🤗READ Before you comment: We only rented this cabin for the summer in Alaska. We wanted to learn about off grid systems and get a feel for how "normal on-grid people" would adjust to off-grid living. Many of your questions will be answered by Watching the Entire video. We're getting ready to release the next video, so we won't be able to moderate any more comments. If you have any questions, feel free to email!
Why do people think that their ancestors, in the old, black and white photos, looked so miserable? They WERE miserable; life without, is HARD WORK. Back in the day, they didn’t do it because it was “novel”, they did it because they had no choice.
People have asked me about living off grid. I've heard people saying they want to leave the "on grid" to live similar to what I do. My advice is to just stay where you are and turn off something. Like the TV. Or the washing machine or the refrigerator. Some convenience that they think they could live without. Once they figure out how to deal with that, then pick the next convenience and establish how they would deal without it. It would be easier to get "stuff" like canning equipment and the knowledge to begin that, refrigeration or how will you take care of food, or washing clothes, or heating and cooking. It would make the "culture shock" much easier if one could ease into it, rather than just cold turkey the change. Especially with children. Wasn't but a few years ago that 2women and a teenager died from not knowing how to live off grid. They just packed up and went.
My wife and I live off-grid in Arizona. Closest utilities are 22 miles down a dirt (sand) from our house. We have solar for electricity, well for water, and propane for cooking, dryer, hot water heater, etc. This to me is what off-grid is. Honestly having lived there for 2 years now, I can't imagine moving back into a town.
"We didn't expect life in the TINY cabin to be so hard." Really? All of you, in a tiny cabin, you didn't think that would be hard? "We didn't expect the weather to be so bad." It's Alaska, not Cali or Florida. What did you expect?
I mean, you set yourselves up for failure right from the get-go. A family as large as yours in a tiny cabin like that was only ever going to end up in tears.
It's really interesting that people idealize the little house books so much. I'm reading them to my young son right now and it's struggle after struggle. Just in the last book The grasshoppers ate everything, there was blizzard after blizzard and they couldn't go anywhere because a blizzard might start and they couldn't see. Pa gets stuck in a blizzard and only survived by falling into an area where he was protected by an overhang on the prairie and eating all the Christmas candy. The little girls get bullied, the family struggles to pay for their house, pa has to travel to another farm and work away from the family for months. Their coats are too small and their dresses are too small and pa has boots that are so worn out his feet show through. They have to live in a tiny dugout. They have to build their own house, ma is cooking and cleaning all the time. When they can't go to school in the blizzard she teaches the kids herself. They have to take care of a cow and cook with fires. The little girls do play outside and the family loves each other, but they're living a really difficult life. I think Pa in the books actually had some of the same things going on as in this video, he kept thinking they next place would be better, that the new land would make them happy, but the struggles of life continue. Our family is always talking about how nice it is we don't have to have it so hard! I guess it's like living in an older house. We live in a house that's more than 100 years old. People say they want to live in an old house, but I think they actually want to have the fun parts, without the work it takes for upkeep. They don't really know what is involved.
We are the same way with the Little House books. I don't understand how someone can idealize/romanticize it when they seem pretty honest about how difficult everything was and how scary the circumstances were. We live off grid and it IS hard, but it's also very beautiful. Definitely easier than the Little House books because we have a lot of modern conveniences still (solar power for energy... air conditioner in the summer, microwave and modern coffee maker... off grid wifi and computer constantly... it's easier than this video portrayed, but every off grid set-up is highly personal and different). They did a great job at the end showing the different off grid set-ups where people have things easier because they've figured out better ways. Anyway, agreed with your comment!
I’m really enjoying this series! I lived off grid for 5 years, with three children under the age of 10. One thing I learned - don’t go into it with the same mindset you had when on grid. No matter what you’ve been used to, you don’t HAVE to do laundry every day, you can actually let the kids put the same clothes on for a week and it won’t kill them…they don’t need a bath every day, etc. the standards we are used to, are actually a luxury. Not everyone is ok with this, I get it. But if you want to make your life a little easier, maybe let those standards ease a bit, in whatever ways you feel comfortable 😊
We've been off-grid for 3 years and I ask everyone contemplating this lifestyle: Can you handle wearing the same clothes more than 1 day? Can you handle taking a sponge bath instead of a daily shower? Are you prepared to have every single task take 3 times longer?
100%!!! And also, laundry can be as simple as just hanging the laundry on the line before a rainstorm - not everything needs to washed with soap everytime, in fact I prefer to avoid any kind of soaps altogether except when absolutely necessary, like getting the fat out of my butcher gloves after processing an animal.
I agree. Back in 1980 my ex and I lived in a very basic mud brick shed we built with our 3 little ones. I look back on those days quite fondly but enjoy my flushing loo and running water very much now.
Exactly. Because of poverty I did a lot of things by hand and we did go two weeks without power one winter. I love manual labor. I truly believe that lifestyle has to be debt free so one doesn't have to be a wage slave and do all the extra work that comes with off grid homesteading at the same time.
This is why you have to get all the facts prior to making such a move. It is possible to live entirely off grid without being completely uncomfortable. You can have a washing machine off grid, you just need the infrastructure to be able to have it. You also need to embrace the realities, realize it is going to be rough, sometimes for years, before you get into the groove. It's also a reality that if you have kids, those kids have to join in on the responsibilities, such as laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc. Most of all, take the rose colored glasses off.
I agree that you need to be well prepared before making a move, but there is no way to get “all” the facts beforehand. There is no substitute for hands on experience. I think you would agree that you would take small steps in gaining hands on experience before doing something extreme like going off grid in a remote area.
Folks just need to be realistic about what life off grid really is. Your still going to be going to work. You still need to make money. Technically you're gonna need more money😅. Good solar isn't cheap. CHEAP off grid is only 1 or 2 steps above being homeless. That's more accurate than any stupid off grid video you'll see.
What did you expect having an 8 person family in a cabin built for two? I’ve been living off grid in Tennessee in a small camper for a year and a half it gets difficult but doable. Of course I’m only 8 miles from a small city and I bought a solar system for my electric. You shouldn’t try being off grid with such a large family in Alaska so far away from civilization.
i dont watch thier videos all time but, they seemed okay where they were. i wonder if this is just a money video attempt? things that make you go hmmmmm
ADAPT. Bring the toilet seat inside to keep it warm, take it with you when you go to outhouse. Make an indoor chamber pot out of bucket and plastic trash bag, use a shower curtain for privacy, have a separate pee bottle, put dried leaves or sawdust over each poop to compost it, never mix pee & poop because that ferments and stinks. I have an induction stovetop cooker & microwave that runs on 1200W sine wave power inverter. Indoor stove ain't that hard, solve it. Get some lumber and make a real porch cover with screens for mosquitos. Learn to make food that only needs heating (canned soups/meats) or add boiling water Dehydrated(Ramen, Mash Potatoes, Rice, Pasta, Refried Beans). You need to spend your time WORKING, put a project list together, set priorities. That many people you have to do laundry everyday. You have a lot going for you at that homestead, handle it. When you go to town bring 2000 pounds of supplies back with you.
Husband: went fishing, made smores, made a bad cup of coffee, strummed a guitar, had a visit with the neighbor, took a walk. Wife: all the chores. Yay! Sounds like a lot of fun.
We are the ones being lied to. This is nothing more than content creation. I have watched them on and off during the years and they always make some big life change every few years. Probably when their analytics start dropping off. They have been homesteading for years. They had to go to Alaska to learn about off grid? Really? The Internet is full of off grid homesteads and off grid content. But they didn’t know it was going to be so hard? Newsflash Alaska is cold! Not. Everything about this is absolute BS because these people are not stupid. These people are professional RUclipsrs and this is nothing more than Clickbait content.
For outhouses: We used to use one sometimes when I was a child. It's best to not attach the toilet seat to the wood and store it in the house next to the fireplace. Just take it with you and wipe it off with a baby wipe when you get back in the house. Then you'll always have a nice warm and toasty clean seat (free of bugs and hiding spiders) when it's time to go.
Things you should understand before going off grid: Basic carpentry - You don't have to know a lot but the basics of how to cut and fit wood together effectively and safely Basic understanding of thermodynamics - learn how to keep heat in and what could sap heat from the environment. Food storage - in cold environments like Alaska you can very easily dig a hold in the ground about 1-2 feet and place food wrapped in a tarp or in an ice chest and this will work just as well as a fridge. Also salting/smoking meats will extend the life by months and you can build smokers out of stones you find around. First aid - you should all have an understanding of first aid, the closest Hospital can be hours away. Lastly you should install solar panels and get a large enough solar battery to last a couple days in the event of large storms. Gas is expensive and you cant rely on a generator holding out for days on end of continuous use, they require much more maintenance and you have to change the oil every couple days to keep the efficiency at 100%.
You need to give each of your children chores so its not all on you. To live off grid EVERYONE HAS TO PITCH IN. From a 2 yrold to 100 yr old everyone needs tk have a job and to make this work for your family. Have been off grid for 8 years with me my spouse and 1 child. Teamwork and everyone has a jobs tk do.
If you look at the PBS series’ where families lived according to standards of living that existed at that far-off time, you learn that it was truly brutal and exhausting.
It seems the entire problem was a lack of due-diligence. It seems like they bought a "shed sized" "Tiny Home" sight unseen that was way too small, and failed to verify it was a s advertised, meaning the kitchen, wood stove and toilet was good to go. Living in an area like that means you need interior living space!
Hmmm, I don't think you understand the entire situation. Our goal was to learn about off grid living before jumping in. That's why we just rented this cabin for the summer, so we could learn about off-grid systems and talk to other off-gridders. And now, back at our on grid homestead, we feel more prepared to design a future off-grid home.
I grew up off grid without running water or electricity in the mountains of Oregon. While it may be romantic to do it for a week or two, when it's the middle of winter and you really want a hot shower after falling when chopping ice to get to the water source, It stops being fun. Having chickens is great normally. But when an animal gets in and kills all of your fresh proteins for the year, you get sick of canned food fast.
If you read the Little House books carefully, you realize that the people having fun were Pa and the girls. NOT Ma, or the other women who went crazy from the isolation and hard work.
I lived the first part of my life in Cuba doing all of the off grid chores and then some. The second part of my life I’ve lived in the USA enjoying basic commodities. To say I feel rich because I have a machine that washes my dishes is an understatement! And I love it. I do not want to live off grid on purpose. It is so hard! Having said that I am glad to have that knowledge because we never know what is waiting down the line. Our homestead has all the systems needed to thrive off grid if the lights get turned off like they do most days in Cuba. And I am teaching my kids so they don’t get overwhelmed if they ever need to wash their clothes by hand. Until then I’ll let my Roomba vacuum my floors while I enjoy some time loving on my babies.
You haven’t seen hard yet. How many cords of wood do you have? Winter is coming. Without more cabin space, your essentials are going to make you feel like you are being strangulated (food storage, extra clothing and the ability to make/fix them, medical, etc). Oh look, here comes a grizzly bear or wolf. I lived in Alaska. I presently live in northern Missouri.
"Just enough knowledge to be dangerous." When I was a young child we lived in the Alaskan bush in a one room cabin without electricity or plumbing. We used Cutters for the mosquitoes. ("But it's not natural." Malaria is natural. I'll go with the bug spray.) Laundry and bath day came once a month - and we needed it. My dad kept beaver caster glands in his coat pockets for the traps. I was too young (left when I was seven) to know that this was an unusual lifestyle at the time. It was just how we lived. But in retrospect, it did color my view of male/female relationships (everybody is killing themselves and we're all oppressed by the struggle to survive and the pain of life, not by each other) and an eternal gratitude for modern conveniences. I DEEPLY APPRECIATE MY WASHING MACHINE. And microwave, blender, AC, heater, etc.
We lived in Alaska when I was a kid, and the mosquitoes are ginormous! I loved, loved, loved Alaska, but I would NEVER choose to learn off grid living in Alaska. The bugs alone would keep me from doing it-it’s not just mosquitoes. But, mercy, the winter weather and lack of sunlight -sheesh! Hats off to y’all for taking on that challenge!!
