Living
Off The Grid
In Northwest Washington
Not
so long ago, in the grand scheme of things - we lived in a home with flushing
toilets, walls, carpeting and this neat white box that got very very cold and
icy that we could open the door on it and there was ice cream inside. Things are
different now.
Living
"off grid" means that we are not hooked up to any public utilities at
all - no electric, no phone, no cable TV, no water-sewer-garbage. Cell phones,
satellite TV and internet, and going to the county dump are now a part of our
life.
When
we bought the property there wasn't a nice little driveway leading to an existing
house. It was a parcel of land that was heavily forested, on a steep hill, that
you could not walk through without a machete. It has taken us two years to create
the driveway, build our cabin - which is far far from finished, and achieve the
level of comfort we now enjoy.
We
purchased a small piece of land that had been in someone's family trust for over
20 years. It is facing south - southwest with a view of Quilcene Bay on the Hood
Canal, Mt. Walker and the Olympic Mountains. Our property is ideally situated
to harvest solar and wind power - which is where our electric comes from. We have
a system of solar panels that harvest power from the sun - even on cloudy days
- providing us with most of our power needs through the day. We are still preparing
the site for the 50 foot tower that will support our wind turbine. The wind turbine
will start producing power with as little as a five mile an hour breeze - which
we have year round.
We
have a well and when we run the auxiliary generator we pump water into our cistern,
which in turn gravity feeds the house and the hoses going to the sheep. We have
a system of gutters on the house that collect the rain and dew into barrels for
watering the flowers and gardens - again using gravity feed.
This
spring we are putting a water filtration system in place that will filter the
gray water from the house - from the shower, bath and sinks - through a series
of barrel filters with pebbles, charcoal, and sand and then hold it in a tank
for watering the pastures, flowers and garden. We remain very aware of what chemicals
we use in the kitchen and bathroom knowing that they are going onto the food we
eat.
We
have a composting toilet. It is a very interesting piece of equipment that converts
human waste into black gold for the garden. When we empty it the composted matter
has no odor at all and has the texture of peat moss mixed with rich garden soil.
And
we have a hot tub! We had a wonderful Jacuzzi tub at our old place that we used
almost every day. Turquoise blue with steaming bubbling water was heaven after
a hard day at the office. Here our hot tub is a 250 gallon galvanized steel watering
tank that is propane heated. It isn't Turquoise and it doesn't bubble, but it
is still heaven after a hard day of clearing, building, fencing, and sheep wrangling.
One
of our best treats was building our outside shower last summer. Until then we
only had the shower in the RV to use and it was like trying to get clean in a
vertical, wet, coffin. Even though we now have a claw foot tub in the cabin -
rescued from a field and refinished, we are still looking forward to turning the
water on to the shower again this spring. Showering outside, watching the deer
walk up the driveway, listening to the pilated woodpeckers make the forest sound
like wild kingdom, and having a 360 degree view is something that has to be experienced
to have true appreciation of.
We
started our cabin a year ago, and it will take another two years to get it finished.
But for now we have a warm, cozy home - it may not have carpet, a freezer or many
of the other things that we took for granted in our old home - but it also does
not have a mortgage. We work on projects as money is available, building a life
that may not be as "easy" as it once was - running up the hill to get
the ice cream out of the RV freezer can be a pain - but it is a life that has
connected us in ways that we had never anticipated. Living off the grid is a way
of life that requires living with intention. We have to think about all of the
daily necessities and we have to think ahead of the seasons as well.
We
are working on detailed information on the equipment that converts the solar and
wind energy into power and we will get a link to that information when we have
it available. In the meantime if you would like to contact
Joe he'd be able to tell you all about it.
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