differs from each power company to the next. While some will buy back as much as you can generate, others will only buy back as much power as you buy from them, effectively leaving your power meter at the zero mark.

Since we are currently looking for a new house, I don’t know which power company we will be dealing with. Assuming, for now, that I can only sell back the amount of electricity that I use, generating our own power will not bring in any money. After working out the fuel usage for the generator and assuming that I have to buy vegetable oil to run the generator, plus the generators initial purchase price and ongoing maintenance, the bottom line is that the power from the utility company will cost about the same or maybe even a little less.

However, the electricity is not the only thing I will be generating. A big part of the energy will be lost as heat. Lost if you don’t catch it, that is! Running the engines cooling water through a heat exchanger in the central heating system will have a positive effect on the total fuel consumption of the central heating.

The whole thing can also be turned around: so, instead of running an engine to cover your power needs and use the excess heat to complement your central heating system, you could also have the engine running to generate the heat to warm your water and house, while running a generator head along side to create electricity while you are heating. Sure, ultimately we are talking about the same system, that generates heat and power, but the sizing of each system would be different.

How our system will be sizes isn’t decided yet. We will first have to find a suitable house. Depending on the age and condition of the central heating system, we will then go one way or the other.

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)