@daelynnsawyer- I totally agree! Hubby lived there in the late 1980's for 5 years, said it was gorgeous, but he never got used to the endless Winter darkness. If you have any tendency toward depression, this State is not a good option for you, ESPECIALLY off-grid!😢
Been off grid for nearly 3 years. It’s the hardest work ever. I couldn’t imagine doing it with 3 kids. My husband and I have been building our farm from scratch on raw land. Some days we wonder if it’s worth it but at the same time we know there’s know turning back for us. We have way too much time and energy invested. We are little bit different cause we raise a large herd of alpacas (that’s how we make it as homesteaders) so we’ve built pens and barns and all kinds of infrastructure already. But we went 3 years without running water! But as if two weeks ago we finally have a nice indoor shower and a kitchen sink! Total game changer!
I loved the conversation where the neighbor advises you to learn from those who have been successful at surviving in a certain area for decades-or centuries. As a young mom (many moons ago) I lived in southern MX in a small desert pueblo that would now be called "off grid". Palm huts-no running water etc...I had to learn EVERYTHING from the locals. The first piece of advice I was given, was to never wear pants. I scoffed at that-until the day that I was squatting in the pig pen to do my business and some neighbors walked by and waved to say hello. Light bulb. SKIRTS--got it. They are like a wearable privacy tent. After that-I may have renumerated on how things were done--but i did not question their wisdom!
A few things I have noticed that make off grid living in a cold climate easier: -Enough indoor space for drying wer clothes and shoes and for kids to play indoors. -finnish sauna, you just need it, a very effective and comfortable way to wash both people and clothes, brings warmth and hot water ❤️ -a good woodstove and masonry oven, if possible, the latter would keep the cabin warm for a long time, so no shivering in the morning, also super handy for cooking while doing other chores. Like an off grid slow cooker and bread oven. I honestly don't know how people handle off grid Alaska without these. 🙈
Just left Alaska after 7 years. Not off grid. In a native village on an island off of Kodiak. We had 5 days of sunshine last summer. Continually overcast and rainy. Beautiful country and people but I need the the sunshine. Just bought a house in Arkansas. It’s November 14 and it was 65. Ahhhh.
The term Living Off Grid is a modern way of saying, living like our great (great) grandparents lived. Truly living without modern amenities you become the electric company and the electrician, the water and waste water plants and the plumber, the bakery providing a loaf of bread and the baker… Kudos to you for giving it a go. I had never heard of your channel prior to this so you have brought in a whole new set of viewers to your content with this experiment. I think we can all use a reminder of the abundance God has provided for us whatever living style we choose.
I agree with you jeb3415. I'm 61, my grandmother would be 109 if she was still alive. Her mother, my great grandmother (all of them in fact) lived with no electricity, no running water, cooked on a wood burning stove, outhouse, used a ice box, etc. My grandmother was thrilled with modern conveniences and never wanted to go back, only forward. She passed away in the middle 90's. Many things have changed even since then, but she grew up in the time period that the way of life grew much easier. I don't think we really understand. If we try to live off grid, and we can't make it work, we go back to the modern age. Back then, you were in the modern age.
No, they want all the advantages of modern technology, they are not Amish, what they think it means is self sufficient... Funny thing is that they buy fancy things made a world away.
I’m pretty sure they are the ones that are lying. They’ve been homesteading for years. You gonna try off grid by going to Alaska? They’re not stupid. This was nothing but creating content. This is 100% Clickbait. That or they’re really really dumb. They’re not really really dumb!
There is new modern technology that allows you to live off grid and have electricity and off-grid doesn't mean living like the pioneers it means not a text to any grid the public uses you can wash your clothes you could have running water you can have electricity do some research
The title of this video is extremely misleading. I don’t get how you were lied to. There are tons of people living off grid I am glad you only rented to find out where your hearts truly are at because it sure doesn’t sound like you’re really into off grid living. Nothing wrong with that now that I’m older I sure wouldn’t be either. Just seems like your city folks.
ultimately, the wife is by extension the washing machine and the dishwasher and the cook. The husband fails when he fails his wife. You may not have a saw mill, do your best to make one. Need a small building for some reason? even to be storage or for the adults to sleep in? build it. By all means, use a tarp, but create a more permanent or "temporary" enclosure for that area. This is not rocket science and your measurements do not need to be perfect. it sucks that the stove, and most everything in the cabin was broken. Fix them.
Totally. When my husband brought me a new cast iron, I was very thankful. And taught me to cook with it over the wood stove. When the propane stove on the porch was getting rained on in the wind last winter, he built me a wind block. He brought me more pots so I could heat water easier. When he notices me struggling, he often steps up or comes up with a better solution. I am truly thankful for it.
When we moved from the South to Wyoming (which is like Alaska, only in the lower 48--to us, at least), we promised ourselves we would take the advice of people who had lived here instead of saying, "Well, in Florida, we did it like this." This philosophy has served us well. Nine years and counting.
Its possible to live entirely off grid without being to uncomfortable one of the things I found out quick was you need areas of dry warm workable spaces such as a barn, large wood shed, so when it rains or snows your under cover I even have an out roof covered outdoor kitchen
A generator? bruh that's cheating... I grew up "off-grid", it sucks ass, especially if you're a kid with nothing to do but manual labor and run around in a circle for like 10 minutes at a time until you're bored, maybe 20 if you have a ball or something to kick around (at least until they get mad at you for kicking it into the house walls, god forbid you hit a window and break it)... oh and it looks like these guys have a bunch of store-bought goods - again, that's cheating - imagine having to do all they had to do with no electricity and take care of a garden and a bunch of animals (like pigs, chicken, geese, goats, cow ) - having to make sure the dog doesn't eat the chicken or the children don't smother the chicks to death or they get attached to a chicken you want to butcher for food and now they'll be heartbroken, not to mention all the work that comes with preparing said butchered chicken,,, but wait, it gets worse, a few times a year, you get to go work the fields, often under the sun with nothing on your back cause it's so hot outside and if it's corn you need to harvest... get ready for some really annoying cuts... then you need to go to the forest and look for felled trees to bring back to your cabin and chop down enough to last the winter - and you do that in late autumn before the snows, when it's cold af and wet... how anyone can look at all that and say "oh that looks amazing" is beyond me...
I agree. It's a new format for them, and they're trying something very new. Nobody really knows what they're doing. But at least they're trying, and still doing. The input is how they learn. I can't wait to see where they go from here.
The absolute biggest off grid lie is that somehow your life is going to be easier. DO NOT believe anyone telling you otherwise. Off grid costs money. Lots and lots of money. You're still going to have to work, you will still have bills. There is nothing simple about the simple life and nothing nostalgic about getting back to basics. 😅
We love it and there is something oddly mythical and even mystical about it (magical?), but it IS hard... much harder than normal living for sure. It gets more simple the more you work out the kinks and complications to make life easier.
Love the honesty here. Off-grid life requires foresight, skill, and know-how. The “lie” might have been that these things aren’t necessary, or the lack of awareness. It’s refreshing to see a more authentic and not falsely polished video.
I can agree with you! Starting unprepared is so very hard!! Even thinking your prepared with bad advice, the romance people think living off grid ? Yeah it’s not! It’s hard , rough, take anything you know and multiply it by 20! And that’s if you have a solid roof, heat, water, food. Just to get you through first 2 years so garden can get started, chickens raised , security ! And that’s in the lower 48, I couldn’t emagine doing it in Alaska… my hat is off to you guys trying
There's a great documentary out there about the Little House books. Laura's daughter likely wrote a substantial amount of it with a libertarian bent that supported her political movement at the time. Charles Ingalls was essentially a rolling stone who never did learn to support his family and eventually had to sign some kind of pauper's agreement with the government to survive. After having that curtain pulled back, I really had to think about how those books impacted my entire view of European settlement at an extremely impressionable age. I think what most of us are picking at with these self-imposed challenges is trying to step outside of the consumer narrative that was pre-determined for most of us and breaking habits we were born into. Those are hard to shake and we feel the need to go to extremes to try and make new values and habits stick.
I have wondered about people romanticizing these hard lives. So many post-apocalyptic tv shows and movies and off-grid living. I grew up with 2 living great-grandmother's and my degree is in history. I enjoy camping but you couldn't pay me to live without modern comforts. Two very different things. I did a 8 week archeological dig in the middle east when I was doing my degree. No air conditioning in the day, no heat at night, crap showers, dirt and sand in everything, no proper bed, no comfortable seats mostly just stools. We had paid labourer's but we had to get down in there and dig and carry buckets of dirt. A lot of my clothes weren't fitting properly about 3 weeks in. Lost body fat working that hard but also everyone was sick at least once, I vomited a few times. Felt like I was living like a homeless person. I looked like a crazy, dirty lady on my plane because I didn't have time to stop at a hotel overnight before it was time to catch my flight. I'm convinced archeologists are completely mad because they live like that all the time. I only joined dig because I could get credits a lot faster and I learn better hands on and the archeology textbooks looked excessively dry. It was a good decision but I learned how much I love my bed sleeping in a warm room.
Completely off grid is very hard. It takes up a lot of time and energy. I think what a lot of people really desire is just something a little more simple. Not spending so much time at jobs and commuting, and buying questionable produce at th grocery store. Something in the middle. Like a partially off grid community. Maybe youre hooked up to city sanitation system but you use solar for all your energy and use a hand cranked washing machine. You have your own garden or a community permaculture garden/forest for food. Well atleast thats what id want. Off grid is so appealing because people just want their time back and no to spend so much money for basic necessities. Somewhere in the middle is probably best for most people if youre accustomed to certain ammenities and don't have th skills to be completely off grid. But know whatever you decide you always have a choice. You dont have to stay at that job you hate but you also dont have to do everything alone to have a fulfilled life. Also where you go off grid is a big factor. Being off grid in the desert is gonna be different from the mountains in alaska or in the carribean.
Wow can't imagine doing it with 5 young kids and a baby. The first 8 months I was cooking outdoors we had umbrellas for shade and all the dishes got dirty with the wind and rain. Building a shelter next to the caravan was a game changer, which is now the outdoor kitchen we share with the critters and cheeky birds looking for crumbs. EVERYTHING takes longer to do. We had a solar array up within 2 months so that helped feel a bit more normal (the internet is such a great source of information), water tanks within 6 months and we plumbed it to the caravan and around the property, that was also a game changer not having to refill constantly. The composting loo was a big surprise and not as icky as one would expect, and now we have our first years pile transformed into rich compost for the garden. Now we are 2 years and 2 months in, fruit trees and garden are flourishing and got our first harvest of berries. We have a small cabin built and still need to line and wire it up. We have 3 shipping containers for storing our tools, bulk dry foods, washing machine etc. The main container house build starts this year and we have multiple projects on the go: laundry/shower, chicken coop, organic pond, wood shed, greenhouse and a couple of other cabins for our adult kids when they come to stay. Looking back the 1st year was really hard but we are now into our groove and absolutely would not go back to the city to be a mortgage slave. In a couple of years we would have finished building most of the necessary infrastructure and be self sufficient and start producing things to earn some $$. It is so beautiful here with the forest, mushrooms and birds that I loath to leave the place to even go into town to pick up supplies. The thought of spending a 3rd winter in the caravan does fill me with mild dread so better get cracking and finish the cabin. This life is certainly not for the faint hearted but ever so rewarding and liberating. The kids love coming here from the city and one day will build their own places as they probably won't be able to afford a house
Alaska is the last place I would try to start off grid living! Give yourselves a huge pat on the back for doing it and solving so many problems off the cuff. 👏 👏 👏
I grew up in Virginia in the 1950's and 60's with 5 sisters and 3 brothers , our dad worked in the coal mines and $20.00 was a good payday so most of the time we didn't have electric . Our mom washed clothes in wash tubs most of the time on a scrub board . We had an outhouse and when we needed a new one someone built it or when one got full we dug a new hole and moved it . Most of the food we ate came from the woods or we grew it and mom cooked it . Our school was 2 rooms and yes they had outhouses as well . I was the oldest boy so I chopped the wood for the stoves and carried coal from nearby train tracks that had fallen off the coal cars . It sounds hard but I wouldn't trade my childhood with anyone .
