Off-Grid Living: Pros and Cons and Our Experiences

How we started our off-grid living adventure

Off-grid living was one of those things that just fell into our laps. There are some very good and generous people in our lives-one person in particular-who has blessed us beyond belief. (In fact, I originally wanted to call this blog “Blessed Beyond Belief” because every project and every adventure here on our mountain oasis is because we have been given great gifts.)

This house is one of those great blessings that we don’t deserve. But we try to be as deserving as possible by loving this place with everything we have.

We moved here five years ago. The house had been abandoned for 12 years until then and was in surprisingly good shape. Ben would come up here every weekend and clean out the rodent droppings and everything that was destroyed. I was pregnant with our second child at the time and had a little toddler in tow.

The solar system was very old and outdated, and the batteries were shot. We had to wait to have them replaced before we had electricity. But we couldn’t wait to live up here, so we moved up anyway.

At first, we only had running water if Ben filled up the tank in the house by connecting the generator to the pump. But it was only cold water, as the hot water tank hadn’t been completely cleaned or checked at that time.

So every day, Ben would start the generator and turn on the pump to the well. He would fill up a water tank outside and the tank to the shower and go to work. I would wash dishes outside and haul water to flush the toilet or to clean. On his way home he would buy ice for our cooler, or rather, our fridge.

At night, we would sing to Baldwin, our toddler, or talk and read books by candlelight.

It was a lovely, romantic, real life adventure. I hope I never forget how much fun that was and how special our family felt in the silence of the woods in the middle of nowhere.

What off-grid living looks like for us now

Things have changed so much since then. We quickly cleaned out the hot water tank (the grossest thing in the house: it held 7 dead chipmunks!) and before we knew it, we had electricity and running water.

We have electricity like any other home, but the batteries need consistent maintenance to run their best, and we have to make sure not to drain the system too low.

Amperage is really hard for the system, and the pump to our well requires lots of amperage.

Our first indication that we have used up all the electricity and need to wait for sun or charge the batteries with the generator is that we will run out of water. The tank will empty, and the pump won’t have enough amperage to kick on. It usually happens while doing dishes or when someone’s showering.

Some appliances would work, but only with full sun on the panels. For instance, we can’t use a standard coffee maker because it will draw too much amperage and the pump won’t be able to kick on, since the sun doesn’t fully hit the panels until about 8:30 am in the summer and 10 am in the winter, give or take. We’d rather have a French press than wait until 10 for coffee, so it makes the coffee maker not worth it.

A day in the life of living off the grid.

Like I just said, we start our day with stovetop coffee. Ben showers every morning and unless we used too much water the night before, he doesn’t have an abrupt ending to his shower time.

I do house chores and feed the kids. We start our day, avoiding anything that would take too much electricity. For instance, I wouldn’t start something in the oven or vacuum. I would definitely not start the instant pot or put on a load of laundry.

By 10 am, maybe 11 if it’s the dead of winter, I’m usually confident that the batteries have had a good hour of sun and so I can start using high-electricity things.

I usually have a very consistent routine of starting laundry as soon as I know the batteries can handle it. I do one load a day, sometimes two. My goal is to never have a pile of dirty clothes that make up a load by the end of the day. I’ve learned the hard way that a winter storm can hit for five days without warning, and then there goes all hope of washing laundry that week. It’s much safer and easier to always be on top of laundry so that no matter what happens, come rain or come shine we will have enough cleanish clothes to get by. I hang the laundry outside or on the balcony depending on the weather. We don’t have a dryer.

If I want to use something like the instant pot to make dinner, I need to get it going by at least noon. So, I start brainstorming food in the morning. The oven also takes electricity even though it’s propane. So I have to be careful about baking in the later afternoon especially in winter. Often, I am not on top of anything and dinner is late, so I have to cook on our propane stovetop. I’ve figured out how to turn almost any oven recipe into a stovetop recipe just out of necessity. (When we first moved here, I even learned how to bake a cake on the stove!)

I’ve usually watered any animals by the afternoon, and done all the dishes except for dinner dishes throughout the day. At first, we would always save our dinner dishes for the next morning because showers are more important than a clean kitchen, at least to us. Now, as long as there aren’t too many dishes, I’m able to cleanup and close the kitchen for the night.

