Your electric alarm clock goes off. It’s 7 a.m. and time for class. Hot water pumps from the showerhead when you turn it on and the coffee pot brews in less than five minutes. Do you ever stop to consider what goes on behind the scenes of your daily routines?
Some people have found ways to simultaneously reduce their costs and help the environment by living off the grid – even if it may mean no morning coffee.
Living off the grid can be as simple as generating part of a home’s power through wind and solar energy, or as radical as moving into a mud hut with no electricity, water, natural gas or sewage at all. Both can save money and help the environment, but this lifestyle is not for everyone. Stepping off the grid means stepping up to face the challenges modern day conveniences let us ignore.
Laura Plaut owns Common Threads Farm, an off-grid farm on Lummi Island. In the summer, she runs camps to teach children how to live sustainably. Although she doesn’t yet live on the property full time, she plans to build a home there eventually. She believes in her investment in solar panels to harness Lummi Island’s sometimes 100-mile-per-hour winds and to leave a better world for our children.
"I feel like we live in a world where if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem," Plaut said.
Many of us who live on the grid thoughtlessly use electricity every day. For people like Plaut, there is no mindlessness to flipping on a switch or plugging in an appliance. Generating electricity is one of the major obstacles to jumping off the grid.
Plaut’s farm is currently powered by a solar-panel system that costs $20,000. Plaut said she thinks it will pay itself off in about seven years. Although she has a battery bank to store energy, she does not have an endless supply and most of it goes to pump the water from her well.
"I could power a coffee pot right now in the middle of a bright sunny day, but I can’t with my setup at six o’clock in the morning," Plaut said. "[You have to] start somewhere."
Plaut’s hope is to soon connect to the grid using the Production Metering Program through Puget Sound Energy (PSE). The program will allow her to feed the extra energy she produces back into the grid so it doesn’t go to waste, and let her take energy from the grid when she needs more.
By living without any connections to utility companies, Jai Boreen encompasses the definition of living off the grid. Boreen and his family live in mud huts that rise from the hills of Missing Mountain Farm in Friday Harbor. He has taken an extreme approach to disposing of his waste – a technique he calls "humanure."
Boreen uses five-gallon buckets lined with paper garbage bags as a toilet. He covers his waste with sawdust and empties them once they’re full. He swears it doesn’t smell.
"You have a certain intimacy with your shit, and some people don’t want that intimacy," Boreen laughed.
Boreen’s devices don’t stop with the toilet.
His house doesn’t provide the same primitive images the word "mud hut" would usually provoke. It is much more home than hut – industrially sound and aesthetically pleasing.
His hut is made of mud dredged from a pond on the property. As long as it doesn’t get wet, the mud is an excellent building material, and a large roof protects it from Washington weather. Boreen mixed the mud with straw and even used old empty crushed beer cans for extra support for his kitchen unit.
Large windows line the hut’s south walls, revealing scenes of Puget Sound. The windows also allow sunlight to pour in all day, which Boreen said is a great way to heat his home without lifting a finger.
"You wake up and it’s absolutely gorgeous," Boreen said. "Every morning, it never fails. This kind of lifestyle is constant therapy."
When warmth from the sun isn’t enough, Boreen has two wood stoves that provide ample heat. One stove sits on the side of the room, running warmth through a large pipe up the wall. The other is a downdraft stove, which is lit outside the hut. Heat from the fire is sucked under the floor through pipes to warm the hut from the ground up. The pipes run directly under Boreen’s bathtub, so although it may take more than just turning a nozzle, hot baths aren’t out of the question.
Perhaps all pioneers have to deal with the bugs that plague an alternate lifestyle, and living off the grid is no different. Living sustainably isn’t without its hardships. For Boreen, some problems stem from skeptics in the community. He thinks people who connect to the power grid without a second thought aren’t scrutinized as much.
"Some people idealize our lifestyle and some people stare at it," Boreen said. "I don’t think that people who stay mainstream have to deal with that as much. Our culture is pretty judgmental."
Boreen hasn’t let criticism change the way he lives. He is proud of the existence he created.
Even with examples like Boreen, it doesn’t always work out for everyone.
Pat Savatgy lived outside of Deming for 25 years before moving to Bellingham in 2007. Though he embraced the off-the-grid lifestyle and still keeps up with off-the-grid technologies as a hobby, he spent too much time commuting to town and decided to move.
Savatgy built his Whatcom County home far from electric lines. In order to produce energy, he created a hydroelectric system that cost much less than running power lines to his house.
Savatgy hooked up a car alternator to a homemade dam on a creek near his house. The alternator charged batteries to power his home. He produced enough energy to live frugally, but couldn’t power all his appliances. Savatgy used a propane refrigerator and wood stove to conserve the energy that he produced.
Savatgy connected a water heater to the stove so whenever a fire was burning, he also had hot water. Considering he installed the stove for warmth, the entertainment value was a bonus.
"We had a glass door and watched the fire like most people would watch TV," Savatgy said. "You have a chance to collect your thoughts."
Savatgy said among the technical problems he encountered, on-the-grid technology started to dominate his low-tech lifestyle. When his son Rory was 12, he discovered the Nintendo 64 and wanted to play all the time.
"That would mean starting the generator to play games," Savatgy said. "It was using gas to play games; it went against my whole philosophy."
For many of us, exchanging video games for nights of watching a fire or coming home to a lightless house is simply too much to ask. But those who embrace the possibility of an off-the-grid lifestyle aren’t alone. Perhaps we could all take a tip and be a little more off, a little less on.
Kaylin Bettinger studies visual journalism and Spanish. She has been published in the Western Front. This is her first published piece for The Planet.