I can so relate to what she went through. My husband and I did something similar 6mths ago. We went from a 3000 sq ft house with tons of friends and family to a 1965 38ft wooden boat. Living on a boat had been my dream. It never occurred to me that it would not be everything I dreamed of. On top of that my husband, who I thought would have the hardest time in our new life was having the time of his life. It was as if he found himself and I lost myself. I did lose my self and I am so happy that I did. I am rediscovering who I am. It’s been hard but so worth it. Remember to be kind to your self. It’s a new life you will have more failures than success at times but that’s part of the journey and it’s a journey worth taking. 😊
I've lived off grid in Michigan for 9 years now. 99.9 % of my friends say they couldn't survive a week living my life. And you know what? I can spot the ones that might make it for a 3 day weekend, a two week vacation. But I haven't found any one that could make it thru a year, let alone a decade. Hauling all my water in, and hauling all my garbage& waste out. No fridge/freezer, washing machine, no furnace, no running water, no sewer/septic system, no tv, no computer, no electric system. I have a tiny 100 watt solar stem that charges my cell phone, my 2 rechargeable kitchen & bedroom area USB lights, my power pack for a back up for my cell phone, and my old tablet. And I have one dirct wired 12 volt light. I also have a direct wired 12 volt charging block that has 1 coigarette lighter port and 3 USB ports. My porch light on my 1988 motorhome is direct solar charged, motion activated wall light. And I have a 3 ft long USB rechargeable tube light for working under my pickup trucks hood. I have no systems that work in the old motorhome. I have a small heater that runs off propane tanks I carry to get refilled. And I water bath or pressure can all pf my veggies, fruits, and meats right after going to the store. Even if it takes all night, bcuz of no fridge. I enjoy my life most of the time. But tired of the deep snow & blizzards, with bitter cold high winds in the winter. I want to move more south to grow my food most of the year and have very little snow or bitter cold temps.
So many kids makes a difference- Mother of 10- 9 at home at one time- Big families keep U hopping in every aspic of daily living- Remember soup with meat and vegetables is satisfying and healthy
LOL. I've lived off grid for 30 years. It takes 10 years just to learn how to do it and how to get used to it. Wildlife has been reduced to 1/3 in the last 50 years. You can't rely on wild game for meat. Green house and chicken, beans and rice.
Off grid is very hard. That’s how we started for 5 years and we finally got power last year. We started out in tents. We still get water by rain. Took us 5 years to get where we are but it was hard and many times wanted to give up. We are all thankful we didn’t because we love it here.
Winston Churchill said: “He who fails to plan is planning to fail”. First time watching your channel. First Observation is that your A-Frame is too small for your family. That alone would be a beatdown fast especially without an indoor kitchen. Don't give up, Find a bigger home with more land and outbuildings.
I'm really liking this series! I was an Arizona off grid nomad for 10 yrs. I saw lots of wanna-bees fail miserably and a few close friends who looked to me for guidance succeed. Many good memories.
@dakotaerfle6152 yes, if you don't have a sustainable income, good mechanical ability, and good knowledge of solar power and general electrical knowledge, don't even consider it. Don't believe Bob Wells hype. You can't live comfortably on $600 of SS. There are social programs to help elderly poor get into good housing.
@margaretgrimm4704 Sometimes being blunt saves lives, think about it for a minute. I'm from northern Minnesota. If you underestimate winter you die. The same happens in desert heat.
Figuring it out is the best part! Everyone on yt is kicking back and drinking coffee with a great view 😂 A lot of work to succeed and many think it’s drinking coffee and hiking 😂
I am off grid as well.. I knew what I was getting into.. it's nice but, very difficult some days.. many everyday things take four times as long to accomplish when roughing it. It saves money in some ways & is more expensive to get set-up & maintain then, normal ""in-the-matrix"" living.. it can be lonesome & glad my dog was my companion.. I did still work in the market but, nearest town for my job was one hour away & that's two hours a day driving.. with deer jumping out in front of my truck every day & increases my chances of a wreck & therefore, I had to increase auto insurance coverage & that's just one example of extra expenses I ain't been poisoned by t.v. in months cuz, I don't get t.v. reception.. a radio is all I got.. & I felt in my cellphone & Wi-Fi data on phone cuz, there is no Wi-Fi where I reside in the sticks. It's a journey that's for sure & I made it (3) months so far & got one more to go.. then, my new rental (mobile home not far from my cabin where I can drive less than an hour on days off work to continue improving my off grid cabin & property.. I am currently even in cold temps. digging out & chopping out bull rush weeds & cat fails that took over my small pond.. most people just hire a end loader & CAT to dig it out . & I cannot go as deep as machinery but, I can do it by hand in spite what sobe folks think.. it's just A LOT of hard work.. but, I will be so proud one day a decade from now when I'm older & I worked the land (even tho I'm 50/yrs old I can work any teen age kid or, young men off today into the ground. If you have work ethic, a vision & goal orientated, staying motivated.. then, any one can do it. I'm happy I had this chance at a "test run" on daily living.. it's a challenge. Yet, I got used to it & became tougher & more resilient just in case the contemporary grid crashes & economy collapses.. I know now, that I CAN DO IT!! .. & So, can YOU!😊
I’d take that place and just chill myself! I hate people, I hate being around people.. Just me being by myself, my library of books and nobody near me, that is literal heaven! I envy folks who have that life.
I have lived off grid, once in Hawaii. That time I was twenty years old and the off grid part wasn’t the worst thing, it was the isolation and loneliness that forced me back to town. Then I moved back to the mainland. I learned construction and mechanical skills, I learned how to live with wildlife/bears, I learned to cut, split hundreds of cords of wood I learned to live in and love very deep snow at high elevation and that made all the difference, now I’m okay with it.
I fully believe that if you guys had your own place, where you could design/change things to be suited to you and your large family, the experience would be 100% different. Really what you guys are doing (did?) is camping in a single solid-walled tent. You'd also be able to implement a much more robust solar system to be able to power such things as water pumps and heaters. Just listening now to you describe the LIttle House dream. I had the same one. And what you guys are dealing with in that teeny house is nothing like how the Ingall's lived. If you had their old house, with the working wood stove, working water hand pumps, actual rooms, etc, you'd really enjoy it. For your future home, you don't need to tie yourself to an all-or-nothing lifestyle re on or off grid. I live in Maine and I do what I can to live as independently as I can. I am on-grid, but choose to heat my house - which has a theoretically working furnace - with a large wood stove. I currently raise chickens for meat and eggs and pure enjoyment, I hope to get a pig or 2, maybe a mini cow, am slowly building up my garden...but I still like to grab take out once in a while, refuse to give up having water on tap via my own drilled well, and fully appreciate being able to light this place up like the sun if hear something in the middle of the night. All this to say, don't let this singularly extreme example of off-grid living be the representation of what all off-grid living is or can be like. That place was too small, too broken, too not fixable (rent vs own) in any way. Best of luck to you guys! Edit: Just watched to the end. Glad you guys got out of there and are out experiencing a whole variety of what the OG life can be like :)
I apologize for my previous comment. As I continued to watch your video you said you lied to yourself about the experience. I totally respect that and I believe this truth y’all are sharing will help many of people lying to themselves.
Thanks William! So classy to keep watching, and comment again to clarify! YES, we are the ones who lied, we tell ourselves lies about our dreams, and this video is a good reminder to all who want to follow their dreams (future us included) to make sure to do a reality check before diving in! I know I will need that reminder again, I have a bad habit of diving into the deep end.
We lived off grid on a sailboat much smaller than that house for 5.5 years and went two an a half of those years without touching a dock and living with just 420 watts of solar panels. Of course, we had no air conditioning. We didn't even have a water maker. It was head and shoulders the best time of our lives. We sold the boat and moved back only because our parents were in their last few years and one needed someone to move in with. We were in the tropics in the Pacific but that meant we had often too much heat instead of cold and we still had very irritating flying insects of all sorts that caused us to modify how we lived. We had to fix everything on the boat almost continuously. Our parents are gone now but we are still stuck on the edge of a small town wanting to get back away from civilization. We do know that we have to be able to get to a town at least every other week for it to be comfortable though. Our next off grid place is at 8,200', on the wooded north side of a mountain and out of sight of the nearest neighbor but it is only 5 miles by road to a town of 770. We also will start will 1,600 watts of solar panels this time and imagine that we will double it sooner rather than later. We will us a composting toilet just like we switched to on the boat. Unlike the boat we will also have a lot more water stored and we will be putting in a well. Off grid is fine for us. Of course, we didn't and don't have kids.
I can tell you that sailboat living will drown any doubt people have about tiny/off grid fantasies. I spent 2 years on a 22ft Catalina. Started with only 300 watts of power. Upgraded to 1100 after a year. Learned a lot about myself and endurance. Had the time of my life in the Gulf and Keys. Hopefully when I retire, we can repeat In much nicer accommodations.
Off grid in Alaska is totally different than off grid in Alabama! The environment is extremely hostile to life in Alaska. Unless prepared for extreme conditions you are putting yourself at the risk of death.
That's why we chose to go and lease this cabin for the summer. We loved Alaska but would never chose this cabin for a winter location, it's just too inaccesible.
My daughter is doing it by tent in Utah. She’s been out there a month now. The difference is that it’s just her. Not an entire family. She only has to worry about her own needs. And she’s making trips to “town” for back packing food supplies.
This experience brought about exactly what you wanted . You wanted to be a better person, you wanted to know more about yourself and your resiliency, capability. It did just that, simply in short order. You were expecting years but it didn't take that long. Now you realize you're just a little too bougie for this life.
Really enjoyed listening to your perspectives. Our four years of off grid experience in Michigan’s upper peninsula is quite different because we don’t have young children. Couple of things stuck out to me: why not a composting toilet? Ours has worked perfectly (urine diverted to the outside under the cabin). We have 300 square feet (not a lot of room) but it would be unsustainable to have an outdoor kitchen due to extremes in weather and the bugs. For laundry, a large washtub, plunger, a mop bucket for wringing out water, and a clothesline works well. When I say off grid, I’m talking about no cell coverage (we use satellite), and nearest power/gas lines are 20 miles away. We go into town once every 2 weeks so the trip has to be worthwhile. Solar has been a challenge in certain seasons due to short days, so we ended up with more panels than we originally planned for. I guess the difference is we had reasonable expectations and therefore it wasn’t overwhelming. Best wishes to your family in each chapter of your lives!
The problem is not the off grid living itself. There is easy and there is a hard way to do it. You need specific skills and mindset for this lifestyle. You can build a very comfortable life off grid if you have a clear vision of what are you doing. And imho it takes some experience too. You don't need to live like in the 17th century. Do your research first and plan and prepare carefully before you begin this endeavor. It's not about rainbows and unicorns. If you are a beginner stop dreaming and imagining, better find someone with real experience and learn from them.
I loved the Wilderness Family movies as a kid. They did actually get deliveries by plane. I read all the Little House books as an adult and life definitely looked hard. There were bad crop seasons where starving to death was a real worry, winter storms where people got lost in the snow and froze to death. The Ingalls even moved to town in the winter to keep from freezing in the winter.
This is fascinating. My sister and her family moved to rural northern Ontario, my parents followed and my husband loved it, wanted to follow and build a house. The land he wanted to buy was ridiculously expensive to hook up to electricity and after a lot of discussion, I agreed if we got a good price on our Toronto house, and he had enough money from the sale to build a system at the same reliable level of power as we had at the time in Toronto, we would build off the grid. 2 years later we have the first draft from the architect for our 5 bedroom house (really 3 bedrooms with 2 bunkies attached by breezeway) and solar power plan with propane back-up. Technically off-grid but I have zero interest in a hard life. We've already moved up into the area renting a 3 bedroom house and it will be a year in January. I'm relieved we'll be very close by family. We'll have ample land if we want to grow food or keep animals (undecided). I dabble looking at others off-grid but they're roughing it and I don't believe for a minute that we're alone going the other way. I look forward to never paying another water bill or electricity bill again. I have never wanted to live without modern conveniences. When we lived near my grandparents farm in middle Devonshire, I used to go with my Nan doing meals on wheels in the 1980s. Some of the rural elderly were stubborn Victorian era women who had refused to go on the power grid until they became too frail to argueanymore. I had two great-grandmother's still alive around the same age and they looked in better shape. That sort of life will age you faster. It's not the farming work necessarily. One of my great-grandmother was a farmers wife and one of my grandmother too. But they had washing machines and AGA's and telephones etc... They worked hard but not semi-homeless level difficulty. Which is what these off-gridders full on roughing it look like they're doing. It just can't be good for you living that hard.
