What is the
hardest thing about living off-the-grid?
What is the best
thing about living off-the-grid?
How long can you go without
sunlight?
Is the house hot
in the summer/cold in the winter?
What does it cost to
heat the house per year?
What is
the effect of Off-the-grid power on house valuation?
How many square feet is the house?
How much maintenance does the house require?
What would it take to
put the house on the grid?
If you
had it to do over what would you have done differently?
Tell me about the birds and
the bees...
And the flowers and the trees
What is the
hardest thing about living off-the-grid?
You have to adjust
your life style around the sun - no long showers at night - and you can't blow
dry your hair 'frivolously'. Your kids can't have large sleepover parties
because it is too hard to monitor energy usage. Early on we had trouble
learning to manage our power, so we had refrigeration and water pressure issues
- we switched to a 24 volt pump which fixed the water pressure and put in a
wonderful special order 12v sunfrost fridge and a powerverter which makes
sure the fridge always has power. Our teenager bemoans the lack of wide
screen TV but she has grown up with the house and there have been few energy
related child raising issues.
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What is the best
thing about living off-the-grid?
I could say being
the only house in town with power whenever there is an outage - but that would
be catty. The best thing is probably the sense of independence you get.
There is also less white noise - the house itself is wonderfully quiet.
(No electric bills is definitely right up there, and having a great excuse not
to iron isn't bad either). Another wonderful thing Is the people you deal
with in the alternative energy fields. They are incredible enthusiastic
about helping you live with their technology - when we had trouble installing
the water pump, they had 'Windy' Dankoff, the guy who designed it give us a
call; want to discuss how to balance a windmill blade, Sencenbaugh himself
will chat with you. The level of technical support available and
their willingness to stand behind their products made it easy to handle
any problems we encountered.
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How long can you go without
sunlight?
If we start with the
batteries fully charged, the house can run all of the fridge, lights, water
pump... for about three days. If you squander power ( DSL on for hours on
end...) this goes down.
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Is the house hot in the summer/cold in the winter?
Unless we have a long
streak of below zero temperatures, the house stays pretty warm all winter - in
2005 and 2006 we never even lit the living room wood stove and ran the propane
stove very seldom. On really cold days the house can be shut down - it is
well insulated and all of the windows have custom drapes or insets which are
R-11 at a minimum. In the summer, the upstairs gets pretty warm - but there are plenty of
windows (including in the attics) and you can get a nice cross draft plus we have
a ceiling fan in the living room. Downstairs is always cool in the summer
- a good excuse to go down and shoot pool!
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What does it cost to heat
the house per year?
In the first few years we heated entirely with wood off the land so it cost nothing - we're
getting to old for that and the past several years have ordered 10-12 cords of
wood (the storage areas hold 13 cords). We order it green
early in the spring so it has all summer to dry and you get the best prices.
Maybe $2000 for heat including wood and propane.
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What is
the effect of Off-the-grid power on house valuation?
The latest valuation was
in 2005 and the house was appraised at $274.900. They did not take the
solar aspects into account at all - it was strictly based on square footage and
what types of floors, ceilings and how 'finished' the rooms were. We're
not complaining that it was so undervalued - it saves on taxes!
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How many square feet is the house?
Total upstairs and
downstairs approximately 3331 sq ft Broken down by room:
|
UPSTAIRS |
DOWNSTAIRS Approximate Room Dimensions (to nearest half foot): woodshed 8x28 (224 sq ft) Garage (odd angles 384 sq ft) Workshop11x13 (143 sq ft) Sunflower Bathroom 11x7 (77 sq ft) Weight room 11x9 (99 sq ft) Pool room (odd angles 279 sq ft) Play room 16x23 (368 sq ft) Green house 12x23 (276 sq ft) Downstairs total including garage, woodshed and greenhouse 1850 sq ft Total upstairs and downstairs approximately 3331 sq ft |
How much maintenance does the house require?
The usual house maintenance: Every year we buy 5 gallons of Behr stain and
get as far around the house as we can - the whole house gets done in 3 years and
we only spend a day or two painting. Every year Vic climbs the windmill
tower and spends about a half hour touching up the paint on the windmill blades.
The Photovoltaics are maintenance free unless there is a particularly heavy snow
- they will clear themselves but Vic usually goes up on the roof and brushes
them off (takes 10 minutes) so we don't lose any sunlight. The batteries
are lead acid and require fluid refilling about four times a year (takes half an
hour for two people) The original batteries lasted 15 years and were
replaced in 1999. The copper cricket system
gets flushed every year (takes about an hour) and the valves were replaced in
2006. We clean the chimneys twice
a year (takes about an hour). The chimneys were good for 17 years
and were relined in 2001.
The roof lasted 21 years and was replaced in 2005.
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What would it take to
put the house on the grid?
You could bring in power from the street into the AC fuse box. The
entire house is wired ac/dc so the outlets wouldn't be a problem. All of
the major appliances are 12V DC so you would either have to replace them all
with the less efficient AC models or you could used a powerverter to convert
120V AC to 12V DC and run the DC appliances off of that. There are
folks in town who have a windmill and they are set up to generate their own
power and sell back (at a fraction of the cost) their excess power to the power
company - they then get power from the power company on cloudy days and at
night. To me, that would defeat the purpose as you give up
your independence.
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If you
had it to do over what would you have done differently?
We would have included
more passive solar aspects and had we been able to afford it we would have
blasted down and used geothermal as well. But we would definitely have chosen to go
off-the-grid when we did.
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Tell me about the birds and
the bees...
| We have birdfeeders which can bee seen from the dining room and he family room. We are visited by chickadees, white breasted nuthatches, red breasted nuthatches, titmice, Red polls, rose breasted gross beaks (and the occasional evening gross beak), purple finches, yellow finches, cardinals, blue jays, robins, cedar waxwings and the obligate Pigeons and crows but my favorites are a family of phoebes who have returned to the nest on the front porch for 15 years now |
 |
| When we first moved to Deerfield, we took a course in beekeeping and built a hive - got a bit of honey the first couple of years and the hive was thriving when a bear decided to avail himself of our honey the third year - we didn't bother rebuilding. |
baby phoebes 2005 |
Every year we tap
three of the sugar maples and boil the sap in a big pot on the wood
stove to end up with 1-2 gallons of maple syrup |
There are
gardens all over the place - tons of perennials and shrubs. There
is a 30 x 75 vegetable garden with raised beds (mostly
annuals but also chives, oregano, rhubarb, asparagus and horseradish).
I have one special garden of medicinal herbs. There are red, black
and golden raspberry patches, strawberries, blueberries, apples, peaches
and grapes. Most of the land is
wooded, there is a wide variety of both coniferous and deciduous trees -
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©2007 All Rights Reserved.
Vicki Abrams Motz
Revised 02/06/07
