Fantastic Indepth content on your off-grid journey costs. Well done! 👍😊 Take no notice of any rogue web bots, negative trolls or miserable comments, they are on every RUclips content creators channel, par for the course! Can't wait for the next one! 🎉
Thanks for an interesting video. I too live in Portugal off-grid and have done for 27 years. Over that time we have invested money in improving the service systems. We now have a 10kW solar system which runs the usual modern house plus aircon in summer and a heat pump on sunny winter days. Our other heating is from pellet stoves. We began with wood burners but they're messy, dusty and the chimneys require cleaning every year. So we swapped to pellet stoves which are extremely low energy (80W) and we heat 2 houses at a cost of around €200 combined. The electricity question isn't simply that of being off or on grid as it depends on where the house is located. 27 years ago there was no mains power within 10kms. Today there is high tension mains power but to connect to the grid would cost in the region of €30K as we would have to pay for a transformer and pay towards the rest of the infrastructure and the houses would have to be brought up to today’s building regs for the electrical system. A neighbour recently replaced their old solar system for a new 5kW one and the cost was €18K. Mostly nothing much wears out apart from the battery. Expect 8-10 years max. Solar panels are good for 20+ years and with no moving parts are definitely easier to maintain than a windmill. Back-up power is a diesel generator. We rarely use it to provide power and last year the total cost was €40 - mostly spent keeping the generator running for routine maintenance. Generators that sit idle for any length of time are problematic. We use gas for cooking and water heating via instant water heaters. Cost is around €300 p.a. We have a septic tank for 'waste' - thank goodness! Water is from a borehole, harvested rain and the supermarket. We have developed a water harvesting system for both bulk irrigation and drinking water so our spend at the supermarket is usually zero. Something else to take into consideration is the initial cost of the property. If it has all services provided it will cost more than one without services so the set-up costs are somewhat off-set by this reduction in purchase price.
Thanks for the detailed reply, and it sounds like you are where we want to be in the future. I really want install ground source heating, rainwater harvesting and haha a septic tank, but it’s a big project and most of these things will be put into place when we build the big house. Thanks for watching 😊
We had a set up cost that was 4 times yours but we have a huge three phase system which also charges our car and we have electricity for both water, heating and cooling, 15m x 5 m pool, a few freezers and irrigation and given the price of Petrol in Portugal and our expenditure on a large property in London including 100 euros a year council tax here compared to 2.5k in London we think 6 to 7 years is quite viable. What is beautiful is having the security of knowledge that if things go up significantly we are covered as they don't tend to go down. We will have to meet up sometime - we have also found the community here much more welcoming and friendly than that in the Uk and help (in a very small way) to organise local events.
Thanks :) sounds like you have quite an impressive system, and it would be interesting to see it sometime. :) I like the idea of running an electric car off of solar, as most of our journeys are only short trips into town. When we were working out what size system we wanted we definitely scaled it against what we used at the time, rather than maybe what we would want in the future. Yes I agree it’s a great community here in Portugal. Thanks for watching :)
One of my reasons for drilling for water and fitting solar in Portugal over the last couple years was I had the money and saw it as my best hedge on inflation and the unknown of income during retirement. Next will be batteries. Thanks great video. Makes me feel I'm on the right path
Hi! Yes it’s good to spend on investing in this type of thing when you have the money to do so. We knew we wanted a solar system before we left the uk, so it was one of the first things we bought when we arrived. Good luck :) And thanks for watching 😊
Another comment I have is about council tax. In the UK we would be paying around £2,000 (approx €2,400) but here we pay €250 p.a. Off-grid properties generally speaking have much lower council tax bills.
Yes council taxes are far lower. I was thinking of making a video comparing mortgage/rental costs v doing up a ruin or building a house from scratch. Maybe in the future. Thanks for watching. 😊
Hey there! Just a heads up that the building laws in Portugal changed last month. You might be able to build your brick house now with all the same conditions you had in the UK. Converting rural land to urban land is now easier, and building septic tanks for wastewater is also more straightforward. Land in Beira Baixa is going to go up a lot because of the new laws. Good luck with everything, and make sure to do your research!
