This is my dream: To live as my forefathers once did - in harmony with the land that sustains us. A project to investigate and innovate the creation of a low impact home with methods of living in a form of permaculture designed to sustain my family and improve biodiversity. To leave the land richer than before and in doing so enable others to do so.
How to live off grid with your own private grid
Posted 28/03/08 by Matt B in the Woodlands category
When considering the dream to live in harmony with nature, as part of the ecosystem, while maintaining a relatively modern lifestyle there are things that must be considered. Not everything from our wasteful way of life can be maintained and not every "green" innovation will be useful. For example to sustain a growing family as part of the biodiversity of the area one can not simply allow nature a free hand but neither can you.That is not to say that things should be unnatural but the land must be managed somewhat as must your resources. This is not so different from the way we imagine that Adam and Eve might once have lived. Effectively we are talking about being gardeners of our living home.
To do this and be independent means that resources can not be "piped in" from outside. This is going to mean living "off grid" while ensuring a reliable supply of energy that is not wasteful. It also means reconsidering the way we do things.
In this article I am going to explore this issue and the issues it raises.
Consider living "off grid" for a moment. That means that the consistent and clean flow of energy that we have come to see as normal no longer exists. There will be peaks and troughs in the supply and with that come spikes, surges and interruptions.
The supply of energy is finite and our family could, conceivably, make too great a demand on this resource dipping the amount available below the optimum point of usage. In English this means that systems needing power might not get all the power they need. For a computer this would force a restart.
As a person who has a great deal of time and money invested in the international communications of the world wide web I am going to want to access this network. Not only does it provide a means of earning external money but it provides a service over which telephone communications can be run. Not loosing touch with family and being able to call for help is a vital necessity.
So what resources, ideas and solutions exist to solve these added problems?
The first technology is called UPS. UPS stands for Uninterpretable Power Supply and it is quite simple. It acts as an energy buffer, or battery, that "stores" electrical potential and smooths out any dips in supply.
All UPS that I know of are designed to beep to alert you of a power outage - this gives you time to save and exit until the supply is returned. However, there are additional uses of UPS that might otherwise be overlooked.
It is all well and good to say "we will use solar power" or "we will use hand generators" but a good plan must consider that these things do and will fail and fall short. In order to reduce inconvenience and damage to electrical systems while getting the most out of them you need to be able to equalise the changes in supply.
You local science teacher will tell you that electricity can not be stored. Honestly electricity is moving electrons store them and they stop moving. Fortunately you can store electrical potential chemically - which is how batteries work.
The first question I have on this regard is: what are the least environmentally damaging options? I do not know this yet and intend to find out.
So how do we apply such technology to ecological living?
To get the most usability with the least impact on the land requires planning. Take for illustrative purposes my home network. This is a tool that I use to enable myself and my family to communicate with the rest of the world. The diagram roughly sums up the network although in truth there are more nodes (computers mostly) on the network than shown. For example I use wireless technology.
Each of these devices must be powered and without the national power grid that power must come from solar, wind and other generators. If the wind drops, the sky clouds or whatever "hamster in a wheel" device I use fails then the telephone, the computers and everything else stop working and might suffer damage. Furthermore, there may be a dangerous spike of energy when the power is restored moments later.
The answer to this is planning.
One needs to stop thinking about the solar panel or the hand crank as the whole story and realise that there is a middle part missing from your picture. That middle part is the buffer and interestingly as your need increases (causing you to scale it up) it becomes more efficient. That's why the national grid is so reliable.
Each power source or collection thereof needs to pass through a capacitor or "store" or some kind so that the excess power is "saved" until there is a deficit of need. Each of these stores should be nominally connected where possible so that when empty they can call upon the reserves of connected stores to continue to supply the demand.
This would be most efficient when supplying a community where each member is equally adding to the "mini grid" as well as drawing from it. Even on a smaller scale where my family might have an environmentally sound source of energy for each of lights, power tools, radio, phone, and other IT when the need is greater in a specific location the excess of other locations can be drawn upon.
Ideally anything that creates energy release could be harnessed to recapture some of that as electrical energy. So, for example, the hot water system might also produce a small flow of electricity during the boiling phase. While this would be irregular it would add to the overall network of electrical resource and with other such systems in place one could have a ready supply of electricity that is not just carbon neutral but entirely earth right.
Just because one wishes to reject a system one should not also reject the knowledge that can be taken from the system.
This leaves us only cost to consider.
I will spend over UK£520 (more than US$1000) on energy this year, maybe more. Assuming a life expectancy of just 5 years for all equipment gives a cost to beat of UK£2600 if I want to be simply cost effective.
(Yet how much more am I willing to invest to live as I wish?)
Checking on Google I find that UK£240 should purchase a solar cell powerful enough to power my laptop while UK£1,400 would by a massive 170W at 24V. Of course a regulator and other devices crank the price higher to about £2,100 after cables, transport etc. Which even without finding a better deal places me at UK£500 (around US$1,000) better off over five years.
However, most sites that I checked placed the panels life expectancy at 20 to 30 years. Looking at it this way I could expect to save as much as UK£5,000 over that time period.
Admittedly batteries (the most common "store"), inverters, blocking diodes (stops an inactive panel draining a battery) and charge controllers (stops charging when the battery is "full") might not live that long but the saving is still significant.
Even more significant is that living this lifestyle should remove or reduce significantly the need to purchase food and other similar items from shops. This saving added to the fact that I did not take into account gas usage means that this is a cost effective lifestyle with a slightly bitter outlay at the start.
What other considerations do you feel there might be and how might the remaining issues be addressed? Feel free to share your thoughts on this subject.
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