Whether you are selling it all and going off grid the way we did it or you are building slowly over time to get things ready for later, there are a few tasks that need to be done to make the transition go more smoothly. Keep in mind that living off grid is about living in nature and it is our job to meet all our needs, like food, clothing, shelter, water, air, security, peace, joy and happiness. When your starting though, some of those needs take a higher priority as the consequences can be rather harsh. We also found that we had to meet our basic needs with temporary solutions first and then start building on more permanent solutions once our needs are being temporarily met. So this goes in stages and it takes time to be in a position where the solutions mature to the point where life can coast along.

Shelter

We can live a few weeks without food, a few days with out water, but only a few hours without shelter; especially in northern climates. The first priority is to have a warm, dry place to find refuge as the weather around here can change quickly and we get extremes. It is not unusual to experience -40C during the winter, +30C in the summer and the full range of weather in a single day during the spring or fall. Shelter is the top priority and it does not have to be pretty. Carey and I both agreed that we would forgo form (beauty) to make sure function is satisfied first. It does not matter how pretty it is, if it does not work, it will not serve you.

If your in an emergency, even a simple lean-to shelter would protect you for survival purposes. Since we we were not in an emergency we elected to use a really old camper when our project started in the Spring. It was cramped but it provided shelter and gave us a place to prepare our meals. The camper met our needs and provided us with an opportunity to then focus on other immediate needs. But we recognized that the camper would not not serve us through the winter, so we scheduled a garage build which would then protect us through the winter.

The camper's job was to protect us until such time as a more permanent structure could be built. Where we were, there was nothing but trees and mud. No infrastructure of any kind. A late spring snow storm it and it got cold and wet. Carey grew up in the city and she tells the story of how she cried for the first month. It is a culture shock and it takes a lot to work through the paradigm shift. But we made it through and the camper did its job which then provided us with an opportunity to then look after our next need: water!

Water

Shelter taken care of? Great, now we need water. This one is a bit tougher. We purchased a 125 gallon tank to haul water from the local town as it only cost a dollar to fill it with potable, treated water. Have you ever tried to moved 125 gallons of water off a truck? Water is about 10 lbs per gallon, so a 125 gallon tank ways about 1,250lbs. We did not think this through. How do we get this tank off the truck and what do we put it on? I had to build a stand that could hold the weight of the tank and was just the right height so that the tank could then slide off the truck onto the stand.

With some hindsight, it may have been better to use the tank to transport the water and then fill smaller tanks when we got it on site. It may also have been easier to use smaller jugs, but then travel costs start going up. If you are fortunate to find a spring where you can gather water, that would be a life saver. We had no such luxury, so we hauled water. It took us a couple years before we could build the infrastructure to collect and treat our own water when our earthship started taking place. We could have done it sooner if we recognized that we could collect water off the garage as well. Any roof we built out here had tin so that we could collect clean rain water. That has served us very well. Even in an emergency a tarp could collect a lot of water.

When we lived in the city, we used about 220 gallons of water per day. It is astounding how much water the toilets and long hot showers consume. That would require two trips a day if we were to keep that up. But with sponge baths and doing our 'business' outside, we got our water consumption down to about 20 gallons a day. Much more manageable!

Food

The one mistake we made was to depend on the food stores to feed ourselves. We did that for three years. What I would do differently is get the gardens planted, get some chickens and maybe even a milk goat or two. Yes, it would require some work for the infrastructure, but that would ensure that our food needs are met. We are also learning that there is a lot of edible wild food in the forest. So any effort to learn what these foods are would also help reduce our dependency on the grocery stores and allow us to stay on site to work on our projects.

Sanitation

What goes in must come out. While pooping in the bush works, it is not comfortable or convenient. I know that Carey was a bit freaked out when the animals had her contribution cleaned up so quickly, sometimes within 24 hours. As a result the outhouse was the very first building we made and I was her hero! It was a luxury that was very well appreciated. If digging a hole, make sure the hold is at least 7 1/2 feet deep. My first hole was 6 feet deep and filled in a year. My second hold is 7 1/2 feet deep and is about 25% full after 9 years. I'm confident that my first hold froze and did not allow the humanure to compost properly. I would also contemplate making an outhouse with a pail (no hole) and instead compost the humanure in a compost heap, which we have been doing with our humanure for years. It is a bit more work as I have to haul out the pail every day, but it works, it recycles the nutrients and it is simple. No black water, no sewage, no mound or field to contend with.