Hey thanks for the information. I had heard about that and it is good to see Portugal is doing something to reinvigorate its interior. We actually have permission from the council to build a house on our land already, but haven’t made a start on the main house because of unexpected elements. Plus holding off on construction is allowing me time to experiment with different techniques to see what works best with the environment. Thanks for watching 😊
Thank you for a really detailed and interesting video. I would really be interested in a comparison between living off grid and on utilities, within Portugal rather than comparing to the UK. I know that our Portuguese water bills are only about 1/3 of our UK bills and obviously with the difference in climate, we use massively less energy on heating. What are your thoughts? 😊
Would be an interesting study. For us it would mean working out how much it would cost to get the grid to us from the nearest source, which is about 1km away. Would definitely be interesting to know. 👍 Thanks for watching 😊
Hello again, thanks for the video, most useful. I follow many Van Lifers and Off Griders and I am always surprized that None of them seem to consider Wind Generators, if only for trickel charging at night, why ? Looking forward to your next up-date. mb
Thanks! We are considering a wind generator for exactly that. Once we have been through this winter, we will have better data on how much extra power we need to generate in order to keep everything running all of the time. I think it is definitely good to have diverse methods of power generation. Thanks for your comment :)
There's very little wind at night for most of the year in S. Portugal. A windmill, along with its regulator, will cost around €5K plus installation. We had one for several years and got rid of it in favour of solar panels. The sheer nerve wracking operation of bringing it down to the ground made the decision. It also provided very little power. Maybe a better and easier to manage back-up option would be a solar generator, (Ecoflow, Anker, Bluetti etc) which in essence is a battery with an inverter that you charge when you have spare power and use when the service battery is low. Maintenance isn't an issue.
Thank you for a really detailed and interesting video. I would really be interested in a comparison between living off grid and on utilities, within Portugal rather than comparing to the UK. I know that our Portuguese water bills are only about 1/3 of our UK bills and obviously with the difference in climate, we use massively less energy on heating. What are your thoughts? 😊
My guess, before we start, is no. Definitely *no* if you don't factor in costs for the labour and sacrifices made to just continue living with anything like the comfort considered normal in the present day. However ... there are compensatory freedoms when you are no longer the indentured servant of the corporate entities that provide water, power and food to the usual population.
Hi really enjoyed your video. I live an off grid live style in Spain, we also have a RUclips channel called "The Adventures of Mac & Anthea" basically"off grid living" with also an "off grid - time out or burn out" section. I built my own solar power system and chose to add additional solar panels and battery to cover the fridge freezer. On the face of it, it seemed a good idea, it was cheaper than a gas fridge and when not powering the fridge the additional solar could power something else, however it wasn't until the solar inverter packed up that I realised there was a fatal flaw in my plan. My house and therefore my fridge/freezer had no power for 10 days whilst my new inverter arrived. I also have a petrol generator for backup, but as your no doubt aware these generators are only designed for 4 hours max use at a time and when used for long periods of time are very expensive to run. I have now bit the bullet and paid the ridiculous cost of a gas fridge freezer. Maybe you have a plan for such an eventuality, but I thought I'd mention it just incase you didn't. Look forward to watching your future videos. Good luck Mac
@theadventuresofmacanthea thanks for the tip! We don’t have a backup, but when our fridge freezer stopped working last summer we had to buy a replacement pretty quickly. I don’t really like having too much reliance on gas as it’s sometimes harder to get access to the bottles when you need them. We definitely need to consider longer term backup systems tho. Thanks for watching 😊
We personally don't like to use gas anymore than we have to but felt we had little choice where the fridge/freezer was concerned. Our supplier is a fair distance away as is everything, luckily here in Spain gas bottles can be bought for as little as 10€ each (far easier than going through the contract route) therefore we keep a stock of gas bottles along with fresh water from the spring, diesel and petrol, basically to save on travel and of course the most valuable commodity, which is always in short supply when off gridding "time". I note you plan to use diesel heaters as well, which we've been using and have proven to be a great solution for heating.
In my opinion not for the homeowner unless there is some way that's very convenient to bring it down for maintenance. They weigh an awful lot. Solar is maintenance free, apart from washing the panels occasionally after a Saharan dust cloud has passed by. The dust in the summer air here gets into the workings of the turbines which means bringing the windmill down to the ground to clean it occasionally. Small windmills don't produce enough - in my opinion - to warrant their cost and maintenance.
It does seem windy here when the sun isn’t shining. I wouldn’t want to invest in something that wouldn’t fill the energy gap, which is part of the reason I’ve started keeping more detailed info on when we run out of power. Thanks for watching 😊
Cheaper.. Ha! No way. Im off grid in Portugal and being on the utilities here would be way cheaper. But I'm not off grid for savings, it's the lifestyle.
Fantastic Indepth content on your off-grid journey costs. Well done! 👍😊
Take no notice of any rogue web bots, negative trolls or miserable comments, they are on every RUclips content creators channel, par for the course!
