I’ve been researching off-grid lifestyles for a while. Not because it’s something that I think would fit the way my family need to live, but because there are definitely things we can learn from people who have chosen that kind of life, and who are making it work.
As a technologist the idea of not having reliable electricity scares me. But then we live for 9 weeks a year in a caravan, and can already power phones and a mobile internet connection for several hours with power banks. Investing in another power bank that could recharge laptops would probably give us everything else we needed in an emergency, and adding some decent solar panels would make us mostly electrically self-sufficient as far as powering devices go.
We also have a lot of gas-reliance in the caravan, but most of the vans on this site use bottled gas anyway, so this would be straightforward to set up if required, as the van is already built for it, so it would just be a case of switching a few cables around. That would give us heat, hot water, and the ability to cook on a hob or in an oven.
Water is a trickier problem, but it’s generally the easiest grid to get connected to. A lot of places people live have water when they don’t have electricity, and there are definitely ways to make running water useful from an electricity-generating point of view.
We are not ready to take these steps yet, but there are things we have learned and changed already as a result of this initial research:
- Not replacing our unreliable dishwasher and broken tumble drier has not really impacted our lives too much at all. Washing dishes just gets built into my evening chores, and clothes can be dried either on radiators or using the natural heat of the sun. We have a launderette lined up for emergencies. but it is rarely used.
- When we’re in the caravan, a small portable washing machine will take care of most of our clothes washing needs.
- We don’t need anywhere near as many clothes as we thought we did, and we definitely have enough of them to last a good while.
- It’s possible to work off a laptop indefinitely, and there are now good enough portable monitors with a very low power draw to give the desired multi-monitor setup for working.
- A combination of mobile internet and tethering to phones gives us three layers of internet contingency, at an additional cost of £20 a month plus £10 per trip if concurrent streaming or meetings are likely to happen regularly. We use Smarty for our main connection, and GifGaf for the backup, but that’s purely based on what works well in this physical location, and milage may vary elsewhere.
There will definitely be more experiments over the next year or so, and we do need to try and be more mindful about how we use electricity and gas throughout the year, not just when we are travelling.