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A remote UK community living off-grid
- arm85 8y agoThat article includes a comment from resident Hugh Piggott, somewhat of a rockstar in the DIY wind turbine world. http://scoraigwind.co.uk/about/ http://scoraigwind.co.uk/about/
- bjpirt 8y agoI was pleasantly surprised to see this too - I bought a charge controller directly from Hugh to load control an immersion element direct from DC solar and he was extremely knowledgeable and helpful.
- arm85 8y agoYes, I've purchased the designs to one of his turbines.
- vram22 8y agoGetting Not Found for that link right now. Just FYI. Will try again later.
- arm85 8y agoPerhaps the ycombinator equivalent to being slash dotted has occurred. Here's a copy https://web.archive.org/web/20181013192728/http://scoraigwind.co.uk/about/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181013192728/http://scoraigwin...
- vram22 8y agoThank you. Update: That link worked. Looks like a good article.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoHe was into wind power before wind power was cool.
- creep 8y agoI kind of like this purely documentary-style article. Simply pictures and quotes. It really pulled me in. I've always wanted to live remotely but I'm not yet finished with school. One day! I live in the rockies. Most of that part of Alberta is a national park, but I think I could find some land and build a little house. I'm surprised that one fella was building windmills. Definitely something to aspire to.
- MrTonyD 8y agoAfter reading about the Biosphere project, I've always thought that there should be a bunch of similar projects - some with an emphasis on government policy choices and some with an emphasis on economic systems and self-sufficiency choices. Why not? Countless billions are already spent on doing these things wrong. Why not figure out how to create a high-functioning society which can be self-sufficient? With robots, AI, and power, it seems like a lot should be possible now. There should no longer be a need for self-sufficiency to mean hard labor and high risk (unless that is desired.)
- bluGill 8y agoAn interesting idea, but you have to account for issues: Small communities tend to do well. People who believe in the policy they are implementing will work to make sure it secedes, while those who disbelieve will try to make it fail. Your subjects cannot be blind to the policy.
- MrTonyD 8y agoWell, there are many such issues that it is possible to bring up. Do we really understand which specific issues are related to community size? Have we tried any mitigation techniques? Any ways to force a small community to have characteristics of a large community in order to test new theories?
- adrianN 8y agoIt is pretty hard to build an off-grid society that is capable of producing the high technology needed to sustain it. Raw materials for windmills and solar panels don't grow on trees unfortunately.
- MrTonyD 8y agoIt is possible to define starting conditions. The goal is to test theories - and many theories may assume that automation will solve many problems in the future. (If we create utopia and it needs supercomputers, well, we can then invest in figuring out what it would take to build those supercomputers.)
- rb808 8y agoMust be nice to live in a country where you can live without working, pay no taxes and still get free healthcare and university.
- peacemaker 8y agoThe healthcare part is correct - you'll get that regardless of your working situation. But university is not free in the UK. Also, if you go for long periods of not paying any "national insurance" (similar to social security) you can actually not receive the govenment pension on retirement. Still, having the major stress removed of worrying about healthcare is reason enough to enjoy living in the UK over the US.
- moonbug 8y ago> But university is not free in the UK. It is in Scotland.
- gambiting 8y agoOnly for Scots or for EU citizens - English people have to pay(due to the fact that Scots willing to study in England have to pay for their universities, to it's reciprocal).
- dasmoth 8y agoI think the requirement is "normally living in Scotland". (I'm not 100% sure how this is enforced. It rather seems as though getting a cheap flat north of the border and declaring that as your normal residence for the duration of studies could be worthwhile if you can afford it...)
- smcl 8y agoI originally thought this was based on N years of schooling in Scotland for some value of N but after a bit of searching it seems the "normally resident in Scotland" bit isn't really very well defined. It's debatable whether it's very ethical to do what you suggested - though I don't imagine it's particularly common.
- CalRobert 8y agoI wonder if people get hassled to no end by planning boards about one-off dwellings, infrastructure, etc. It's wonderful to see this sort of thing still exists, and you can in fact have a home without working on dumb shit that doesn't matter (aka most jobs) for 5-10 years to pay for it.
- sclangdon 8y agoWales introduced the One Planet scheme in 2011 to try and make this easier [0] (it's debatable whether it is, in-fact easier). The Lammas eco-village [1] in Wales is very similar to the one in the OP, and is one of the driving forces for this kind of movement (and the One Planet scheme). [0] https://gov.wales/docs/desh/publications/090521susdev1wales1planeten.pdf https://gov.wales/docs/desh/publications/090521susdev1wales1... [1] http://lammas.org.uk/en/welcome-to-lammas/ http://lammas.org.uk/en/welcome-to-lammas/
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- jonahrd 8y agoThe idea reminds me very much of the original Wicker Man, but I'm sure there's no cult on this island!
- ginko 8y agoHah, yeah. The Wicker Man was also the first thing I thought of.
- starbeast 8y agoThe local folk seem friendly, but do get noticeably uneasy and fix their smiles, showing slightly too much teeth, whenever visiting strangers ask why the wind turbine is required to be fireproof with sharpened metal blades.