Gonna put this one here to explain something... The work loads were all shared in the off grid homestead. K even mentions this during our Coffee discussion. Everyone except the very youngest children did chores, cleaning, cooking, etc. The problem wasn't that the work load wasn't being shared, rather that the work wasn't a fun family experience like we imagined off grid work to be, (as crazy as that may sound to some)...
My mother who grew up in a mudbrick house, no electricity or running water, totally communally sufficient, thinks the prepper/bugout/homesteading culture is very weird and lopsided. Their family left/escaped mostly due to the legacy of Lenin's brand of so-called communism making an already hard life even more pointlessly difficult. Winter was especially hard. She thinks self-sufficiency is delusional (you need a whole community of people doing different things to successfully live, eg: the Amish), and has pointed out the whole point of that show "Alone" that everyone seems to miss, is that being *actually* self-sufficient usually means slowly starving to death while your clothes rot off your back when nature inevitably doesn't provide because she doesn't actually give a single hoot about you.
@@nb6175 you made a statement about it takes a community... This is 100% legit. Any homesteader I have talked to complaints revolve around, lacking skills, lacking machinery, lacking muscle. Lacking time. I started my bucket list off grid life a year ago ... So I'm in the infant stage of off grid life. But the one thing I have know for a long time is that my dream will actually require a community. I'm actively looking for members of my community. Lol. I have a few neighbors I would turn to in need, but I'm actively looking to share my property with other like minded people with skills and similar desires that can't afford this life in society either. I'm on disability...and knew off grid life was the only life I could afford on SSI.... So as I build my food oasis in the desert, I'm constantly sharing my vision and hoping I'll tell the right people along the way
This video was worth the wait! I’m so glad you guys show all aspects of things instead of hiding the outhouse ☺️. Some people are just rude and totally missed the point of what you guys were making. I made so many connections to my own life with what you were talking about. I romanticized my career and thought it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Reality set in. You adjust and change to find what works for you. I love that you guys tried off grid before building your house. What invaluable lessons you learned! Can’t wait for the rest of the series! Thank you for being open and transparent!
Heh. As a veteran outdoorsman and mountaineer who has spent two years of his life living in his vehicle and STILL sleeps outdoors every night (as I have for the past 20+ years), all I have to add is right now I'm sitting in front of a 42 inch monitor and I'll gladly pay my electric bill. I do, however, have a nice toasty woodstove here in my office, so while it's hovering around freezing outside, I have it up to about 75 in here. There is a good reason we built the grid. Living off it sucks. Hot showers FTW.
Can we just collectively agree on how exceptionally well this was put together? I felt that I was watching a largely backed production of a mini series. I watched a documentary on Netflix called ‘The littlest Big Farm’ which I quite enjoyed and have rewatched a couple times and found I was equally engaged and entertained with this episode. This was just so well put together and truly humongous congrats on this work. It was so enjoyable to watch. ☺️
Part of going off grid is being able to build enough to have a well, food, electrical (wind, water and or solar) and sceptic tank. If you are doing less that would be considered survival camp. There's a lot of work involved in setting up off grid to make it livable -- It's not easy getting there but once u do --- it's amazing.
I agree, it's wonderful once you've made it your own special, set-up place. Plus, they probably needed more room. We have a little over 1,000 sq ft, live off grid with 4 kids ages 13 to 3 yrs old, and we love it. Hard, but doable and enjoyable.
Don't give up. When you make changes there are challenges and learning curves. If I was young again and had a life long mate that could agree with me I would do this. I moved in a small to double wide I bought that needed work but so many things were hidden when I bought it fighting health issues I am contemplating renting it out. Where would I go??? Life is not easy for anyone anymore. Blessings to you all❤😊
Fantastic video guys. You were detailed and production was fantastic. I noticed the change of not over talking K. You two feel much stronger and like a united front which makes for a much more pleasurable and smoother flow. Much love you two. ❤❤❤
Oh yeah, pooping in a bucket with a toilet seat attached to it, having to chop fire wood to use wood heat, no air-conditioning, no internet, no TV. I grew up like that. Not ever interested in going back. Just buy a house out in the country with some land, plant a garden, get some chickens and make the place yours. That's far enough off the grid for me.
Yup. A moms life..monotonous and repetitive. Finding moments of change is the key. Making moments is key. Loving your joy in the little things in life. ❤
Off grid life = Camping in the worst conditions possible, and not being able to escape to any comfort (or cleanliness) for any significant period of time. Seeing people as capable as this, struggle like this, should give people a bit of a wake up call. Cheers for the honesty!🎉
Excuse me, but I live totally off grid. I'm comfortable and clean. I have a bathtub and a shower. I have a bed, a sofa etc. I have a woodstove. And a propane one. Battery operated lights. You obviously don't know anything about off grid living!
@@uphillhomestead6188 Oh? It's "Let's be offended time"? 🤦♂️😏 Let's do it! Ok sure. I live on grid, but barely. I heat with wood, hunt and raise animals for all our meat, grow half the produce we need, and need a generator for power often. I have a few different friends with families, less than half hour away, that live 100% off Grid. It is common in my area for the relative few that are here. So yes, I know nothing.🙄 Yes, there are people that are/can be comfortable - but this often takes months, perhaps years - and can still be very difficult in a hard winter, not a drop everything and go into the woods and have it be idyllic. Good for you 👍 Proud of you, but this is not the case for many. Just because you can, doesn't mean everyone that tries, does and/or can. Just because you do, doesn't lessen the lesson for others that haven't done it, wanting to jump in both feet, and have that expectation. You, living like this, know this full well - you've seen people fail I'm sure, just like the fellow helping these good people out in the video. So ok, sure you're right, my statement did not apply to "everyone." Happy?🤔😂
@@dallasburgess5329 you know full well that you stated that off grid living means you're dirty and uncomfortable. And that's not true. Why anyone would jump into a totally new lifestyle without knowing about it is insane. And yea, I guess 0 degrees where I live is considered cold... Thank God for the wood stove! And oh, jackets... Because I read somewhere that they help! Research don't complain. And yes, I applaud you.
@@uphillhomestead6188 What I know "full well" is that just because you, or any other person can do it, does not mean anyone can do it. I also know, that just because I made a TRUE statement, that applies in many cases, - and in most cases for people new to the life, doesn't mean I don't know anything about off grid living. And just because YOU can, and do, doesn't give you the right to insult people.
@dallasburgess5329 you know full well that I was responding to your stupid statement about off grid living means you're always dirty and life is uncomfortable. Both of which are not true. Stop turning it around so I'll debate you.
Alaska and the prairie is a biiiiiiig difference. One thing that is wise is boots on the ground and maybe even a trial stay at a property before buying.
What a great episode. Such an eye opener that it truly just makes “women’s work” harder but it’s still all the same work. It’s so easy to romanticize this type of lifestyle. Love how honest you are being with yourself Kay. This is such a fun series to watch.
As someone who survived off grid lvivng, you’re video lost all credibility with me when you said Alaska. Inless you understand living in cold, wet, windy climate your gonna have a bad time. Went to Wisconsin or Somewhere down south.
It’s really hard to share on RUclips. There will be 107 “you guys are wimps go back to the city” comments on this video by tomorrow morning. Comments like this are the reason we still share the honest feelings here on YT. We know we all feel the struggles at times and to hide that fact is a disservice
I have found that the RUclipsrs who hide the struggle (for fear of criticism) lose their authenticity eventually. And again, there are those that EVERYTHING is a struggle and who wants to watch that? Lol. A fine line to balance and you did well with this video.@@Homesteadyshow
I am about 3/4 through the video and I keep saying out loud, “ya but you need a better system for that, and then it would be easier.” I have not lived off grid, I don’t know that I ever will live fully off grid, but I did grow up very rural, and this required different daily living systems that were different then the town kids. In my adult life I have also made some lifestyle choices that found me living rural too, and at different times “simpler” which incorporated off grid adjacent system like laundry, outhouses, lots of large scale gardening and animal husbandry… and having a good, functional system for all of those activities is absolutely key. And it can mean the difference between enjoyment and frustration. Great video, I hope you have been able to move on and keep the parts you enjoy and incorporate which ever parts make the most sense for your life.
That was the point of the summer off grid challenge. Now we know the things we can do without at first...but other things we'd like to set up right away on our future off-grid homestead!
Building an off-grid homestead in the Yukon Territory for the 2nd year now. Curious about your future videos. You put your family into the almost worst possible situation with that old broken cabin - everything can only get better. Smart move. 😉 With the proper investment in infrastructure, preparedness and thought about how things have to roll, it's definitely enjoyable and could even be convenient to live off-grid.
@Homesteadyshow Although my husband is pressuring me to do vids, I simply don't find the drive to do that. Even without kids. All the more: respect to you guys how you juggle the big family and everything besides it! The worst thing here is the solar system. We don't have a big clue and every time the system changes a parameter (still don't know why, because it's not tied to the internet), it takes us hours to figure it out... I'd say to live a comfy off-grid life (I can even run a dryer), that's the biggest concern. Plus running water - it took us a year and cost us a fortune to get a well driller out here - and a proper septic system are essential. In between living off-grid out of water jugs and showering at work and this homestead, we lived on the grid. My conditions for going back off-grid were to not poop in a bucket anymore (first place had a full outhouse), being able to open a water tap and get warm water and have fluffy towels if I want to thanks to the dryer. 😉 If it were about camping, I'd say I'm a glamper.
one doesn't have add complications by going to Alaska off grid in Alaska is a whole another learning curve on top of the remote location only adds more strain to already stressful situations
Yes, we are off grid in Texas and it is SO much easier (you get full solar power for the summer so air conditioner isn't a problem if you have enough power set up). Alaska is just ridiculously harder, especially in the winter. Like living off-grid on Advanced Pro Mode lol!
🤗READ Before you comment: We only rented this cabin for the summer in Alaska. We wanted to learn about off grid systems and get a feel for how "normal on-grid people" would adjust to off-grid living. Many of your questions will be answered by Watching the Entire video. We're getting ready to release the next video, so we won't be able to moderate any more comments. If you have any questions, feel free to email!
I'd say you heard what you wanted to hear... more than you were lied to.
Yea… I don’t see many of these offgrid channels as that romantic, it’s a ton of work!!! It looks like a ton of work!
@@GreenGoddessCreative yep and majority of these modern homesteaders just don't have it in em to do what those mean ole pioneers did way back when.
Why didn’t you just try off grid at home? Off grid doesn’t have to be in remote Alaska.
Why do people think that their ancestors, in the old, black and white photos, looked so miserable? They WERE miserable; life without, is HARD WORK. Back in the day, they didn’t do it because it was “novel”, they did it because they had no choice.
People have asked me about living off grid. I've heard people saying they want to leave the "on grid" to live similar to what I do. My advice is to just stay where you are and turn off something. Like the TV. Or the washing machine or the refrigerator. Some convenience that they think they could live without. Once they figure out how to deal with that, then pick the next convenience and establish how they would deal without it. It would be easier to get "stuff" like canning equipment and the knowledge to begin that, refrigeration or how will you take care of food, or washing clothes, or heating and cooking. It would make the "culture shock" much easier if one could ease into it, rather than just cold turkey the change. Especially with children. Wasn't but a few years ago that 2women and a teenager died from not knowing how to live off grid. They just packed up and went.
My wife and I live off-grid in Arizona. Closest utilities are 22 miles down a dirt (sand) from our house. We have solar for electricity, well for water, and propane for cooking, dryer, hot water heater, etc. This to me is what off-grid is. Honestly having lived there for 2 years now, I can't imagine moving back into a town.
"We didn't expect life in the TINY cabin to be so hard." Really? All of you, in a tiny cabin, you didn't think that would be hard?
"We didn't expect the weather to be so bad." It's Alaska, not Cali or Florida. What did you expect?