Things that work and don’t work for off-grid living:

Appliances that work:

1. My instant pot. Of course, there has to be full sun on the panels, but it does work in the middle of the day.
2. A NutriBullet blender. After lots and lots of painful trial and error, I finally discovered that it works off grid.
3. Lots of Ben’s power tools. With the obvious exception that there is full sun on the panels, and for the big tools, he usually turns on the generator just to be safe.

Appliances that (to our knowledge) don’t work:

1. A hair dryer.
2. A microwave.
3. Apparently every other brand of blender in existence.
4. A coffee maker.
5. A toaster.
6. A space heater. The one exception is that we bought a small space heater for our chicks this spring because even though we had them in the house with us, it was very cold in the mornings and chicks are so expensive right now. However, at the time we were running out of water first thing every morning, so maybe it was draining our system. It was around the time that our batteries failed, so I’m not sure what was the actual cause.
7. An electric water kettle.
8. A dryer.
9. A dishwasher.
10. There are other things that we just don’t know if they would work. For example, an ice cream maker, a dehydrator, a freeze dryer, and the list goes on.

Pros of off-grid living:

1. We are more self-sufficient.

We love the self-sufficiency aspect of being off grid. It’s such a great feeling to have complete control over your utilities in spite of all of the responsibilities. It’s a relief to say the least that we are not at the mercy of an electric company, and we know our water is fresh, safe, and clean.

Not only this, but because we are very used to running out of water or electricity, we are less uncomfortable when we don’t have those things. It’s not a disaster, just a miner hiccup in our household life.

2. It forces us to live more simply.

Part of this is living off-grid, but part of it is just the fact that we live so far out in the mountains. We are about 45 minutes from the nearest town, which has the nearest gas station, store, and anything else we could need. It really affects our spending habits to be so far away.

We have to really plan ahead, especially in the wintertime when interstate 40 can be shut down.

Not only are we isolated, but the nearby town has hardly anything anyway. It’s just a small town surrounded by the reservation, with only the basic necessities and a smattering of Mexican restaurants.

I think the thing about being off-grid is that it’s inconvenient, but to such a degree that if we were only trying to be self-sufficient with our utilities and not in other areas of our lives, it would be silly and probably not worth the effort.

3. It keeps us on top of household chores.

This is especially the case with the laundry, but also with dishes and vacuuming and anything else that requires electricity. We never know when we will run out of sun, so staying on top of whatever makes life run smoothly makes all the difference when living off-grid.

4. It makes us more resourceful and creative.

This could be a whole separate blog post! There are so many ways that this lifestyle affects our creativity and ability to think on our feet. I think it comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, we are the ones responsible for everything that we have, and we often run into problems. So we have to be resourceful because no one is there to bail us out.

4. It just makes sense.

When you realize how much you distrust where your food comes from, and how much better it is to have control over what you consume on every level, then water and electricity just follow in the line of ways to become more independent.

Cons of off-grid living:

1. It’s inconvenient.

There’s a whole lot of starting fires with snowy wood, starting the generator in a snowstorm, waiting for a week to do laundry, waiting to do dishes or take a shower, etc. in this off-grid life. We have to plow ourselves out in winter, we can’t order pizza, and there’s no “backup plan” if we get desperate.

2. It’s more work.

It’s so much more work! Especially for Ben. Hauling wood, cutting and splitting wood, plowing the roads, and tending to the fires at night are all jobs that fall on his shoulders. It’s more work for me too, but mostly in the house, and the chores are just more complicated, not harder.

3. It’s not like we are completely independent.

We recently learned this the hard way. We had made some mistakes and our batteries died years before we thought they would. It was a little devastating, especially having to shell out so much money to replace them. It also made us realize that while we don’t pay a monthly bill to someone, we do have to save up and replace the batteries eventually. And the price is very painful. We are not as self-sufficient as we would like to think, just like a person who can use a generator to run the electricity in his house still needs gas.

Why we love living off-grid

While this life definitely has its challenges, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love it. The romanticism of living off-grid in the middle of the woods is really nice. But also, the feeling of freedom is priceless, and is ever motivating us toward more self-sufficiency. If you are considering a lifestyle like this, please let me know in the comments! I would love to hear from likeminded people.