Off Grid Living: A Complete Guide for Beginners
Embark on a self-sufficient life! Discover essential tips & tricks for beginners in our ultimate guide to off-grid living and start your off grid living journey with confidence
Do you wish you could live a simpler, more self-sufficient life? Do you want to ditch the public utilities and rely on your own sources of power, water, and waste management? If you do, you might want to give off grid living a try. Imagine a life where you cut down your environmental impact, save some money, and enjoy more freedom and flexibility? If you do, you might be interested in off grid living. It is a lifestyle choice that is quickly gaining interest world-wide and for good reason!
Table of Contents
We've been off grid living since 2015
Here’s how it started…
… and how its going.
An Introduction to Off Grid Living
Off grid living is a lifestyle choice that means living without relying on public utilities like electricity, water, gas, or sewerage. Instead, you use alternative sources for power, water, and waste management, like solar panels, rain barrels, compost toilets, and generators.
For example, you can use solar panels to capture the sun’s energy and batteries to store it for later use. You can use rain barrels to collect water and filter it for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. You can use compost toilets to turn your human waste into soil, propane tankless water heaters for hot water and a propane heater as a primary/secondary backup heating source to keep you warm. And for those times when you really need it, you can use a small gas generator to power up your devices. Sounds pretty cool, right?
People choose off grid living for different reasons, like self-reliance, cost savings, environmental concerns, or personal preference. Off grid living can also vary in degree, from completely disconnected to partially connected to the grid.
Some people might envision off grid living as remote a life as living in a hand built Alaskan log cabin. And there’s nothing wrong with it if that’s the way you want to go. Richard Proenneke did it for thirty years. In fact, we wrote a complete story called “How Dick Proenneke built a log cabin alone in Alaska”.
At the other end of the spectrum, you can have an off grid home stuffed to the rafters with the latest technology that is completely automated and rivals the comforts of even the fanciest on grid home.
In this article, we’ll give you a complete guide for beginners who want to learn more about the basics of off grid living.
We’ll cover four broad but common topics we get asked the most:
- How to Power Your Off Grid Home
- How to Get Water for Your Off Grid Home
- How to Manage Waste for Your Off Grid Home
- How to Stay Connected and Secure in Your Off Grid Home
By the end of this article, you’ll have a much better understanding of what off grid living involves, and how you can start your own off grid journey. In today’s day and age, it’s probably not what you may have envisioned and that’s probably a good thing.
The topic of designing, building, finding land or buying an existing off grid home each has its own article on our website. So in this article let’s pretend you just bought or finished building your off grid home and let’s answer the four most common questions we get asked about off grid living.
Let’s get started!