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I live off grid. We started with a stone hut in a deep valley without cell signal, and no infrastructure, and now we’ve all the power we can use, all the water

I live off grid. We started with a stone hut in a deep valley without cell signal, and no infrastructure, and now we’ve all the power we can use, all the water we can use, and 140Mb/s internet. The whole “oh, we only need 3L of water per day and 500Wh is enough” lifestyle is unsustainable. I know, I’ve tried it, and I’ve seen many others go through it - you go gently mad spending your days managing your limited resources, and eventually give up. Power: we’ve 4.8kW of solar panels, a hydro generator that makes a continuous 280W through the winter months, and three small 150W nominal wind turbines, which also help in the winter. Storage is 84kWh of OPzS lead acid cells. 2x 5kW Victron multiplus for triple phase output, and their MPPTs for the various inputs. I also laid 500m of 18mm2 SWA cable from our powerhouse to the cabin we built, so we can have power here too. Stuck a 1:2 transformer at each end to get more carrying capacity. Water: there are a number of muddy, sulphurous seeps in the side of the valley. In the winter there’s water, in the summer, mud. Laid tubing with simple pre filters on the intakes down to a chain of IBCs 70m above the valley floor - 50 micron, 10 micron, 1 micron, carbon, then store in the IBCs. At each house (there’s both the mill and the cabin) I then re filter through a 1 micron sediment filter and a carbon block, as algae tend to grow in the tanks. For drinking, we have a simple reverse osmosis setup along with a UV block under each kitchen sink. As our fallback, basically for august when the river runs dry and the mud turns to dust, we’ve a submersible pump next to the hydro intake, which is a low spot in the bedrock and holds a pool of increasingly stagnant water in the summer. Still, our water treatment system makes it perfectly good for everything. Hot water, I took inspiration from someone on here, and built a pair of big damn heat exchangers - excess heat from stoves in winter, or from power in summer, gets dumped into 4000L of water in a heavily insulated bunker. I aim to keep it at 85C, as above that I risk melting things. There’s then 200m of coiled tubing in each bunker, through which flows the high pressure cold water (7bar), which comes out somewhere around 40-60C, depending on the season Sewerage, we are using above ground vermi composting tanks built from IBCs (IBCs are dead handy, very cheap used) - works a charm, no smells or anything. Grey water just goes to a soakaway. Internet: I’ve talked about this here before. Solar powered mast atop the valley with an atheros w/ openwrt, LTE with an LPDA antenna as our nearest cell mast is line of sight from there but 20km away, Wi-Fi relay using yagis to each point of consumption, and then APs dotted around so we have coverage over our few sq km. Heat in both houses is from a log stove. We’ve 11ha of forest, which we are clearing the dead but still standing trees (ash, oak) from, both for the sake of the forest and for the sake of us not freezing in the winter. We’re insulated up to the gunwales in the cabin, and the mill has a huge thermal mass. We have a dishwasher, a washing machine, home theatre with surround (and oh boy you can crank it when your nearest neighbour is 20km away), all the modern conveniences. Sure, it all had to be carried in by hand or on the aerial cableway, as the one thing we don’t have is road access, but I’m one who’s strongly in favour of “effort now, easy later”. What else… I use an rpi running openhab to monitor and control everything, from power production and consumption to water levels and quality, to the weather. I can’t control the weather, to be clear. Other things… our chainsaws are battery powered (makita’s 36V stuff packs an amazing punch, and no two-stroke screaming in your ear), as are our brushcutters, polesaws, everything. Only thing that uses fossils is the truck, and that will change. This year I’m planning on more infrastructure - probably a small monorail, as I’ve got bored of injuring myself carrying stuff up 45 degree inclines, and a large pond up the hill, for water storage, and possibly hydro, possibly pumped. I’m also thinking about building myself a proper workshop, as at the moment I just drag equipment around the forest and cover it with tarps for the weather, which is also getting boring! Oh, and I’ve grand plans to turn our ‘88 hilux into a strange beast - remove the elderly million mile diesel, add hub motors and as many batteries as I can cram into the engine bay and under the flatbed. That’s the main thing making me want a workshop. So, anyway - my point is sustainability. I’ve invested significant time and resources here over the last two years so that our life here is a sustainable one - ecologically, sure, but also for us - it’s enough work just being here - I don’t want to have to always be worrying about resource management too, and I want to be able to still live here when I’m a feeble old dodger.

dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
Hypothetically, could you grow weed off-grid?
kcindric 5y ago
Oh man, this is a great writeup! I really like your practical approach instead of a proof of concept that most off grid endeavors try to be. Do you maybe have a blog or pictures of your setup?
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  Nope - I’ve been in full time gulag mode since we got here in 2019, and while I’ve been intending to document this stuff, mostly so my wife can also run it if I fall off a roof or get crushed by a tree, it’s not my top priority - as and when I do, though, I’ll be sure to share it on HN - it’ll likely be a wiki rather than an episodic thing, part how-to, part instruction manual, part madcap adventure. I’ve always had the attitude of go big or go home - half measures usually result in pain and expense down the road, and I’m not shy about buying good gear rather than inventing it myself. All of this, from land to the cabin to the infrastructure, has cost just shy of €100k, which in my view is pretty affordable for “never pay a utility bill again”. The cabin and the hydro turbine were the two big ticket items, at €25k and €15k respectively. Sure, I have expenses like filter cartridges, spares for repairs, but it doesn’t amount to all that much.
  - kcindric 5y ago
    That sounds like a reasonable amount of money. Hell, you can't even buy a modest flat for that kind of money in most of EU major cities. Do you have reading recommendations for anyone that is interested in building such a robust off grid system? Oh, you talked mostly about energy and water, but what about food?
    - madaxe_again 5y ago
      Oh, yeah, I forgot about the garden :) We had an abandoned olive grove as part of the land - it's superb soil, as the river floods it every second winter or so, so we've interplanted with various fruit trees (it'll be a good 5+ years before they start to give a reasonable yield), and have set up half a dozen hugelkultur beds, which we irrigate with buried drip hose. Using some very simple little soil humidity monitors (arduino, LoRa, dinky battery) to trigger the valves for the irrigation. Same architecture as I'm using for all the remote sensing - tank level monitors, river level monitors, insolation monitors. Last year was our first attempt, and it didn't go too badly, but learned plenty, about what crops do well where. Hopefully this year will give us a better yield and more than one harvest - we started late last year, and the summer heat here is way too intense for much of what we planted up. So, we're nowhere near self-sufficient for food, but we did manage about 100kg of dried beans, and made a mountain of marmalade from the quinces that grow wild all over. I guess food is one where it's more about being able to be self sufficient if we had to be, but it's not so critical - we've a big chest freezer, which is currently mostly full of boar (we let the hunt association hunt on our land, in exchange for a cut of their proceeds - and we've no shortage of boar - we had huge sounders working their way up the riverbed every night last year) and I go out to provision every few weeks. Reading recommendations... not really - I've spend hundreds of hours watching other off-gridders on youtube, taking note of what works and what doesn't, and then for each element I've just researched and researched until I've reached what seems like a sensible solution. Batteries, for instance, I put together a spreadsheet to figure out what gave the best TCO over a 20 year period - and unsurprisingly ended up with the same solution as grid scale solar operators use - OPzS cells. Power kit, Victron is king, unquestionably - their stuff is great, hackable, reliable, easy to install and use. The battery sheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1QhUEg1VAhMDzOWHjJDCCN22Pg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1Qh... - you'll note it's purely lead acid, as other chemistries compared so unfavourably on TCO that I just ejected them from the equation. People talk about lifepo and Lithium and nimh and what have you, and if you go for a really small capacity then the equation can be favourable, but for any capacity over about 40kWh lead becomes much more economical. This, for instance, is what we followed for our vermi composting systems - http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/design-construction/ http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/design-construction/ - but I haven't found any site or resource that is reliably useful across all aspects - someone will know what they're talking about with power, but will be dead wrong about water, and someone else will know water, but will have a laughable power setup... so swings and roundabouts. Mostly, the solutions have been led by problems, and then a search for a way to solve that problem. We've ended up with a few less-than-optimal waystations (year one we used butane for hot water, had to run a generator in the winter, froze our asses off in the mill, flooded up to the roofline and had to run for our lives), but bit by bit we've optimised and optimised. I'm sure I've got gotchas I've yet to consider or encounter, but that makes it interesting, and I can't help but love the process of continuous improvement.

