I have a fantasy where I don’t see other humans for weeks at a time and live off the land and raise my own animals and never have to pay an electric bill. Anyone else?
I thought after reading someone’s interest in water and electrical sourcing in another thread that an off-the-grid SIG might be fun. Research and test techniques. Maybe even find a spot to implement them a few years down the road.
Anyone else?
I’ve had a similar fantasy for the last decade, but any time I tried to grow my own food, even hydroponically, once the routine sets in, I’m quickly reminded how much easier it is to buy it from someone else. And then I realized that my fantasy was never really about living off-grid at all. That was just a means to an end. My goal was to have a hobo’s freedom without suffering from homelessness, starvation, or chronic boredom.
lol…that’s exactly what it is. I want all the benefits of a modern industrial and technological society without having to significanlty particpiate in it or acknlwedge its neccesitay or existance.
I’m screwed…
I was watching an American pickers episode. They came across a guy, that as a little kid was raised in a cult. There he learned engineering and chemistry. He left the cult as soon as he could, but he now lives on the outskirts of a town. But he makes his own biodiesel, he’s made his own of the grid electricity sources, I think he said the only out of pocket expenses was internet and some stuff for his garden. He had built walls around himself. It was a nice set up.
For the first 8 months of 2016, DMS had John and Alexa working on their schoolbus conversion to tiny home, detailed on their blog. The project interested me greatly since I’ve long kicked around the idea of some sort of mobile, semi self-sufficient residence. They had a tight budget and a schedule, so their creation ended up more RV than anything else.
This is largely my interest in the subject as well, but I’d like a degree of self-sufficiency as well - all the comforts of home on wheels without being wholly dependent upon an RV pedestal or other umbilical.
I’ve kicked around the various mobile tiny house platforms: school bus conversion, box truck, trailer.
School bus
Box truck
Trailer
For me, the concept needs the following:
The proliferation of the tiny house concept has generated endless ideas on how to do all of this in conspicuous consumption style at considerable expense; there seems to be less focus on how to get excellent bang-for-the-buck which is where I tend to live. I’m not interested in dumping $50k+ into such a venture when I’m confident it can be done for far markedly less without looking and feeling like a shanty on wheels.
I saw a video of a guy that built a solar powered sterling engine using a large parabolic dish. With a DC generator attached it could be used as a peak demand supplement for the solar cells. For instance it could help run the AC when the sun is up. The cold side of the engine could be cooled by water recirculated to the hot water supply. https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+stirling+engine+parabolic+dish&tbm=isch
It would be a fun challenge to make one that folds up for transportation.
A very well thought out list of requirements.
Most tiny home options aren’t really viable in my case, for family reasons. I’d also prefer some type of land ownership. For a couple of years, I’ve been interested in [biogas energy]
(https://energypedia.info/wiki/Electricity_Generation_from_Biogas) generation, which would reduce dependency on waste removal and the power company simultaneously.
I’ve been watching Last Man on Earth on Hulu, and it sort of reminds of this off-grid lifestyle. They face similar issues.
My interest is essentially RV with the potential to become a primary residence many years down the road. Land ownership is still possible with such an arrangement but not a primary goal. As such, portability is important.
The infrastructure for off grid is an interesting challenge - and in fact strikes me as the primary challenge in such an effort. Power can be somewhat independent (so long as you can live within limits), but water, climate control, sewer, and food make Independence of supply lines and/or connections to existing infrastructure more difficult.
Power demands escalate quickly. LED lighting takes watts. Laptops consume low tens of watts. TV’s (suitable for a small space) consume high tens of watts. Kitchen appliances take hundreds of watts. AC takes a kilowatt as does any kind of electric heat.
I’d really like to do solar power with a li-ion battery bank, but the amount of both required to run AC or any kind of heating demands for long would be prohibitive - and this thing needs to be reasonably portable. At ~$500/kWH for Li-Ion with decent power-output capabilities I’d need something like a $4000 bank just to be able to run a small AC unit overnight. I haven’t even calculated how many faceplate watts of solar it would take to recharge said bank in a day - suspect it would be far more than I can reasonably carry and deploy.
Solar panels have seen a nearly 10-fold reduction in price since I first looked at them roughly 7 years ago, but the rest of the system components (inverters, charge controllers, wiring, batteries) haven’t seen such drastic price drops. 18650 Li-ion cells can be had as cheap as ~$0.50/W-H and may get cheaper.
As such, any solar or battery bank I enact will likely just be sufficient for the smaller loads. I expect to utilize propane for the big heat demand (furnace, cooking) items as well as for a generator to handle the big loads such as kitchen appliances and AC.
The water situation is also interesting. One can only carry so much water in a given volume (I gather that 60 gallons can suffice for a couple on a weekend trip), but there’s also the problem of blackwater. I hear that composting toilets have come a long way - which will leave you with just greywater which is not as difficult to dispose of - but I’m not familiar enough with them to say they’re a good plan. The more adventurous could capture rainwater from the roof and treat/filter it into drinking water.
There was discussion that THE BUS could be had for a very good price. 
Seriously - let’s renovate the think inside out (including power steering) and auction it off for the moving fund.
A portable system for turning your blackwater into a limited energy source might be an interesting approach. I’ve seen people convert their septic system into bio-gas generators. A RV sized solution may only yield enough gas to heat your meals for less than an hour a day though, but that’s at least something. Then there’s the problem of what to do with the surplus. You’ll produce more sewage than you can anaerobically compost. Although, processing it aerobically, to make it “safe” to “dump” anywhere would be a fairly quick and painless process. Aeration alone would make it safe in a few days.
Hello to all in this thread. I’m hosting an event this Saturday at 11am in the back parking lot for those who are doing van, RV, off-grid projects. Come and join us to discuss your project/build.
https://calendar.dallasmakerspace.org/events/view/3007
Bring your project or pictures if you can. See you there!