I mean, you set yourselves up for failure right from the get-go. A family as large as yours in a tiny cabin like that was only ever going to end up in tears.
What failure? I see trials, struggles, moments of feeling defeat, all vital parts of growing stronger long term…
This is what happens when hipsters try to live in the woods.
It's really interesting that people idealize the little house books so much. I'm reading them to my young son right now and it's struggle after struggle. Just in the last book The grasshoppers ate everything, there was blizzard after blizzard and they couldn't go anywhere because a blizzard might start and they couldn't see. Pa gets stuck in a blizzard and only survived by falling into an area where he was protected by an overhang on the prairie and eating all the Christmas candy. The little girls get bullied, the family struggles to pay for their house, pa has to travel to another farm and work away from the family for months. Their coats are too small and their dresses are too small and pa has boots that are so worn out his feet show through. They have to live in a tiny dugout. They have to build their own house, ma is cooking and cleaning all the time. When they can't go to school in the blizzard she teaches the kids herself. They have to take care of a cow and cook with fires. The little girls do play outside and the family loves each other, but they're living a really difficult life. I think Pa in the books actually had some of the same things going on as in this video, he kept thinking they next place would be better, that the new land would make them happy, but the struggles of life continue. Our family is always talking about how nice it is we don't have to have it so hard! I guess it's like living in an older house. We live in a house that's more than 100 years old. People say they want to live in an old house, but I think they actually want to have the fun parts, without the work it takes for upkeep. They don't really know what is involved.
We are the same way with the Little House books. I don't understand how someone can idealize/romanticize it when they seem pretty honest about how difficult everything was and how scary the circumstances were. We live off grid and it IS hard, but it's also very beautiful. Definitely easier than the Little House books because we have a lot of modern conveniences still (solar power for energy... air conditioner in the summer, microwave and modern coffee maker... off grid wifi and computer constantly... it's easier than this video portrayed, but every off grid set-up is highly personal and different). They did a great job at the end showing the different off grid set-ups where people have things easier because they've figured out better ways. Anyway, agreed with your comment!
I’m really enjoying this series! I lived off grid for 5 years, with three children under the age of 10. One thing I learned - don’t go into it with the same mindset you had when on grid. No matter what you’ve been used to, you don’t HAVE to do laundry every day, you can actually let the kids put the same clothes on for a week and it won’t kill them…they don’t need a bath every day, etc. the standards we are used to, are actually a luxury. Not everyone is ok with this, I get it. But if you want to make your life a little easier, maybe let those standards ease a bit, in whatever ways you feel comfortable 😊
Yep. I think this is probably one of the hardest things for people to adjust too.
We've been off-grid for 3 years and I ask everyone contemplating this lifestyle: Can you handle wearing the same clothes more than 1 day? Can you handle taking a sponge bath instead of a daily shower? Are you prepared to have every single task take 3 times longer?
100%!!! And also, laundry can be as simple as just hanging the laundry on the line before a rainstorm - not everything needs to washed with soap everytime, in fact I prefer to avoid any kind of soaps altogether except when absolutely necessary, like getting the fat out of my butcher gloves after processing an animal.
I agree. Back in 1980 my ex and I lived in a very basic mud brick shed we built with our 3 little ones. I look back on those days quite fondly but enjoy my flushing loo and running water very much now.
Exactly. Because of poverty I did a lot of things by hand and we did go two weeks without power one winter. I love manual labor. I truly believe that lifestyle has to be debt free so one doesn't have to be a wage slave and do all the extra work that comes with off grid homesteading at the same time.
This is why you have to get all the facts prior to making such a move. It is possible to live entirely off grid without being completely uncomfortable. You can have a washing machine off grid, you just need the infrastructure to be able to have it. You also need to embrace the realities, realize it is going to be rough, sometimes for years, before you get into the groove. It's also a reality that if you have kids, those kids have to join in on the responsibilities, such as laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc. Most of all, take the rose colored glasses off.
I agree that you need to be well prepared before making a move, but there is no way to get “all” the facts beforehand. There is no substitute for hands on experience. I think you would agree that you would take small steps in gaining hands on experience before doing something extreme like going off grid in a remote area.
You can get all the facts, then try it and still think it's crappy. Preparedness doesn't guarantee success
Folks just need to be realistic about what life off grid really is. Your still going to be going to work. You still need to make money. Technically you're gonna need more money😅. Good solar isn't cheap. CHEAP off grid is only 1 or 2 steps above being homeless. That's more accurate than any stupid off grid video you'll see.
@t_riverrat910 A good rule of thumb for off grid is. However hard or long you think it's going to take, x it by 100. Everything will go wrong.
I live in the city and have washed my clothes by hand my whole adult life rarely using a machine.
What did you expect having an 8 person family in a cabin built for two? I’ve been living off grid in Tennessee in a small camper for a year and a half it gets difficult but doable. Of course I’m only 8 miles from a small city and I bought a solar system for my electric. You shouldn’t try being off grid with such a large family in Alaska so far away from civilization.
i dont watch thier videos all time but, they seemed okay where they were. i wonder if this is just a money video attempt? things that make you go hmmmmm
@@farnorthhomested844 well, obviously it is. it's their work, not charity
Because for the summer, it was a very affordable rental. And it allowed us to learn about off grid living, without committing.
ADAPT. Bring the toilet seat inside to keep it warm, take it with you when you go to outhouse. Make an indoor chamber pot out of bucket and plastic trash bag, use a shower curtain for privacy, have a separate pee bottle, put dried leaves or sawdust over each poop to compost it, never mix pee & poop because that ferments and stinks. I have an induction stovetop cooker & microwave that runs on 1200W sine wave power inverter. Indoor stove ain't that hard, solve it. Get some lumber and make a real porch cover with screens for mosquitos. Learn to make food that only needs heating (canned soups/meats) or add boiling water Dehydrated(Ramen, Mash Potatoes, Rice, Pasta, Refried Beans). You need to spend your time WORKING, put a project list together, set priorities. That many people you have to do laundry everyday. You have a lot going for you at that homestead, handle it. When you go to town bring 2000 pounds of supplies back with you.
Husband: went fishing, made smores, made a bad cup of coffee, strummed a guitar, had a visit with the neighbor, took a walk.
Wife: all the chores.
Yay! Sounds like a lot of fun.
We are the ones being lied to. This is nothing more than content creation. I have watched them on and off during the years and they always make some big life change every few years. Probably when their analytics start dropping off. They have been homesteading for years. They had to go to Alaska to learn about off grid? Really? The Internet is full of off grid homesteads and off grid content. But they didn’t know it was going to be so hard? Newsflash Alaska is cold! Not. Everything about this is absolute BS because these people are not stupid. These people are professional RUclipsrs and this is nothing more than Clickbait content.
For outhouses: We used to use one sometimes when I was a child. It's best to not attach the toilet seat to the wood and store it in the house next to the fireplace. Just take it with you and wipe it off with a baby wipe when you get back in the house. Then you'll always have a nice warm and toasty clean seat (free of bugs and hiding spiders) when it's time to go.
Things you should understand before going off grid:
Basic carpentry - You don't have to know a lot but the basics of how to cut and fit wood together effectively and safely
Basic understanding of thermodynamics - learn how to keep heat in and what could sap heat from the environment.
Food storage - in cold environments like Alaska you can very easily dig a hold in the ground about 1-2 feet and place food wrapped in a tarp or in an ice chest and this will work just as well as a fridge. Also salting/smoking meats will extend the life by months and you can build smokers out of stones you find around.
First aid - you should all have an understanding of first aid, the closest Hospital can be hours away.
Lastly you should install solar panels and get a large enough solar battery to last a couple days in the event of large storms. Gas is expensive and you cant rely on a generator holding out for days on end of continuous use, they require much more maintenance and you have to change the oil every couple days to keep the efficiency at 100%.
You need to give each of your children chores so its not all on you. To live off grid EVERYONE HAS TO PITCH IN. From a 2 yrold to 100 yr old everyone needs tk have a job and to make this work for your family. Have been off grid for 8 years with me my spouse and 1 child. Teamwork and everyone has a jobs tk do.
Everyone (except the two youngest) had chores and helped with the work load everyday. Just like they do on our homestead. :)
Even bigfoot would say you're setup was crap.
If you look at the PBS series’ where families lived according to standards of living that existed at that far-off time, you learn that it was truly brutal and exhausting.
It seems the entire problem was a lack of due-diligence.
It seems like they bought a "shed sized" "Tiny Home" sight unseen that was way too small, and failed to verify it was a s advertised, meaning the kitchen, wood stove and toilet was good to go.
Living in an area like that means you need interior living space!
Hmmm, I don't think you understand the entire situation. Our goal was to learn about off grid living before jumping in. That's why we just rented this cabin for the summer, so we could learn about off-grid systems and talk to other off-gridders. And now, back at our on grid homestead, we feel more prepared to design a future off-grid home.
I grew up off grid without running water or electricity in the mountains of Oregon.
While it may be romantic to do it for a week or two, when it's the middle of winter and you really want a hot shower after falling when chopping ice to get to the water source, It stops being fun.
Having chickens is great normally. But when an animal gets in and kills all of your fresh proteins for the year, you get sick of canned food fast.
Yes, we were really glad to take the summer to do this, to give us really good insight into designing our own off-grid homestead.
I love how honest and transparent you are. Instead of coming up with excuses you just went for it all with full honesty and vulnerability.
If you read the Little House books carefully, you realize that the people having fun were Pa and the girls. NOT Ma, or the other women who went crazy from the isolation and hard work.
I lived the first part of my life in Cuba doing all of the off grid chores and then some. The second part of my life I’ve lived in the USA enjoying basic commodities. To say I feel rich because I have a machine that washes my dishes is an understatement! And I love it. I do not want to live off grid on purpose. It is so hard! Having said that I am glad to have that knowledge because we never know what is waiting down the line. Our homestead has all the systems needed to thrive off grid if the lights get turned off like they do most days in Cuba. And I am teaching my kids so they don’t get overwhelmed if they ever need to wash their clothes by hand. Until then I’ll let my Roomba vacuum my floors while I enjoy some time loving on my babies.
This is soo balanced and that probably comes from experiencing both lifestyles and seeing the pros and cons of both!
Well said!
You haven’t seen hard yet. How many cords of wood do you have? Winter is coming. Without more cabin space, your essentials are going to make you feel like you are being strangulated (food storage, extra clothing and the ability to make/fix them, medical, etc). Oh look, here comes a grizzly bear or wolf. I lived in Alaska. I presently live in northern Missouri.
"Just enough knowledge to be dangerous." When I was a young child we lived in the Alaskan bush in a one room cabin without electricity or plumbing. We used Cutters for the mosquitoes. ("But it's not natural." Malaria is natural. I'll go with the bug spray.) Laundry and bath day came once a month - and we needed it. My dad kept beaver caster glands in his coat pockets for the traps.
I was too young (left when I was seven) to know that this was an unusual lifestyle at the time. It was just how we lived. But in retrospect, it did color my view of male/female relationships (everybody is killing themselves and we're all oppressed by the struggle to survive and the pain of life, not by each other) and an eternal gratitude for modern conveniences.
I DEEPLY APPRECIATE MY WASHING MACHINE. And microwave, blender, AC, heater, etc.
Yes! I've been so happy to be back with my washing machine while we plan our own off-grid homestead.
We lived in Alaska when I was a kid, and the mosquitoes are ginormous! I loved, loved, loved Alaska, but I would NEVER choose to learn off grid living in Alaska. The bugs alone would keep me from doing it-it’s not just mosquitoes. But, mercy, the winter weather and lack of sunlight -sheesh! Hats off to y’all for taking on that challenge!!
@daelynnsawyer- I totally agree! Hubby lived there in the late 1980's for 5 years, said it was gorgeous, but he never got used to the endless Winter darkness. If you have any tendency toward depression, this State is not a good option for you, ESPECIALLY off-grid!😢
Been off grid for nearly 3 years. It’s the hardest work ever. I couldn’t imagine doing it with 3 kids. My husband and I have been building our farm from scratch on raw land. Some days we wonder if it’s worth it but at the same time we know there’s know turning back for us. We have way too much time and energy invested. We are little bit different cause we raise a large herd of alpacas (that’s how we make it as homesteaders) so we’ve built pens and barns and all kinds of infrastructure already. But we went 3 years without running water! But as if two weeks ago we finally have a nice indoor shower and a kitchen sink! Total game changer!