- arethuza 8y agoNitpick: It's not an island - they are at the end of peninsula between Loch Broom and Little Loch Broom.
- CalRobert 8y agoReading this I'm intrigued if only because it's a place a kid could play in the street, or equivalent, and not get killed by a driver. We have too few refuges from cars.
- wbl 8y agoCentral cities can be made car free too.
- CalRobert 8y agoTrue, and I looked at Ghent for this very reason, but it's quite a bit more expensive.
- Kratisto 8y agoIs Ghent car free? I don't know anything about the city.
- oh_sigh 8y agoThe center is car free and around the periphery you can drive, but even on the outskirts there are still fewer cars than one might expect if you are familiar with similar sized American or English cities.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- toyg 8y agoThere is a certain degree of hypocrisy lingering: "I want to know where everything comes from and be in control and yadda yadda", but then you're using yellow plastic gloves probably made in China by some pollution-heavy factory, dishwashers, plastic chairs and sheep-shavers made by people doing those jobs you so despise, and going back to Russia every day in something that is unlikely to be a wind-powered boat... And how is the wind-power guy "off-grid", when his website was an early internet hit and he (like the violin maker) probably derives an income from the "outer world" thanks to his activities? Living in a society is always a compromise, these people have just struck a slightly different subset of trade-offs -- but to sustain their lifestyle, they are still largely dependent on the wider world being what it is.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- upofadown 8y agoPretty sure from context that the person quoted did not actually want to know where every single thing in their lives came from. Off-grid does not have anything to do with income.
- Trufa 8y agoIt's impossible to be an alive human and don't have any contradiction. To have a couple of contradictions is a show of a reasonable willingness to compromise rather than a complete dismissal of a lifestyle choice calling or calling it hypocritical. Since I sometimes have to drive my car I won't ever ride my bike.
- vram22 8y ago"No man is an island" from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasi... Excerpt: No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.[22] [Donne's original spelling and punctuation] Sorry, not all that relevant, but it sounds too good, so couldn't resist quoting it.
- asianthrowaway 8y agoSounds insanely boring. All the people interviewed come off as misanthropes.
- jaycolson 8y agoi romantically think that I'd enjoy this arrangement (somewhere more tropical however) ... but in reality I'm not sure how long I could last without fiber to the home ... j/j
- martinald 8y agoLooks like they have decent LTE coverage on EE at least, which I was surprised at.
- newaccoutnas 8y agoSignals can propogate fairly far when there's no buildings or other stuff in the way (just sea!).
- dasmoth 8y agoThis is why I'm excited about Starlink (and potentially other big LEO constellations as well -- but Starlink is the one I'm most optimistic about right now).
- zeveb 8y agoAh, 2018! A dizzying time when images on a web page are blurry or altogether missing unless one has enabled JavaScript! (the article is interesting, but why-oh-why does the Beeb site show blurry photographs instead of sharp ones? We've had an imagine tag for decades now!)
- Nadya 8y agoWeb dev here: They're lazy-loading the images to give a perceived faster load time. You take a super low quality (often blurry so it doesn't just look low quality) placeholder and swap it in for a proper image as needed. This is overall a slower loadtime and a bit wasteful (sending useless junk over the wire) but appears to load faster for end users since the time-to-first-render is quicker. Of course, lazy-loading the images requires Javascript to be enabled to detect when the page has finished loading and it is now "safe" to load the higher quality images.
- golangnews 8y agoIt is faster and more efficient on a long image-heavy page like this, because they're not loading the larger images until the user scrolls to them (try reloading the page and scrolling quickly to see). So it's not entirely pointless.
- gnud 8y agoSee, now, the good way of doing this is to specify the exact dimensions of the image in html/css. Same perceived load speed of the page, no junk.
- Nadya 8y agoBut won't work on any device at any screen size ("responsive design"). There's a way to do server-side rendering for image assets in this regard but the front-end devs in charge of this kind of thing rarely know how to set something like that up.
- vram22 8y agoApropos: A few years ago, I went to a remote resort (in India) for a vacation. It was in a forested mountainous area. A few km. from the resort, there was an earthship. It had been built over a period by a British guy who lived in it. Rather large. Like a cylinder capped with a roof. Lots of glass to let in sunlight. Partly self-sufficient, for water, electricity via solar, heating via the glass windows, etc. (it was in a cold place). It was at the edge of a high cliff with a direct line-of-sight view to the plains. He had even set up some kind of way to catch the Internet signal from the plains and supplied it to the rooms of the resort for a fee. He was also a remote web developer. Rather cool.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoWhat's an earthship?
- vram22 8y agoGood question. Sorry, I had meant to put the link in my above comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship Also see permaculture, a related thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
- newnewpdro 8y agoThere's a decent film [1] documenting their origin and architect Mike Reynolds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Warrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Warrior
- vinc 8y agoDoes he have a website? I'd love to read more about his place! I spent a couple of years traveling and living in remote permaculture communities before starting my own project six months ago, so far I feel like I'm living the dream but I'm just at the beginning. Having some successful examples help a lot.
