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What you're missing there is maintenance. I live off grid, I have nothing but reliable systems here. Stuff breaks every single day. Nature happens - we get lig

What you're missing there is maintenance. I live off grid, I have nothing but reliable systems here. Stuff breaks every single day. Nature happens - we get lightning strikes, floods, fires, freezing temperatures, droughts - stuff breaks. When we moved here, some stuff had been done by the previous owners. No plans or anything, just "hunt the burst water line under the concrete" and all that fun. The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is. If you have an off-grid home that you can't maintain, you aren't going to last long there.

tomcam 6y ago
> I live off grid, I have nothing but reliable systems here. Stuff breaks every single day One of HN’s most important comments on this subject ever IMHO
nunodonato 6y ago
This. I live off-grid as well, you really need to be ready to DIY. People looking for easy off-grid solutions are fooling themselves.stay in your flat
- swader999 6y ago
  Living rural, on grid on an acreage and I'm still amazed at how much work it is. Some of it is self inflicted. Redoing my footer drains by hand, building a cistern for extra water storage, land scaping, finish a basement, gardening, tuning teleposts, bobcat, mini excavator, snow fencing to reduce plowing, tree planting and protecting, fencing, too many maintenance and repair tasks to list. There's always another project waiting...
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    OP might want to go live somewhere sufficiently rural but partially on-grid to try it out and see if it's for him. I'd suggest something with at least access through a gravel road, traditional electric provider, but with off-grid well and septic might be a good start. When you're at the point where you don't need to call anyone to do something for you, then maybe you're ready to live full time off grid.
blabitty 6y ago
>The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is. I have this mentality with my normal on grid tract house. My saying is "at least I know what corners I cut"
christophilus 6y ago
> The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is. This sounds similar to the NIH syndrome in some software companies. I’m still trying to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. In software, I tend to err on the side of NIH. In life, I am almost never DIY. I suspect I’m out of balance in both regards.
- hef19898 6y ago
  My take on it, for what it's worth, is that DIY can go the extreme from building your own tools to just use plug and play tech, doing only the "plug" part yourself. Same goes for NIH, but I'm no software engineer and only recently restarted DIY for certain things.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  A popular guideline that makes sense to me is to control the tech that you compete on and outsource everything else. Eg if "search" quality is a competitive differentiation, make sure you implement search yourself. Your goal is to beat the rest of the market in search quality so buying a commodity search product that anyone else can buy doesn't make sense. You are directly rewarded for paying the extra NIH cost to go the extra mile for your customers. For everything else, there's little benefit to paying the extra cost of NIH. An excessively fancy/powerful support ticketing system, for example, isn't going to help you get more customers. Few people might care how much nicer the checkout/payment page is than on other products, so you can outsource that. Most areas in real life don't benefit from extra quality either. For eg, the extra quality you might get from hunting/farming your own own food makes little difference to most people, so most choose to outsource that.
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
Me and my partner rebuilt a log cabin into a year-round house over the period of a year. Only bearing walls remained. Re-insulated, expanded and changed the roof, added a bathroom, sleeping lofts, etc. She did most light work while I was holding down the day job to secure the down-payment and mortgage, and I would handle the heavy stuff on the weekends. The zone is not ideal for wind or solar, so we are connected to electrical. We had a contractor help with bath tiling, he did plumbing and electric hook-ups, an electrician did what was required by code for the electric system. Every single one of the licensed pros had cut corners. The electrician did not secure the outlets to the walls properly, just enough for them to start getting loose after 2 years. One weak screw instead of four. I was afraid of electric for a while. Only had the energy to read the code, some books and watch some youtube videos and re-secure all the outlets and set up 2 extra outlets, with channel cable dragging, etc, about 3 years ago. The plumbing had multiple mistakes as well, wrong tank positioning, wrong main drain placement, no main cut-off to the tank, did not get a filter hook-up or a drain valve, etc, and the hot water boiler did not get a proper set-up for easy maintenance (the magnesium sacrificial anode cannot be removed, too close to the ceiling, you have to dismount the whole unit). If I had the money and not to have to work during the build process, I would have built a small house first, learning everything about how to do it right and observing the "pros" as they go along. But hey, we have a house that total spend was 1/3 of the market, enough land to build a second one, and I am a different man from the experience. It was my first experience with engineering outside of software. Trust no one, do your own research, plan, experiment and verify apply even more in "physical world" engineering. It's nice to become more and more self-reliant with construction skills. I just serviced the indoor plumbing, changed 3 taps, installed a water-filter hook-up and filter, including pipes, and plan to assemble a big water filtration system, myself, in the summer. $ 5K to 7K for filter tank, controller and installation by contractor, vs $600 for system and medium from manufacturer, and install it yourself. Whether you plan to go off-grid, build, be your own general contractor, or even just buy a property, doing things yourself, provided you can follow engineering principles and values, is always the best bet. You want reliability. The pros want to make a profit. Life pro tip - if planning to participate in construction in any way, audit the locality and how strict vs smart their code and inspections are.
- 6y ago
bregma 6y ago
It's my experience that if you're living off-grid you're probably remote, and if you're remote and even not off-grid you have to do the DIY thing because you're not going to get trades to come out and do it for you. Few plumbers or electricians are willing to make a 2-or-more-hours round trip on the road at any price. If you have an off-grid home you're not willing to maintain, you're going to spend a lot of time sitting alone in the cold and dark until nature finally recycles you.