We also ran into a problem with plastic and food waste. The food waste was easy, we feed that to the chickens or pigs. But the plastic was a problem as we wanted to live with zero waste being shipped off to land fills. So our strategy has been to eliminate the plastic as much as possible. Growing our own food, using glass jars, recycling and other strategies has made a significant impact on the amount of garbage we have to deal with. We are down to a small garbage bag a week. Everything else is reused or recycled in some way.

Food preservation

As you can tell, the infrastructure can now start being worked on. We had a fridge in the camper, but it was very small. We had a deep freeze but it required electricity. I've since found out that with a couple clay pots, one could make a refrigerator that works through evaporation. Digging a hole, well or using a mound root cellar is also a good way to keep food cool. Mother Earth News is a FANTASTIC resource for alternative ways to solve the challenges we face when we are responsible for everything. We have found a few books as well, that don't depend on computers or electricity to access and read. I've found that most of the challenges already have solutions and our elders remember them as they used to live with those solutions. So befriend an elder and pick their brain. They can be a fantastic resource for this journey. You could also just buy a generator or a solar system to run the fridge and deep freeze too. That works as well, but there are costs associated with those solutions. If your final goal is a solar system, I would recommend purchasing and installing it now as it would allow you to have lights and help with food preservation. It also gives you an opportunity to learn how to use it before it gets installed in your permanent home. This is the path we went, more out of ignorance as we did not know any better.

One day we had a bear visit us and rock the camper. While remembering that we are learning how to co-exist with nature, we did not anticipate visitors. So now that we have food, there was some interest in that food by others. Now we need security!

Security

Grace is our dog and she is a Great Pyrenees cross and she is the best dog I've ever had. We got her as a puppy, so she was not much use to us in the beginning, but over the years she has kept almost all predators away from our yard and protected the chickens and goats. We have never had a bear incident since we got her over 10 years ago. We have seen lots of coyotes and foxes. On occasion a wolf would walk through the yard too, but for the most part they leave us alone. She works hard all night long and sleeps during the day while we are up to take over the day duties.

Energy

This one was tough to figure out. We did a lot of work calculating how much electricity we used and how to reduce those numbers. On average, we would consume 660KWh of electricity per month. Our goal was to reduce that to 150Kwh. It was cheaper to reduce our usage and build a solar system to match that reduction than to build one big enough to match our current needs. Building the Earthship, using passive solar heating, high energy efficient fridge, keeping our deep freeze out side and a whole range of other strategies really helped us with this task. But it is not just about electricity. Wood is another source of energy and we needed to make sure we had an ample supply and not deteriorate the wood lot by over harvesting. We did calculations and determined that we are only using about one third of the wood that the wood lot produces each year. So we are not even close to diminishing the productivity of the renewable energy resource that we have. We view it as being sacred and as such must respect it too. Thermal mass heading through passive solar gain is used not only in the earthship, but also our greenhouse, my mother-in-laws house and in other areas. Taking advantage of the suns rays is critical to life out here off the grid. Let the sun build your home!

Level up

What I mean from level up is that once the basics are covered, work can then take place to ensure survival for the longer term. When we first moved off grid, what I explained above sufficed for a few months. But we knew winter was coming, so work had to be done to ensure that we could survive the winter. When we first came out here, we had to survive the night. Then the night turned into a few weeks. By summer time we were in full swing to prepare for winter. That foundation was setup by leveling up several times throughout the last 10 years. Each time we leveled up, work got easier as the infrastructure was put into place to allow us to take advantage of technology, knowledge, experience and other benefits of being out here.

This is where the journey is as there is always something to do and it is never done. This is what keeps us young and invigorated. We are always testing out new ideas to see if we can find efficiencies or building new tools to fill a gap rather than purchasing the solutions. As we perform our upgrades we find that the functionality of what we are working on matures and that then allows us to turn to form.

Now that our domain has matured over the last 10 years, we are now working on making it pretty! That is important as the divine feminine needs it. So our focus now is to finish what we started so that it not only functions the way we want it to, it looks great too!

Moving off grid? Here is a checklist to help you get started!