Living off the grid doesn’t mean you have to live like in the 15th century, doing everything with your own hands. Much of typical house work is done today by some appliances. If you want to live off-grid, you probably don’t want to get rid of those appliances. So what should you do?

If you’re building a new off-grid capable house, you must be able to supply all the energy and water used for your appliances. If you don’t want to be 100% grid-independent, you may, for example, want to make your electricity and harvest rainwater, but buy natural gas from the supply network. But in every case you need to precisely identify all your energy and water needs to fulfill those needs somehow. (more…)

If you want power your off-grid home by yourself, you need to look at this idea on three levels:

• producing the energy in any source,
• reducing the energy use,
• storing it for future when supply exceeds demand.

There are only two ways to deal with this problem with one simple solution. But none of them is a good one. (more…)