I loved the conversation where the neighbor advises you to learn from those who have been successful at surviving in a certain area for decades-or centuries. As a young mom (many moons ago) I lived in southern MX in a small desert pueblo that would now be called "off grid". Palm huts-no running water etc...I had to learn EVERYTHING from the locals. The first piece of advice I was given, was to never wear pants. I scoffed at that-until the day that I was squatting in the pig pen to do my business and some neighbors walked by and waved to say hello. Light bulb. SKIRTS--got it. They are like a wearable privacy tent. After that-I may have renumerated on how things were done--but i did not question their wisdom!
lived in Botswana for 4 years - 1 "off grid" running water will always be my favorite modern convenience.
A few things I have noticed that make off grid living in a cold climate easier:
-Enough indoor space for drying wer clothes and shoes and for kids to play indoors.
-finnish sauna, you just need it, a very effective and comfortable way to wash both people and clothes, brings warmth and hot water ❤️
-a good woodstove and masonry oven, if possible, the latter would keep the cabin warm for a long time, so no shivering in the morning, also super handy for cooking while doing other chores. Like an off grid slow cooker and bread oven.
I honestly don't know how people handle off grid Alaska without these. 🙈
Just left Alaska after 7 years. Not off grid. In a native village on an island off of Kodiak. We had 5 days of sunshine last summer. Continually overcast and rainy. Beautiful country and people but I need the the sunshine. Just bought a house in Arkansas. It’s November 14 and it was 65. Ahhhh.
The term Living Off Grid is a modern way of saying, living like our great (great) grandparents lived. Truly living without modern amenities you become the electric company and the electrician, the water and waste water plants and the plumber, the bakery providing a loaf of bread and the baker…
Kudos to you for giving it a go. I had never heard of your channel prior to this so you have brought in a whole new set of viewers to your content with this experiment. I think we can all use a reminder of the abundance God has provided for us whatever living style we choose.
I agree with you jeb3415. I'm 61, my grandmother would be 109 if she was still alive. Her mother, my great grandmother (all of them in fact) lived with no electricity, no running water, cooked on a wood burning stove, outhouse, used a ice box, etc. My grandmother was thrilled with modern conveniences and never wanted to go back, only forward. She passed away in the middle 90's. Many things have changed even since then, but she grew up in the time period that the way of life grew much easier. I don't think we really understand. If we try to live off grid, and we can't make it work, we go back to the modern age. Back then, you were in the modern age.
No, they want all the advantages of modern technology, they are not Amish, what they think it means is self sufficient... Funny thing is that they buy fancy things made a world away.
I’m pretty sure they are the ones that are lying. They’ve been homesteading for years. You gonna try off grid by going to Alaska? They’re not stupid. This was nothing but creating content. This is 100% Clickbait. That or they’re really really dumb. They’re not really really dumb!
There is new modern technology that allows you to live off grid and have electricity and off-grid doesn't mean living like the pioneers it means not a text to any grid the public uses you can wash your clothes you could have running water you can have electricity do some research
The title of this video is extremely misleading. I don’t get how you were lied to. There are tons of people living off grid I am glad you only rented to find out where your hearts truly are at because it sure doesn’t sound like you’re really into off grid living. Nothing wrong with that now that I’m older I sure wouldn’t be either. Just seems like your city folks.
ultimately, the wife is by extension the washing machine and the dishwasher and the cook. The husband fails when he fails his wife. You may not have a saw mill, do your best to make one. Need a small building for some reason? even to be storage or for the adults to sleep in? build it. By all means, use a tarp, but create a more permanent or "temporary" enclosure for that area. This is not rocket science and your measurements do not need to be perfect.
it sucks that the stove, and most everything in the cabin was broken. Fix them.
Totally.
When my husband brought me a new cast iron, I was very thankful. And taught me to cook with it over the wood stove.
When the propane stove on the porch was getting rained on in the wind last winter, he built me a wind block.
He brought me more pots so I could heat water easier.
When he notices me struggling, he often steps up or comes up with a better solution. I am truly thankful for it.
When we moved from the South to Wyoming (which is like Alaska, only in the lower 48--to us, at least), we promised ourselves we would take the advice of people who had lived here instead of saying, "Well, in Florida, we did it like this." This philosophy has served us well. Nine years and counting.
Its possible to live entirely off grid without being to uncomfortable one of the things I found out quick was you need areas of dry warm workable spaces such as a barn, large wood shed, so when it rains or snows your under cover I even have an out roof covered outdoor kitchen
A generator? bruh that's cheating... I grew up "off-grid", it sucks ass, especially if you're a kid with nothing to do but manual labor and run around in a circle for like 10 minutes at a time until you're bored, maybe 20 if you have a ball or something to kick around (at least until they get mad at you for kicking it into the house walls, god forbid you hit a window and break it)... oh and it looks like these guys have a bunch of store-bought goods - again, that's cheating - imagine having to do all they had to do with no electricity and take care of a garden and a bunch of animals (like pigs, chicken, geese, goats, cow ) - having to make sure the dog doesn't eat the chicken or the children don't smother the chicks to death or they get attached to a chicken you want to butcher for food and now they'll be heartbroken, not to mention all the work that comes with preparing said butchered chicken,,, but wait, it gets worse, a few times a year, you get to go work the fields, often under the sun with nothing on your back cause it's so hot outside and if it's corn you need to harvest... get ready for some really annoying cuts... then you need to go to the forest and look for felled trees to bring back to your cabin and chop down enough to last the winter - and you do that in late autumn before the snows, when it's cold af and wet... how anyone can look at all that and say "oh that looks amazing" is beyond me...
I feel like a cabin even a little larger and a little newer would have made a much better experience!
There's a lot of van-life people that are having serious buyers-remorse, too.
A lot of your older videos are very informative and educational.
This new batch though is very "Reality TV" and its SUPER weird yall.
I actually think it’s a good process for people to watch. Social media makes off-grid living seem glamorous and easily achievable.
I agree… they are getting weirder and weirder…click bait … cause they have nothing important to say….
I agree. It's a new format for them, and they're trying something very new.
Nobody really knows what they're doing. But at least they're trying, and still doing. The input is how they learn.
I can't wait to see where they go from here.
Yeah, I definitely miss the educational aspect.
The absolute biggest off grid lie is that somehow your life is going to be easier. DO NOT believe anyone telling you otherwise. Off grid costs money. Lots and lots of money. You're still going to have to work, you will still have bills. There is nothing simple about the simple life and nothing nostalgic about getting back to basics. 😅
We love it and there is something oddly mythical and even mystical about it (magical?), but it IS hard... much harder than normal living for sure. It gets more simple the more you work out the kinks and complications to make life easier.
@hillsidehavenhomestead We love it to. It just isn't portrayed truthfully most times online or in the media.
Love the honesty here. Off-grid life requires foresight, skill, and know-how. The “lie” might have been that these things aren’t necessary, or the lack of awareness. It’s refreshing to see a more authentic and not falsely polished video.
I think the most important thing is to have the right patner with the same mindset.
Even the dog is like, "I didn't sign up for this."
Who ever said off grid living is easy at start up?
I can agree with you! Starting unprepared is so very hard!! Even thinking your prepared with bad advice, the romance people think living off grid ? Yeah it’s not! It’s hard , rough, take anything you know and multiply it by 20! And that’s if you have a solid roof, heat, water, food. Just to get you through first 2 years so garden can get started, chickens raised , security ! And that’s in the lower 48, I couldn’t emagine doing it in Alaska… my hat is off to you guys trying
There’s off-grid and there’s remote. Don’t confuse them!
There's a great documentary out there about the Little House books. Laura's daughter likely wrote a substantial amount of it with a libertarian bent that supported her political movement at the time. Charles Ingalls was essentially a rolling stone who never did learn to support his family and eventually had to sign some kind of pauper's agreement with the government to survive. After having that curtain pulled back, I really had to think about how those books impacted my entire view of European settlement at an extremely impressionable age. I think what most of us are picking at with these self-imposed challenges is trying to step outside of the consumer narrative that was pre-determined for most of us and breaking habits we were born into. Those are hard to shake and we feel the need to go to extremes to try and make new values and habits stick.
I have wondered about people romanticizing these hard lives. So many post-apocalyptic tv shows and movies and off-grid living. I grew up with 2 living great-grandmother's and my degree is in history. I enjoy camping but you couldn't pay me to live without modern comforts. Two very different things. I did a 8 week archeological dig in the middle east when I was doing my degree. No air conditioning in the day, no heat at night, crap showers, dirt and sand in everything, no proper bed, no comfortable seats mostly just stools. We had paid labourer's but we had to get down in there and dig and carry buckets of dirt. A lot of my clothes weren't fitting properly about 3 weeks in. Lost body fat working that hard but also everyone was sick at least once, I vomited a few times. Felt like I was living like a homeless person. I looked like a crazy, dirty lady on my plane because I didn't have time to stop at a hotel overnight before it was time to catch my flight.
I'm convinced archeologists are completely mad because they live like that all the time. I only joined dig because I could get credits a lot faster and I learn better hands on and the archeology textbooks looked excessively dry. It was a good decision but I learned how much I love my bed sleeping in a warm room.
Completely off grid is very hard. It takes up a lot of time and energy. I think what a lot of people really desire is just something a little more simple. Not spending so much time at jobs and commuting, and buying questionable produce at th grocery store. Something in the middle. Like a partially off grid community. Maybe youre hooked up to city sanitation system but you use solar for all your energy and use a hand cranked washing machine. You have your own garden or a community permaculture garden/forest for food. Well atleast thats what id want. Off grid is so appealing because people just want their time back and no to spend so much money for basic necessities. Somewhere in the middle is probably best for most people if youre accustomed to certain ammenities and don't have th skills to be completely off grid. But know whatever you decide you always have a choice. You dont have to stay at that job you hate but you also dont have to do everything alone to have a fulfilled life.
Also where you go off grid is a big factor. Being off grid in the desert is gonna be different from the mountains in alaska or in the carribean.
Wow can't imagine doing it with 5 young kids and a baby. The first 8 months I was cooking outdoors we had umbrellas for shade and all the dishes got dirty with the wind and rain. Building a shelter next to the caravan was a game changer, which is now the outdoor kitchen we share with the critters and cheeky birds looking for crumbs. EVERYTHING takes longer to do. We had a solar array up within 2 months so that helped feel a bit more normal (the internet is such a great source of information), water tanks within 6 months and we plumbed it to the caravan and around the property, that was also a game changer not having to refill constantly. The composting loo was a big surprise and not as icky as one would expect, and now we have our first years pile transformed into rich compost for the garden. Now we are 2 years and 2 months in, fruit trees and garden are flourishing and got our first harvest of berries. We have a small cabin built and still need to line and wire it up. We have 3 shipping containers for storing our tools, bulk dry foods, washing machine etc. The main container house build starts this year and we have multiple projects on the go: laundry/shower, chicken coop, organic pond, wood shed, greenhouse and a couple of other cabins for our adult kids when they come to stay. Looking back the 1st year was really hard but we are now into our groove and absolutely would not go back to the city to be a mortgage slave. In a couple of years we would have finished building most of the necessary infrastructure and be self sufficient and start producing things to earn some $$. It is so beautiful here with the forest, mushrooms and birds that I loath to leave the place to even go into town to pick up supplies. The thought of spending a 3rd winter in the caravan does fill me with mild dread so better get cracking and finish the cabin. This life is certainly not for the faint hearted but ever so rewarding and liberating. The kids love coming here from the city and one day will build their own places as they probably won't be able to afford a house
Alaska is the last place I would try to start off grid living! Give yourselves a huge pat on the back for doing it and solving so many problems off the cuff. 👏 👏 👏
I grew up in Virginia in the 1950's and 60's with 5 sisters and 3 brothers , our dad worked in the coal mines and $20.00 was a good payday so most of the time we didn't have electric . Our mom washed clothes in wash tubs most of the time on a scrub board . We had an outhouse and when we needed a new one someone built it or when one got full we dug a new hole and moved it . Most of the food we ate came from the woods or we grew it and mom cooked it . Our school was 2 rooms and yes they had outhouses as well . I was the oldest boy so I chopped the wood for the stoves and carried coal from nearby train tracks that had fallen off the coal cars . It sounds hard but I wouldn't trade my childhood with anyone .
