Bode Miller, the American downhill skiing sensation and gold medal contender in the Winter Olympics, is famous for a fearless, wild style often ascribed to his oddball upbringing. When he was a child, his parents, free-spirited hippies, took the family to live on a 450-acre mountainous homestead in New Hampshire.
It was there that the young Miller learnt to ski, wild and free. The children were partly home-schooled; there was no television, in fact, there was no electricity or plumbing, either; the family lived entirely “off-grid”. They had to “invent, grow or carry in” essentials such as food and fuel, says Miller.
While Miller’s family were early and full-time pioneers, the idea of living off-grid has been picked up more recently by part-time eco-campaigners such as the actors Woody Harrelson and Darryl Hannah. In Britain, increasing numbers are also going off-grid.
Literally speaking, “off-grid” means living without mains power or water. Instead, energy can be generated from a wind turbine or solar panels, or, as Sir Elton John has reportedly done, you can install a ground source heat pump to transfer the earth’s heat to the inside of your home. Water can be drawn from a local spring or “harvested” from the rain as it runs off the roof.
Off-grid living can also encompass other environmentally-friendly measures. Daryl Hannah, for instance, travels to her off-grid home in the Rocky Mountains in a car powered by biodiesel (fuel derived from a mixture of vegetable oil and alcohol). This may not be the solution that President Bush imagined when, this month, he warned Americans that they were “addicted to oil”, but it’s an answer of sorts.
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Why would anyone want to live this way? Some do it to survive in places where the mains utilities don’t go; others to save money or even to save the planet.
Most British off-gridders have tucked themselves away in deeply rural areas, although that is beginning to change as off-grid living, once the preserve of the very rich, or very poor, becomes more mainstream — the result of the rising cost of oil, electricity, and water.
David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, is so determined to prove his green credentials that his new Notting Hill house will boast thermal solar panels on the roof to heat water, photovoltaic solar panels to turn light into electricity and a wind turbine (if he can get planning permission).
I stumbled across the off-grid life after buying a remote property in the mountains of northern Majorca a few years ago. I was looking for a solar panel for recharging my laptop when the search engine threw up the term off-grid. I liked it so much that I started a website advising others how they could go off-grid.
Following Daryl Hannah’s example, I even run my Range Rover on biodiesel when I can. The owner of the local fish and chip shop was gobsmacked when I first offered to take his old oil away free twice a week. I have to filter the oil through a very fine plastic mesh to clean it, but it works fine when mixed 50-50 with diesel from the pump.
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Perhaps the best known British exponent of the off-grid life is Ben Law, who appeared in two of Channel 4’s Grand Designs architecture series as he collected rainwater at his house in Prickly Nut wood in Surrey, and charged batteries from a wind turbine. Law is motivated partly by concern about the environment, but going off-grid can also make sense financially.
A ground-source heat-pump (see below) transfers ground heat to heat domestic water and costs between £6,000 and £8,000 to install in a new 3-bedroom house (£10,000-£15,000 in an existing house). “The payback is five to eight years based on current oil and gas prices,” says Patrick Sherriff of Geothermal International. This will cover 70 per cent of the house’s heating.
There are other ways of saving by avoiding the grid. Jim Varnom, a semi-retired accountant, lives off-grid in the Yorkshire Dales. Twelve years ago Northern Electric quoted him “at least £20,000” to bring electricity to the house from half a mile away. For about £12,000, Varnom has an entire off-grid set-up: a large Proven wind turbine, several powerful batteries, and an inverter to transform the 24-volt DC he generates into the 240-volt AC required for household use. He runs lights, television, fridge-freezer, computers and other equipment via the inverter.
Two wood-burning stoves are fed with “windfall wood from the local farm” and the gas cooker runs off Calor bottles. Water is pumped from a nearby spring. “We had gaslight and candles till six years ago,” said Varnom. “Then I fitted a small turbine with a government grant of £2,500. Some members of the family said I was going against the spirit of the place by changing it, but as we get older we have to make it suitable.”
