The second part of the “How are we going to do it” series covers the going-off-the-grid part. 

As a people, our reliance on the utility companies for power, water and gas is complete.
If anything goes wrong in these vast networks you’re lights will not come on, the tab stays dry or your house stays cold. Any one of the above causes real problems for a lot of people. In the future the cost will go up while the reliability goes down…
We want to minimize our dependence on an overly expensive and unreliable system and use what can be free to everybody.

In short, there are two flavors of “the Grid”. One is the information grid, like the banks, insurances, health care, a car.., anything that requires you to register or enable somebody else to track you, for whatever reason. One lives like this if one wishes to stay under the radar, out of sight.., hidden. This is not the grid we intend to get of..

We’re talking about the Utility Grid. Power, gas, water…

In Holland we pay all sort of taxes to keep everything running, more than 50% of our utility bill are taxes, no kidding. Next to the fact that it can be cheaper, it can also be, a lot, cleaner. Additional bonus of prducing our own is that we minimize our dependence on others. So, how are we going to do it?

Water

Water falls from the sky, at least in the better part of the world, and where we’re going to live for sure. We collect it via the roof and it gets collected in tanks. These tanks will be large enough to sustain us through dry periods.
From the tanks it is pumped through filters and comes out of the tap. We can shower, drink, wash clothes, whatever…
The waste product of these activities is grey water.., it’s dirty but not unusable. The grey water is used to feed indoor planters. The Earthship systems also use the filtered grey water to fill the toilet, which in turn is a low-use flush toilet. The black water from the toilet is flushed outside into a leech field where it is filtered until eventually leaving clean water to enter the ground.

This is of course a simple description of a complicated proces. When we have the design of the house ready, we’ll have a much better understanding of the finished system.

Power

We have one of the greatest energy sources in the universe at our disposal. Our Sun.

Next to wind this an abundant source and we’ll be focusedon utilizing this as much as possible. Depending on where we end up wind energy is certainly a viable option, the wind turbine, however, is visually intrusive and we’ll try to avoid them.

Solar energy is relatively easy to implement. Put a couple (i.e. enough) photovoltaic panels on the roof, have them face south at a proper angle and hook them up to a couple of batteries. The power created is 24 volts on which you can run, at least, the lights in your home. A 24v fridge is also possible.
Systems which use 230v will get their power through an inverter. At the moment the initial costs are still pretty high, but prices are dropping all the time with the systems getting more efficient all the time.

A wind turbine can be hooked up to the same system.

Heat

The house will be solar heated through the windows. Any additional heating will be done by a wood stove.
Warm water will come from a solar water heater with assistance of a regular, but energy efficient, gas heater. The gas will also be used for cooking and will be derived from tanks. We won’t be producing that ourselves…

Simple

As mentioned, the above is of course a simple view of a complex system. As with Earthships the whole point of the building will be its systems. Without them, it will be just a (sustainably build and environment friendly) house.

Later on, when we have a design and are actually building, we’ll get back to these systems with more detail.

Any questions or comments, feel free… and, in case you missed it, don’t miss the first part: Process of Elimination.