My grandfather also worked in the PA coal mine's and my mom has not so good memories of bathing in front of the wood stove in their tiny house.
18:20
Gave me chills. A profound question i too am sorting out still after 4 years as a new "off grid" homesteader.
I can so relate to what she went through. My husband and I did something similar 6mths ago. We went from a 3000 sq ft house with tons of friends and family to a 1965 38ft wooden boat. Living on a boat had been my dream. It never occurred to me that it would not be everything I dreamed of. On top of that my husband, who I thought would have the hardest time in our new life was having the time of his life. It was as if he found himself and I lost myself. I did lose my self and I am so happy that I did. I am rediscovering who I am. It’s been hard but so worth it. Remember to be kind to your self. It’s a new life you will have more failures than success at times but that’s part of the journey and it’s a journey worth taking. 😊
I've lived off grid in Michigan for 9 years now. 99.9 % of my friends say they couldn't survive a week living my life. And you know what? I can spot the ones that might make it for a 3 day weekend, a two week vacation. But I haven't found any one that could make it thru a year, let alone a decade.
Hauling all my water in, and hauling all my garbage& waste out. No fridge/freezer, washing machine, no furnace, no running water, no sewer/septic system, no tv, no computer, no electric system.
I have a tiny 100 watt solar stem that charges my cell phone, my 2 rechargeable kitchen & bedroom area USB lights, my power pack for a back up for my cell phone, and my old tablet. And I have one dirct wired 12 volt light. I also have a direct wired 12 volt charging block that has 1 coigarette lighter port and 3 USB ports. My porch light on my 1988 motorhome is direct solar charged, motion activated wall light. And I have a 3 ft long USB rechargeable tube light for working under my pickup trucks hood. I have no systems that work in the old motorhome. I have a small heater that runs off propane tanks I carry to get refilled.
And I water bath or pressure can all pf my veggies, fruits, and meats right after going to the store. Even if it takes all night, bcuz of no fridge.
I enjoy my life most of the time. But tired of the deep snow & blizzards, with bitter cold high winds in the winter. I want to move more south to grow my food most of the year and have very little snow or bitter cold temps.
So many kids makes a difference- Mother of 10- 9 at home at one time- Big families keep U hopping in every aspic of daily living- Remember soup with meat and vegetables is satisfying and healthy
LOL. I've lived off grid for 30 years. It takes 10 years just to learn how to do it and how to get used to it. Wildlife has been reduced to 1/3 in the last 50 years. You can't rely on wild game for meat. Green house and chicken, beans and rice.
Off grid is very hard. That’s how we started for 5 years and we finally got power last year. We started out in tents. We still get water by rain. Took us 5 years to get where we are but it was hard and many times wanted to give up. We are all thankful we didn’t because we love it here.
Winston Churchill said: “He who fails to plan is planning to fail”.
First time watching your channel. First Observation is that your A-Frame is too small for your family. That alone would be a beatdown fast especially without an indoor kitchen. Don't give up, Find a bigger home with more land and outbuildings.
I'm really liking this series! I was an Arizona off grid nomad for 10 yrs. I saw lots of wanna-bees fail miserably and a few close friends who looked to me for guidance succeed. Many good memories.
Any words of wisdom, or knowledge to pass on?
@dakotaerfle6152 yes, if you don't have a sustainable income, good mechanical ability, and good knowledge of solar power and general electrical knowledge, don't even consider it. Don't believe Bob Wells hype. You can't live comfortably on $600 of SS. There are social programs to help elderly poor get into good housing.
@margaretgrimm4704 Sometimes being blunt saves lives, think about it for a minute. I'm from northern Minnesota. If you underestimate winter you die. The same happens in desert heat.
Figuring it out is the best part!
Everyone on yt is kicking back and drinking coffee with a great view 😂
A lot of work to succeed and many think it’s drinking coffee and hiking 😂
I am off grid as well.. I knew what I was getting into.. it's nice but, very difficult some days.. many everyday things take four times as long to accomplish when roughing it.
It saves money in some ways & is more expensive to get set-up & maintain then, normal ""in-the-matrix"" living.. it can be lonesome & glad my dog was my companion.. I did still work in the market but, nearest town for my job was one hour away & that's two hours a day driving.. with deer jumping out in front of my truck every day & increases my chances of a wreck & therefore, I had to increase auto insurance coverage & that's just one example of extra expenses
I ain't been poisoned by t.v. in months cuz, I don't get t.v. reception.. a radio is all I got.. & I felt in my cellphone & Wi-Fi data on phone cuz, there is no Wi-Fi where I reside in the sticks.
It's a journey that's for sure & I made it (3) months so far & got one more to go.. then, my new rental (mobile home not far from my cabin where I can drive less than an hour on days off work to continue improving my off grid cabin & property.. I am currently even in cold temps. digging out & chopping out bull rush weeds & cat fails that took over my small pond.. most people just hire a end loader & CAT to dig it out . & I cannot go as deep as machinery but, I can do it by hand in spite what sobe folks think.. it's just A LOT of hard work.. but, I will be so proud one day a decade from now when I'm older & I worked the land (even tho I'm 50/yrs old I can work any teen age kid or, young men off today into the ground.
If you have work ethic, a vision & goal orientated, staying motivated.. then, any one can do it.
I'm happy I had this chance at a "test run" on daily living.. it's a challenge.
Yet, I got used to it & became tougher & more resilient just in case the contemporary grid crashes & economy collapses.. I know now, that I CAN DO IT!!
.. & So, can YOU!😊
I’d take that place and just chill myself!
I hate people, I hate being around people.. Just me being by myself, my library of books and nobody near me, that is literal heaven!
I envy folks who have that life.
Sounds like a dream you could work towards!
I have lived off grid, once in Hawaii. That time I was twenty years old and the off grid part wasn’t the worst thing, it was the isolation and loneliness that forced me back to town. Then I moved back to the mainland. I learned construction and mechanical skills, I learned how to live with wildlife/bears, I learned to cut, split hundreds of cords of wood I learned to live in and love very deep snow at high elevation and that made all the difference, now I’m okay with it.
I fully believe that if you guys had your own place, where you could design/change things to be suited to you and your large family, the experience would be 100% different. Really what you guys are doing (did?) is camping in a single solid-walled tent. You'd also be able to implement a much more robust solar system to be able to power such things as water pumps and heaters.
Just listening now to you describe the LIttle House dream. I had the same one. And what you guys are dealing with in that teeny house is nothing like how the Ingall's lived. If you had their old house, with the working wood stove, working water hand pumps, actual rooms, etc, you'd really enjoy it.
For your future home, you don't need to tie yourself to an all-or-nothing lifestyle re on or off grid. I live in Maine and I do what I can to live as independently as I can. I am on-grid, but choose to heat my house - which has a theoretically working furnace - with a large wood stove. I currently raise chickens for meat and eggs and pure enjoyment, I hope to get a pig or 2, maybe a mini cow, am slowly building up my garden...but I still like to grab take out once in a while, refuse to give up having water on tap via my own drilled well, and fully appreciate being able to light this place up like the sun if hear something in the middle of the night.
All this to say, don't let this singularly extreme example of off-grid living be the representation of what all off-grid living is or can be like. That place was too small, too broken, too not fixable (rent vs own) in any way.
Best of luck to you guys!
Edit: Just watched to the end. Glad you guys got out of there and are out experiencing a whole variety of what the OG life can be like :)
I apologize for my previous comment. As I continued to watch your video you said you lied to yourself about the experience. I totally respect that and I believe this truth y’all are sharing will help many of people lying to themselves.
Thanks William! So classy to keep watching, and comment again to clarify! YES, we are the ones who lied, we tell ourselves lies about our dreams, and this video is a good reminder to all who want to follow their dreams (future us included) to make sure to do a reality check before diving in! I know I will need that reminder again, I have a bad habit of diving into the deep end.
We lived off grid on a sailboat much smaller than that house for 5.5 years and went two an a half of those years without touching a dock and living with just 420 watts of solar panels. Of course, we had no air conditioning. We didn't even have a water maker. It was head and shoulders the best time of our lives. We sold the boat and moved back only because our parents were in their last few years and one needed someone to move in with. We were in the tropics in the Pacific but that meant we had often too much heat instead of cold and we still had very irritating flying insects of all sorts that caused us to modify how we lived. We had to fix everything on the boat almost continuously. Our parents are gone now but we are still stuck on the edge of a small town wanting to get back away from civilization. We do know that we have to be able to get to a town at least every other week for it to be comfortable though. Our next off grid place is at 8,200', on the wooded north side of a mountain and out of sight of the nearest neighbor but it is only 5 miles by road to a town of 770. We also will start will 1,600 watts of solar panels this time and imagine that we will double it sooner rather than later. We will us a composting toilet just like we switched to on the boat. Unlike the boat we will also have a lot more water stored and we will be putting in a well. Off grid is fine for us. Of course, we didn't and don't have kids.
Sounds like an awesome adventure
I can tell you that sailboat living will drown any doubt people have about tiny/off grid fantasies. I spent 2 years on a 22ft Catalina. Started with only 300 watts of power. Upgraded to 1100 after a year. Learned a lot about myself and endurance. Had the time of my life in the Gulf and Keys. Hopefully when I retire, we can repeat In much nicer accommodations.
Off grid in Alaska is totally different than off grid in Alabama! The environment is extremely hostile to life in Alaska. Unless prepared for extreme conditions you are putting yourself at the risk of death.
That's why we chose to go and lease this cabin for the summer. We loved Alaska but would never chose this cabin for a winter location, it's just too inaccesible.
My daughter is doing it by tent in Utah. She’s been out there a month now. The difference is that it’s just her. Not an entire family. She only has to worry about her own needs. And she’s making trips to “town” for back packing food supplies.
Alaska is not about off grid. It's about outdoors, wildlife, and love of raw nature and wild places.
Appreciate the honesty. Don't appreciate the greedy amount of ad breaks.
This experience brought about exactly what you wanted .
You wanted to be a better person, you wanted to know more about yourself and your resiliency, capability.
It did just that, simply in short order.
You were expecting years but it didn't take that long.
Now you realize you're just a little too bougie for this life.
Really enjoyed listening to your perspectives. Our four years of off grid experience in Michigan’s upper peninsula is quite different because we don’t have young children. Couple of things stuck out to me: why not a composting toilet? Ours has worked perfectly (urine diverted to the outside under the cabin). We have 300 square feet (not a lot of room) but it would be unsustainable to have an outdoor kitchen due to extremes in weather and the bugs. For laundry, a large washtub, plunger, a mop bucket for wringing out water, and a clothesline works well. When I say off grid, I’m talking about no cell coverage (we use satellite), and nearest power/gas lines are 20 miles away. We go into town once every 2 weeks so the trip has to be worthwhile. Solar has been a challenge in certain seasons due to short days, so we ended up with more panels than we originally planned for.
I guess the difference is we had reasonable expectations and therefore it wasn’t overwhelming. Best wishes to your family in each chapter of your lives!
The problem is not the off grid living itself. There is easy and there is a hard way to do it. You need specific skills and mindset for this lifestyle.
You can build a very comfortable life off grid if you have a clear vision of what are you doing. And imho it takes some experience too.
You don't need to live like in the 17th century. Do your research first and plan and prepare carefully before you begin this endeavor.
It's not about rainbows and unicorns. If you are a beginner stop dreaming and imagining, better find someone with real experience and learn from them.
We came out here off grid and everything was harder. Well DUH!!!! Sorry that one just blew my mind!
I loved the Wilderness Family movies as a kid. They did actually get deliveries by plane. I read all the Little House books as an adult and life definitely looked hard. There were bad crop seasons where starving to death was a real worry, winter storms where people got lost in the snow and froze to death. The Ingalls even moved to town in the winter to keep from freezing in the winter.