An off-grid system does not look after itself. The wind turbine needs annual maintenance; the back-up generator needs an oil change and Varnom has to check the water level in the batteries.
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“You need to be very practical and you need to know where everything is,” he said. “I worry about how my wife would cope on her own. Sure, you just click on a switch and it all starts. But when it doesn’t work you need to know the ins and outs of it.”
Because much of his power is generated from renewables, Varnom qualifies for government grants for each kilowatt-hour generated by the wind turbine (this is registered on a specially-fitted meter). He receives a cheque once a year from Good Energy, one of several companies acting as middlemen to help small off-grid households to collect their entitlement.
Some rural off-grid homes have gone one step further and get by with no electricity at all. Simon Lloyd, 40, who works for Loughborough University, lives in Tipi Valley, West Wales. When he comes home the candles are lit and his wife cooks dinner on the wood-burning oven that he built himself. The difference is that Simon’s home is not a house; it’s a yurt, a very stout kind of Mongolian tent. “We move twice a year,” he says — “in the summer to enjoy the view and in the winter to a more protected spot.”
The couple use a wind turbine for lighting; their water comes from a neighbour’s borehole in exchange for help with building work. “I use about 5 litres of water a day at the most, but the borehole is frozen at the moment,” he told me. “In the summer it does run a little dry.” The couple take their washing to the launderette.
At the other extreme is Donnachadh McCarthy, a journalist who lives in Camberwell, South London. He uses a wind turbine and solar panels on his roof to generate power and produces so much that he sells the surplus electricity to the national grid. He does not believe in the use of batteries as these are “environmentally unsound”. Last year he made £35 from the deal. (The annual electricity bill for an average two-bedroom house is £600). Water is collected from the roof, “and then fills my WC and tap in the bathroom via gravity. I have shaved in rainwater almost continuously since it was installed eight years ago”. He uses rainwater in his washing machine but has mains back-up for periods of drought.
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All this takes some initial investment: for instance, the rainharvesting equipment, which was “put in by a plumber mate”, cost McCarthy £300. The solar panels cost £13,000 six years ago although they would now cost only £7,000, and the price is dropping. While these will not pay for themselves in McCarthy’s lifetime, in a few years the economics might have changed: the wind turbine, with inverter (£3,000) and the solar water heater (£4,200, minus a £900 grant), will cover their cost in bill savings in 5 to 20 years.
McCarthy is an urban exception — most off-grid activity is still rural. When Jyoti Fernandez, 32, and Dai Saltmarsh, 34, a builder, bought a field in Dorset it was to fulfill their dream of living self-sufficiently. With their four children, aged 2, 4, 6, and 8, they live in a turf-roofed, two-bedroom cabin that they built from local wood. They have a small wind turbine although now have planning permission for a much larger one, to help to power their growing farming business. “I bought the turbine from America and it fits in my suitcase — the blades are about 3ft across,” says Fernandez. They, like Ben Law, have something that marks out the serious, dedicated off-grid person from the dilettante: a composting lavatory. “You climb some steps,” says Fernandez “and underneath is a barrel that collects the waste. You just put a bit of dry vegetation down when you go to the toilet. It composts the solid matter down. You can’t put it on your vegetable crops, but we put it on trees.
“People worry that we are lowering their property values. We know a lot of people who are interested in living this way, but it’s such a battle,” says Fernandez. “If there was land that was designated and set aside for people to build self-sufficient houses, a lot of young families would take the risk.”
Martin Foster, a farmer, has an off-grid holiday cottage by the banks of Loch Sween in Argyll. The cooker runs off bottled gas while the lights are powered by a small £300 second-hand wind turbine — charging two tractor batteries. “You get about three hours’ television on a windless night, and if it’s windy you can watch all night,” said Foster.
I fear that the spirit of going off-grid may be lost on my local chippie. He wants to start charging £10 for his rancid cooking oil.
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How to go off-grid