tomcam 6y ago

> I live off grid, I have nothing but reliable systems here. Stuff breaks every single day One of HN’s most important comments on this subject ever IMHO

nunodonato 6y ago

This. I live off-grid as well, you really need to be ready to DIY. People looking for easy off-grid solutions are fooling themselves.stay in your flat

swader999 6y ago
Living rural, on grid on an acreage and I'm still amazed at how much work it is. Some of it is self inflicted. Redoing my footer drains by hand, building a cistern for extra water storage, land scaping, finish a basement, gardening, tuning teleposts, bobcat, mini excavator, snow fencing to reduce plowing, tree planting and protecting, fencing, too many maintenance and repair tasks to list. There's always another project waiting...
- ryandrake 6y ago
  OP might want to go live somewhere sufficiently rural but partially on-grid to try it out and see if it's for him. I'd suggest something with at least access through a gravel road, traditional electric provider, but with off-grid well and septic might be a good start. When you're at the point where you don't need to call anyone to do something for you, then maybe you're ready to live full time off grid.

blabitty 6y ago

>The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is. I have this mentality with my normal on grid tract house. My saying is "at least I know what corners I cut"

christophilus 6y ago

> The major advantage of DIY is that you end up being able to repair your own stuff, to know how it works, to know where it is. This sounds similar to the NIH syndrome in some software companies. I’m still trying to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. In software, I tend to err on the side of NIH. In life, I am almost never DIY. I suspect I’m out of balance in both regards.

hef19898 6y ago
My take on it, for what it's worth, is that DIY can go the extreme from building your own tools to just use plug and play tech, doing only the "plug" part yourself. Same goes for NIH, but I'm no software engineer and only recently restarted DIY for certain things.
themacguffinman 6y ago
A popular guideline that makes sense to me is to control the tech that you compete on and outsource everything else. Eg if "search" quality is a competitive differentiation, make sure you implement search yourself. Your goal is to beat the rest of the market in search quality so buying a commodity search product that anyone else can buy doesn't make sense. You are directly rewarded for paying the extra NIH cost to go the extra mile for your customers. For everything else, there's little benefit to paying the extra cost of NIH. An excessively fancy/powerful support ticketing system, for example, isn't going to help you get more customers. Few people might care how much nicer the checkout/payment page is than on other products, so you can outsource that. Most areas in real life don't benefit from extra quality either. For eg, the extra quality you might get from hunting/farming your own own food makes little difference to most people, so most choose to outsource that.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

Me and my partner rebuilt a log cabin into a year-round house over the period of a year. Only bearing walls remained. Re-insulated, expanded and changed the roof, added a bathroom, sleeping lofts, etc. She did most light work while I was holding down the day job to secure the down-payment and mortgage, and I would handle the heavy stuff on the weekends. The zone is not ideal for wind or solar, so we are connected to electrical. We had a contractor help with bath tiling, he did plumbing and electric hook-ups, an electrician did what was required by code for the electric system. Every single one of the licensed pros had cut corners. The electrician did not secure the outlets to the walls properly, just enough for them to start getting loose after 2 years. One weak screw instead of four. I was afraid of electric for a while. Only had the energy to read the code, some books and watch some youtube videos and re-secure all the outlets and set up 2 extra outlets, with channel cable dragging, etc, about 3 years ago. The plumbing had multiple mistakes as well, wrong tank positioning, wrong main drain placement, no main cut-off to the tank, did not get a filter hook-up or a drain valve, etc, and the hot water boiler did not get a proper set-up for easy maintenance (the magnesium sacrificial anode cannot be removed, too close to the ceiling, you have to dismount the whole unit). If I had the money and not to have to work during the build process, I would have built a small house first, learning everything about how to do it right and observing the "pros" as they go along. But hey, we have a house that total spend was 1/3 of the market, enough land to build a second one, and I am a different man from the experience. It was my first experience with engineering outside of software. Trust no one, do your own research, plan, experiment and verify apply even more in "physical world" engineering. It's nice to become more and more self-reliant with construction skills. I just serviced the indoor plumbing, changed 3 taps, installed a water-filter hook-up and filter, including pipes, and plan to assemble a big water filtration system, myself, in the summer. $ 5K to 7K for filter tank, controller and installation by contractor, vs $600 for system and medium from manufacturer, and install it yourself. Whether you plan to go off-grid, build, be your own general contractor, or even just buy a property, doing things yourself, provided you can follow engineering principles and values, is always the best bet. You want reliability. The pros want to make a profit. Life pro tip - if planning to participate in construction in any way, audit the locality and how strict vs smart their code and inspections are.

6y ago

bregma 6y ago

It's my experience that if you're living off-grid you're probably remote, and if you're remote and even not off-grid you have to do the DIY thing because you're not going to get trades to come out and do it for you. Few plumbers or electricians are willing to make a 2-or-more-hours round trip on the road at any price. If you have an off-grid home you're not willing to maintain, you're going to spend a lot of time sitting alone in the cold and dark until nature finally recycles you.