This is fascinating. My sister and her family moved to rural northern Ontario, my parents followed and my husband loved it, wanted to follow and build a house. The land he wanted to buy was ridiculously expensive to hook up to electricity and after a lot of discussion, I agreed if we got a good price on our Toronto house, and he had enough money from the sale to build a system at the same reliable level of power as we had at the time in Toronto, we would build off the grid.
2 years later we have the first draft from the architect for our 5 bedroom house (really 3 bedrooms with 2 bunkies attached by breezeway) and solar power plan with propane back-up. Technically off-grid but I have zero interest in a hard life. We've already moved up into the area renting a 3 bedroom house and it will be a year in January. I'm relieved we'll be very close by family. We'll have ample land if we want to grow food or keep animals (undecided).
I dabble looking at others off-grid but they're roughing it and I don't believe for a minute that we're alone going the other way. I look forward to never paying another water bill or electricity bill again. I have never wanted to live without modern conveniences.
When we lived near my grandparents farm in middle Devonshire, I used to go with my Nan doing meals on wheels in the 1980s. Some of the rural elderly were stubborn Victorian era women who had refused to go on the power grid until they became too frail to argueanymore. I had two great-grandmother's still alive around the same age and they looked in better shape. That sort of life will age you faster. It's not the farming work necessarily. One of my great-grandmother was a farmers wife and one of my grandmother too. But they had washing machines and AGA's and telephones etc... They worked hard but not semi-homeless level difficulty. Which is what these off-gridders full on roughing it look like they're doing. It just can't be good for you living that hard.
Gonna put this one here to explain something... The work loads were all shared in the off grid homestead. K even mentions this during our Coffee discussion. Everyone except the very youngest children did chores, cleaning, cooking, etc. The problem wasn't that the work load wasn't being shared, rather that the work wasn't a fun family experience like we imagined off grid work to be, (as crazy as that may sound to some)...
My mother who grew up in a mudbrick house, no electricity or running water, totally communally sufficient, thinks the prepper/bugout/homesteading culture is very weird and lopsided. Their family left/escaped mostly due to the legacy of Lenin's brand of so-called communism making an already hard life even more pointlessly difficult. Winter was especially hard. She thinks self-sufficiency is delusional (you need a whole community of people doing different things to successfully live, eg: the Amish), and has pointed out the whole point of that show "Alone" that everyone seems to miss, is that being *actually* self-sufficient usually means slowly starving to death while your clothes rot off your back when nature inevitably doesn't provide because she doesn't actually give a single hoot about you.
Makes perfect sense. You had a romanticized idea of what it would be like, and reality wasn't as green as envisioned....
@@nb6175 you made a statement about it takes a community... This is 100% legit. Any homesteader I have talked to complaints revolve around, lacking skills, lacking machinery, lacking muscle. Lacking time. I started my bucket list off grid life a year ago ... So I'm in the infant stage of off grid life. But the one thing I have know for a long time is that my dream will actually require a community. I'm actively looking for members of my community. Lol. I have a few neighbors I would turn to in need, but I'm actively looking to share my property with other like minded people with skills and similar desires that can't afford this life in society either. I'm on disability...and knew off grid life was the only life I could afford on SSI.... So as I build my food oasis in the desert, I'm constantly sharing my vision and hoping I'll tell the right people along the way
@@nb6175 indeed, you’re just another animal in the woods trying to survive.
I'm glad you found nicer places to live. That aframe was just not a good fit.
Anyone who is even considering it. I would say go camping first,off grid is only a few levels up.
This video was worth the wait! I’m so glad you guys show all aspects of things instead of hiding the outhouse ☺️. Some people are just rude and totally missed the point of what you guys were making. I made so many connections to my own life with what you were talking about. I romanticized my career and thought it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Reality set in. You adjust and change to find what works for you.
I love that you guys tried off grid before building your house. What invaluable lessons you learned! Can’t wait for the rest of the series! Thank you for being open and transparent!
Heh. As a veteran outdoorsman and mountaineer who has spent two years of his life living in his vehicle and STILL sleeps outdoors every night (as I have for the past 20+ years), all I have to add is right now I'm sitting in front of a 42 inch monitor and I'll gladly pay my electric bill. I do, however, have a nice toasty woodstove here in my office, so while it's hovering around freezing outside, I have it up to about 75 in here.
There is a good reason we built the grid. Living off it sucks. Hot showers FTW.
Can we just collectively agree on how exceptionally well this was put together? I felt that I was watching a largely backed production of a mini series. I watched a documentary on Netflix called ‘The littlest Big Farm’ which I quite enjoyed and have rewatched a couple times and found I was equally engaged and entertained with this episode. This was just so well put together and truly humongous congrats on this work. It was so enjoyable to watch. ☺️
Part of going off grid is being able to build enough to have a well, food, electrical (wind, water and or solar) and sceptic tank. If you are doing less that would be considered survival camp. There's a lot of work involved in setting up off grid to make it livable -- It's not easy getting there but once u do --- it's amazing.
I agree, it's wonderful once you've made it your own special, set-up place. Plus, they probably needed more room. We have a little over 1,000 sq ft, live off grid with 4 kids ages 13 to 3 yrs old, and we love it. Hard, but doable and enjoyable.
Don't give up. When you make changes there are challenges and learning curves. If I was young again and had a life long mate that could agree with me I would do this. I moved in a small to double wide I bought that needed work but so many things were hidden when I bought it fighting health issues I am contemplating renting it out. Where would I go??? Life is not easy for anyone anymore. Blessings to you all❤😊
BRAVO! ABOUT TIME, A REL POST ABOUT A REAL ISSUE ! MAKING REALITY TRUE AGAIN! TY
Fantastic video guys. You were detailed and production was fantastic. I noticed the change of not over talking K. You two feel much stronger and like a united front which makes for a much more pleasurable and smoother flow. Much love you two. ❤❤❤
Oh yeah, pooping in a bucket with a toilet seat attached to it, having to chop fire wood to use wood heat, no air-conditioning, no internet, no TV. I grew up like that. Not ever interested in going back. Just buy a house out in the country with some land, plant a garden, get some chickens and make the place yours. That's far enough off the grid for me.
Yup. A moms life..monotonous and repetitive. Finding moments of change is the key. Making moments is key. Loving your joy in the little things in life. ❤
Off grid life = Camping in the worst conditions possible, and not being able to escape to any comfort (or cleanliness) for any significant period of time. Seeing people as capable as this, struggle like this, should give people a bit of a wake up call. Cheers for the honesty!🎉
Excuse me, but I live totally off grid. I'm comfortable and clean. I have a bathtub and a shower. I have a bed, a sofa etc. I have a woodstove. And a propane one. Battery operated lights. You obviously don't know anything about off grid living!
@@uphillhomestead6188 Oh? It's "Let's be offended time"? 🤦♂️😏
Let's do it! Ok sure. I live on grid, but barely. I heat with wood, hunt and raise animals for all our meat, grow half the produce we need, and need a generator for power often. I have a few different friends with families, less than half hour away, that live 100% off Grid. It is common in my area for the relative few that are here. So yes, I know nothing.🙄 Yes, there are people that are/can be comfortable - but this often takes months, perhaps years - and can still be very difficult in a hard winter, not a drop everything and go into the woods and have it be idyllic. Good for you 👍 Proud of you, but this is not the case for many. Just because you can, doesn't mean everyone that tries, does and/or can. Just because you do, doesn't lessen the lesson for others that haven't done it, wanting to jump in both feet, and have that expectation. You, living like this, know this full well - you've seen people fail I'm sure, just like the fellow helping these good people out in the video.
So ok, sure you're right, my statement did not apply to "everyone." Happy?🤔😂
@@dallasburgess5329 you know full well that you stated that off grid living means you're dirty and uncomfortable. And that's not true. Why anyone would jump into a totally new lifestyle without knowing about it is insane. And yea, I guess 0 degrees where I live is considered cold... Thank God for the wood stove! And oh, jackets... Because I read somewhere that they help! Research don't complain. And yes, I applaud you.
@@uphillhomestead6188 What I know "full well" is that just because you, or any other person can do it, does not mean anyone can do it. I also know, that just because I made a TRUE statement, that applies in many cases, - and in most cases for people new to the life, doesn't mean I don't know anything about off grid living. And just because YOU can, and do, doesn't give you the right to insult people.
@dallasburgess5329 you know full well that I was responding to your stupid statement about off grid living means you're always dirty and life is uncomfortable. Both of which are not true. Stop turning it around so I'll debate you.
Off grid is fine, if one is single or a couple, I could not and would not want to imagine how difficult it would be with kiddos. =)
Alaska and the prairie is a biiiiiiig difference. One thing that is wise is boots on the ground and maybe even a trial stay at a property before buying.
What a great episode. Such an eye opener that it truly just makes “women’s work” harder but it’s still all the same work.
It’s so easy to romanticize this type of lifestyle.
Love how honest you are being with yourself Kay.
This is such a fun series to watch.
As someone who survived off grid lvivng, you’re video lost all credibility with me when you said Alaska. Inless you understand living in cold, wet, windy climate your gonna have a bad time. Went to Wisconsin or Somewhere down south.
Honestly, this is my favorite of all your videos so far, and I think it’s Kay’s vulnerability and honesty. ❤
It’s really hard to share on RUclips. There will be 107 “you guys are wimps go back to the city” comments on this video by tomorrow morning. Comments like this are the reason we still share the honest feelings here on YT. We know we all feel the struggles at times and to hide that fact is a disservice
Skills are easy. Expectations and emotions are hard. ❤️
I have found that the RUclipsrs who hide the struggle (for fear of criticism) lose their authenticity eventually. And again, there are those that EVERYTHING is a struggle and who wants to watch that? Lol. A fine line to balance and you did well with this video.@@Homesteadyshow
I am about 3/4 through the video and I keep saying out loud, “ya but you need a better system for that, and then it would be easier.” I have not lived off grid, I don’t know that I ever will live fully off grid, but I did grow up very rural, and this required different daily living systems that were different then the town kids. In my adult life I have also made some lifestyle choices that found me living rural too, and at different times “simpler” which incorporated off grid adjacent system like laundry, outhouses, lots of large scale gardening and animal husbandry… and having a good, functional system for all of those activities is absolutely key. And it can mean the difference between enjoyment and frustration. Great video, I hope you have been able to move on and keep the parts you enjoy and incorporate which ever parts make the most sense for your life.
That was the point of the summer off grid challenge. Now we know the things we can do without at first...but other things we'd like to set up right away on our future off-grid homestead!
Building an off-grid homestead in the Yukon Territory for the 2nd year now. Curious about your future videos. You put your family into the almost worst possible situation with that old broken cabin - everything can only get better. Smart move. 😉
With the proper investment in infrastructure, preparedness and thought about how things have to roll, it's definitely enjoyable and could even be convenient to live off-grid.
You guys got a channel? I’d love to see that project!
@Homesteadyshow Although my husband is pressuring me to do vids, I simply don't find the drive to do that. Even without kids. All the more: respect to you guys how you juggle the big family and everything besides it!
The worst thing here is the solar system. We don't have a big clue and every time the system changes a parameter (still don't know why, because it's not tied to the internet), it takes us hours to figure it out... I'd say to live a comfy off-grid life (I can even run a dryer), that's the biggest concern. Plus running water - it took us a year and cost us a fortune to get a well driller out here - and a proper septic system are essential. In between living off-grid out of water jugs and showering at work and this homestead, we lived on the grid. My conditions for going back off-grid were to not poop in a bucket anymore (first place had a full outhouse), being able to open a water tap and get warm water and have fluffy towels if I want to thanks to the dryer. 😉 If it were about camping, I'd say I'm a glamper.
Oh, yes, writing this while standing beside the wood stove. 😅 Heat! Of course, how to properly heat your home is also darn important.
one doesn't have add complications by going to Alaska
off grid in Alaska is a whole another learning curve
on top of the remote location only adds more strain to already stressful situations
Yes, we are off grid in Texas and it is SO much easier (you get full solar power for the summer so air conditioner isn't a problem if you have enough power set up). Alaska is just ridiculously harder, especially in the winter. Like living off-grid on Advanced Pro Mode lol!
It is so different starting with a family with young kids. Much different than if it was just the two of you to start. Good luck guys!