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New here. Earthships and/or living "off the grid"?
Hello all! I'm a long time lurker, and used to post on the knot way back in ancient history. Just wondering if anyone here has plans to go REALLY hardcore and try to live off the grid or as far off it as possible.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about how it is SO HARD to function in society while trying to avoid all the evils of convenience. GMOs are an obvious one, but also things like living without a bank account. Then she told me about earthships which I had never heard of up until then. My mind was blown.
Re: New here. Earthships and/or living "off the grid"?
Our goal is to build a house and live as much off the grid as possible. I'm not sure how far we can go if we take into account our climate, budget and where we'll be able to buy land. I admit that I haven't done a ton of research on this so I could be way off but from what I've read, I don't think it's realistic to live comfortably on solar power entirely. The few articles I've found about living off the grid in MN talk about using solar power and wind turbines, but there can be zoning issues with the turbines. Of course there are the people who live in rustic cabins but that wouldn't be comfortable for us.
We are planning on building a small house....not as small as the hardcore tiny houses (google tiny houses and you'll see how small people go) but maybe around 1000 sf. We're hoping this will help reduce the resources we'll need to run the house and hopefully make living off the grid easier. We're hoping to buy land in a few years and go from there.
I just googled earthships and they look really interesting. They aren't really aesthetically pleasing to me but it's a cool concept.
Tired after a long morning of hiking and swimming.
Awesome!! Maybe you can come back share pics and what you thought of it after you visit. Also, if you're really interested in this, you should look into permaculture organizations in your area. There is a movement called Transition that is happening all over the world towards living life off the grid and building a supporting community to ease into that way of living.
My mom and dad grew up off the grid. Not by choice... it took that long for the grid to reach them. I think my dad's farm got power in 1957 and my mom's got power in about 1963.
I would never choose to live that way. I'm hooked on running water and the internet. I'm good with that.
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#1 12.11.11
#2 10.23.13 EDD
LOL. Yeah, I'm not sure if I would actually want to live that way. But I find it completely fascinating. I definitely want to live "simpler" if that makes sense, and be more connected to the things that sustain us.
We will still have running water and internet in our home (and all the other things we have).
Well I complete understand the desire to build a new energy efficient house but building has a much, much bigger carbon footprint than buying an existing house and renovating to make it more efficient. Think of all the gas gusling heavy equipment needed to dig/shape the ground, pour the concrete, and transport the materials even if most of the materials are local (in the building industry local typically means 500 miles). Then consider the energy needed to run all of the generators to run nailers, saws, lights, shop vacs, temporary heat if you're buliding in the winter, etc. New construction is not green!
If you want to argue you're going to build a LEED/Energy Star/Green Globe home I can go into more details about those too.
You can easily buy a nice existing home in the country (sounds like you all want land to garden, farm, etc.), make it more energy efficient, then add renewable energy sources, and live completely off the grid. This option would probably cost less especially if the housing market is like it is now and would be a more green option.
We have taken our 1970's house from having a carbon footprint of 21 tons of CO2 per year for heating, cooling, and hot water to only 2.7 tons! We spend 12% annually of what the previous owner spent on those utilities. We have many more renovation plans to save water, electricity, and reduce our heating/cooling bills even more in the future!
Jennyk, it's pretty hard to go off the grid solely on solar power in MN. You would need to sink a lot of money into PV and have no trees in the area. Plus you would still need to physically be connected to the grid since you would produce most of your energy in the summer and sell the extra back to your utility. Then in the winter you would buy it back. Wind turbines would not be the best choice in a hilly and/or wooded area which a lot of MN is. Solar hot water heaters and geothermal mixed in with PV panels would probably be your best option. It is not nearly as easy to live off the grid in cold climate areas like ours. Those earthships wouldn't work up here.
DH and I bought 20 acres in Prewitt, New Mexico in 2008 and we are building a small 16' x 16' home with a loft (just enough for us and LO to live in for a year or two) for around 10k that will be our guest house eventually and we are going to build our own earthship like home. We have the perfect soil composition for building our own adobes and will use those in addition to rammed earth and bottles. We currently rent in Albuquerque while we work and go to school.
My MIL already lives out there full-time in the building that was on the property. DH finished it the best it could (it is still pretty campy), but she is a glass artist and happy as a clam
We compost our own waste and collect as much rain water as possible out there. That building is not an earthship, but it has been our start! We hope to all be out there full time within 2 years!
If you ever get a chance to go to Taos and see some of the Michael Reynolds homes you should! They are gorgeous to see!
Thank you so much for posting this...I was sitting here wondering how people had reached this conclusion that it was so "Green" to move to this amazing land off the grid--and then BUILD a new home...which isn't green.
So. Thank you for this!
Well I'm glad at least one other person on this board shares my opinion.
Oh I can't believe I forgot to mention WASTE! Residentially an estimated 4.38 lb/sf of waste is generated in new construction homes. For a modest 1,000 sf home that's 4,380 lb of waste! Which amounts to 300,000 tons of waste annually (this number was probably from before the economy took a dive though).
Contractors are considered "green" when they recycle only 50% of the waste on a project (LEED MR Credit 2) and reuse only 5% of that content (LEED MR Credit 3).
I haven't researched this in any kind of depth, but I was under the assumption that the houses were built completely out of recycled materials. (My friend described them as a house made out of "garbage"). How would this offset the carbon footprint?
Note: I have no intention of doing this (I am a poor renter in a northern climate). Just was curious what other's thoughts were. But if I do get the chance to check them out sometime I definitely will.
ETA: I just did some more quick research, and it appears you don't use heavy equipment to build or change the landscape. You work with what is there. It is designed that anyone even with minimal construction knowledge can build it themselves.
Yes those specific "Earthships" use a lot of recycled material and often times require minimal digging to make a level foundation because they are typically built in near desert conditions. The dirt used does need to come from somewhere and the concrete ones are said to be the best strength and heat wise. Concrete can have some recycled materials in it like fly ash or previously used ground concrete but the majority of it needs to be new material for it to form properly. I also wonder what kind of nasty VOCs are going to be in those homes when they are using garbage like old tires as one of the main building materials. It's all about getting as much mass as you can in the walls to retain the warm or cold temperatures (which is why concrete is the best wall choice). Outside of the southwest those designs are not thermally balanced however. Here in WI we had a whole community of "underground homes" where built in the early 70's. They were low flat homes built in the side of a small hill and the roofs were covered by dirt and lawn. They were very dark and depressing with only 6 windows on the front. None of the bedrooms and bathrooms could have windows because they were in the back. The indoor air quality was poor (very stuffy inside because the exhaust vents were limited) and the roofs leaked like a sieve (there were water stains in every room)! I was in one a few years back and beyond the front rooms with the windows it was not very pleasant. All 15 of them have been torn down now!
My post was referring to the new construction homes for the rest of America. I'm guessing everyone in this post who said they want to build a new home isn't planning to move to New Mexico right?