- vram22 8y ago
- Finbarr 8y agoMy great uncle, Tom Forsyth, lived in Scoraig and was involved in the community for decades. He was highly intelligent, well traveled, and was an unusual and interesting character. https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16610388.obituary-tom-forsyth-crofter-and-pioneer-of-eigg-land-reform/ https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16610388.obituary-tom...
- walrus01 8y agoOne of the interesting things now about being off grid, is that the problem of generating sufficient kWh per month via photovoltaics is very nearly solved. Even in winter. If you can afford to buy solar panels by the pallet load, the cost is about $0.42 to $0.58/W STC rating. Then it becomes a relatively low tech construction question of how do you build a ground mount for something like qty 80, 360W 72-cell panels, each of which measures 2.00 x 1.00 meters in size. In the northern hemisphere, you'll have to size the PV+Wind system's predicted kWh per month production to the shortest sunlight days of the year, from mid November to mid February. December and January are particularly bad. If you have a home that you are certain will not draw more than 1500kWH per month in those times, the PV system will need to be able to produce a cumulative 2000kWh in December. This does mean that you'll have a significant excess of kWh in all other, longer months of the year, even enough to run small air conditioners from late May to mid September. Forget ever using electrical element heating, which is 100% efficient from a thermodynamics perspective, but uses a ridiculous amount of kWh per heating unit. Household heating will have to be designed another way, with passive + insulation + natural gas/propane + wood stove + other BTU heat sources considered. Anything that's not electrical, unless you're quite wealthy and can afford to build a gargantuan ground mount PV system. The harder problem is the energy storage. Until the advent of things like the tesla powerwall and similar Li-Ion based storage systems, people bought massive banks of AGM lead acid batteries and replaced them every 5 years at great cost. The cycle lifetime of those is quite limited, they're huge and heavy, and their cycle lifetime is significantly shortened if you regularly cycle them on a daily basis below 40% state of charge. As economics of scale for battery storage improve (due to market demand for electric cars, drops in $ per kWh stored with 21700 batteries, etc), the fully-built system $ per kWh cost will drop further. It's totally possible to combine wind and PV charging feeds, with multiple different charge controllers, into one battery bank. It's not going to be as cheap as electricity at $0.08/kWh in Seattle from the mostly hydroelectric fed grid utility, but amortizing the cost of the big PV system over many years you can achieve a fully off grid cost in the sub $0.20/kWh range.
- starbeast 8y ago>Forget ever using electrical element heating, which is 100% efficient from a thermodynamics perspective, but uses a ridiculous amount of kWh per heating unit. Insulate to passive house standard and old lightbulbs throw enough heat - https://www.nypassivehouse.org/how-three-light-bulbs-help-keep-my-house-72-degrees/ https://www.nypassivehouse.org/how-three-light-bulbs-help-ke...
- ckdarby 8y agoI have considered living off-grid out in the "middle of no where" for some time. One of the things that has always held me back is access to decent internet. Has anyone found a way around this or has set up any major "wireless tower" to get internet from another distant location?
- ryacko 8y ago/r/homelab has examples of people using wifi point to point links.
- Scoundreller 8y agoA little help for the lazy: https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/ https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/
- DoreenMichele 8y agoFrom what I have read, it is kind of a "movement" to develop co-ops or other DIY rural internet. It is being compared to the movement to electrify farms about a hundred years ago in the US. So it's not hard to find stuff on the subject, for example: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2689496/Remote-villages-DIY-broadband-Frustrated-residents-dig-trenches-lay-new-cables-BT-refuse-cost.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2689496/Remote-vill... https://offgridsurvival.com/offgridinternet/ https://offgridsurvival.com/offgridinternet/
- contingencies 8y agoI would hazard a guess that internet is generally easier to solve than questions like mental preparedness for isolation.
- Architect0126 8y agoYou can use satellite internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access
- DoreenMichele 8y agoIt's a beautiful, surprisingly rich piece with details about the history and geography of the area. It makes me feel like someone who lived there could start a blog and probably make money waxing poetic about life there and many people would enjoy living vicariously through them. Many people fantasize about a simpler life, but actually making it happen can take years or simply be completely out of reach. There is probably a huge market for catering to feeding those fantasies and satisfying them to some degree virtually.
- black_puppydog 8y agoIn the scuttlebutt community there are actually quite a few off-grid people hanging around. They're part of what makes ssb so interesting. This is just stuff that's very nitty-gritty, dirty, and somehow meaningful, compared to lots of other social media posts. :)
- vram22 8y agoSince there is a lot of interest in this thread, and also triggered by sclangdon's comment here about the Lammas eco-village in Wales, sharing some terms / URLs which I came across recently, so that people can search for / visit them to get more information on related topics: - eco-village network - intentional communities - https://www.ic.org/ https://www.ic.org/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_community The Whole Earth Catalog, which was mentioned by Steve Jobs in his Stanford commencement speech ("Stay hungry. Stay foolish."), was also a great resource for these kinds of things. I was lucky to get to read it when my uncle from the States brought us a copy on a visit. Tons of useful and interesting products and techniques mentioned and described in it, including, e.g. Japanese saws, which I mentioned on HN some time ago. http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog Excerpt: [ The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, "do it yourself" (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan "access to tools". ]