dj_mc_merlin 5y ago

Hypothetically, could you grow weed off-grid?

kcindric 5y ago

Oh man, this is a great writeup! I really like your practical approach instead of a proof of concept that most off grid endeavors try to be. Do you maybe have a blog or pictures of your setup?

madaxe_again 5y ago
Nope - I’ve been in full time gulag mode since we got here in 2019, and while I’ve been intending to document this stuff, mostly so my wife can also run it if I fall off a roof or get crushed by a tree, it’s not my top priority - as and when I do, though, I’ll be sure to share it on HN - it’ll likely be a wiki rather than an episodic thing, part how-to, part instruction manual, part madcap adventure. I’ve always had the attitude of go big or go home - half measures usually result in pain and expense down the road, and I’m not shy about buying good gear rather than inventing it myself. All of this, from land to the cabin to the infrastructure, has cost just shy of €100k, which in my view is pretty affordable for “never pay a utility bill again”. The cabin and the hydro turbine were the two big ticket items, at €25k and €15k respectively. Sure, I have expenses like filter cartridges, spares for repairs, but it doesn’t amount to all that much.
- kcindric 5y ago
  That sounds like a reasonable amount of money. Hell, you can't even buy a modest flat for that kind of money in most of EU major cities. Do you have reading recommendations for anyone that is interested in building such a robust off grid system? Oh, you talked mostly about energy and water, but what about food?
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    Oh, yeah, I forgot about the garden :) We had an abandoned olive grove as part of the land - it's superb soil, as the river floods it every second winter or so, so we've interplanted with various fruit trees (it'll be a good 5+ years before they start to give a reasonable yield), and have set up half a dozen hugelkultur beds, which we irrigate with buried drip hose. Using some very simple little soil humidity monitors (arduino, LoRa, dinky battery) to trigger the valves for the irrigation. Same architecture as I'm using for all the remote sensing - tank level monitors, river level monitors, insolation monitors. Last year was our first attempt, and it didn't go too badly, but learned plenty, about what crops do well where. Hopefully this year will give us a better yield and more than one harvest - we started late last year, and the summer heat here is way too intense for much of what we planted up. So, we're nowhere near self-sufficient for food, but we did manage about 100kg of dried beans, and made a mountain of marmalade from the quinces that grow wild all over. I guess food is one where it's more about being able to be self sufficient if we had to be, but it's not so critical - we've a big chest freezer, which is currently mostly full of boar (we let the hunt association hunt on our land, in exchange for a cut of their proceeds - and we've no shortage of boar - we had huge sounders working their way up the riverbed every night last year) and I go out to provision every few weeks. Reading recommendations... not really - I've spend hundreds of hours watching other off-gridders on youtube, taking note of what works and what doesn't, and then for each element I've just researched and researched until I've reached what seems like a sensible solution. Batteries, for instance, I put together a spreadsheet to figure out what gave the best TCO over a 20 year period - and unsurprisingly ended up with the same solution as grid scale solar operators use - OPzS cells. Power kit, Victron is king, unquestionably - their stuff is great, hackable, reliable, easy to install and use. The battery sheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1QhUEg1VAhMDzOWHjJDCCN22Pg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1Qh... - you'll note it's purely lead acid, as other chemistries compared so unfavourably on TCO that I just ejected them from the equation. People talk about lifepo and Lithium and nimh and what have you, and if you go for a really small capacity then the equation can be favourable, but for any capacity over about 40kWh lead becomes much more economical. This, for instance, is what we followed for our vermi composting systems - http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/design-construction/ http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/design-construction/ - but I haven't found any site or resource that is reliably useful across all aspects - someone will know what they're talking about with power, but will be dead wrong about water, and someone else will know water, but will have a laughable power setup... so swings and roundabouts. Mostly, the solutions have been led by problems, and then a search for a way to solve that problem. We've ended up with a few less-than-optimal waystations (year one we used butane for hot water, had to run a generator in the winter, froze our asses off in the mill, flooded up to the roofline and had to run for our lives), but bit by bit we've optimised and optimised. I'm sure I've got gotchas I've yet to consider or encounter, but that makes it interesting, and I can't help but love the process of continuous improvement.