Can't wait for the next one! 🎉
Thanks for an interesting video. I too live in Portugal off-grid and have done for 27 years. Over that time we have invested money in improving the service systems. We now have a 10kW solar system which runs the usual modern house plus aircon in summer and a heat pump on sunny winter days. Our other heating is from pellet stoves. We began with wood burners but they're messy, dusty and the chimneys require cleaning every year. So we swapped to pellet stoves which are extremely low energy (80W) and we heat 2 houses at a cost of around €200 combined. The electricity question isn't simply that of being off or on grid as it depends on where the house is located. 27 years ago there was no mains power within 10kms. Today there is high tension mains power but to connect to the grid would cost in the region of €30K as we would have to pay for a transformer and pay towards the rest of the infrastructure and the houses would have to be brought up to today’s building regs for the electrical system. A neighbour recently replaced their old solar system for a new 5kW one and the cost was €18K. Mostly nothing much wears out apart from the battery. Expect 8-10 years max. Solar panels are good for 20+ years and with no moving parts are definitely easier to maintain than a windmill. Back-up power is a diesel generator. We rarely use it to provide power and last year the total cost was €40 - mostly spent keeping the generator running for routine maintenance. Generators that sit idle for any length of time are problematic.
We use gas for cooking and water heating via instant water heaters. Cost is around €300 p.a.
We have a septic tank for 'waste' - thank goodness!
Water is from a borehole, harvested rain and the supermarket. We have developed a water harvesting system for both bulk irrigation and drinking water so our spend at the supermarket is usually zero.
Something else to take into consideration is the initial cost of the property. If it has all services provided it will cost more than one without services so the set-up costs are somewhat off-set by this reduction in purchase price.
Thanks for the detailed reply, and it sounds like you are where we want to be in the future. I really want install ground source heating, rainwater harvesting and haha a septic tank, but it’s a big project and most of these things will be put into place when we build the big house.
Thanks for watching 😊
Nice one mate carry on with the good work injoy it you all
Many thanks, and thanks also for watching 😊
We had a set up cost that was 4 times yours but we have a huge three phase system which also charges our car and we have electricity for both water, heating and cooling, 15m x 5 m pool, a few freezers and irrigation and given the price of Petrol in Portugal and our expenditure on a large property in London including 100 euros a year council tax here compared to 2.5k in London we think 6 to 7 years is quite viable. What is beautiful is having the security of knowledge that if things go up significantly we are covered as they don't tend to go down. We will have to meet up sometime - we have also found the community here much more welcoming and friendly than that in the Uk and help (in a very small way) to organise local events.
Thanks :) sounds like you have quite an impressive system, and it would be interesting to see it sometime. :) I like the idea of running an electric car off of solar, as most of our journeys are only short trips into town. When we were working out what size system we wanted we definitely scaled it against what we used at the time, rather than maybe what we would want in the future.
Yes I agree it’s a great community here in Portugal.
Thanks for watching :)
One of my reasons for drilling for water and fitting solar in Portugal over the last couple years was I had the money and saw it as my best hedge on inflation and the unknown of income during retirement. Next will be batteries.
Thanks great video. Makes me feel I'm on the right path
Hi! Yes it’s good to spend on investing in this type of thing when you have the money to do so. We knew we wanted a solar system before we left the uk, so it was one of the first things we bought when we arrived. Good luck :)
And thanks for watching 😊
Another comment I have is about council tax. In the UK we would be paying around £2,000 (approx €2,400) but here we pay €250 p.a. Off-grid properties generally speaking have much lower council tax bills.
Yes council taxes are far lower. I was thinking of making a video comparing mortgage/rental costs v doing up a ruin or building a house from scratch. Maybe in the future.
Thanks for watching. 😊
In Portugal we pay about €150 per annum compared to £3000 in the UK.
Thanks for the analysis. Good work.
Thank you very much! And thanks for watching 😊
Beautiful analysis. Thank you.
Thank you, and thanks for watching 😊
Thank you! And thanks for watching 😊
Great job on the video!!
That’s most appreciated! Thanks for watching 😊
Hey there! Just a heads up that the building laws in Portugal changed last month. You might be able to build your brick house now with all the same conditions you had in the UK. Converting rural land to urban land is now easier, and building septic tanks for wastewater is also more straightforward. Land in Beira Baixa is going to go up a lot because of the new laws. Good luck with everything, and make sure to do your research!
Hey thanks for the information. I had heard about that and it is good to see Portugal is doing something to reinvigorate its interior.
We actually have permission from the council to build a house on our land already, but haven’t made a start on the main house because of unexpected elements. Plus holding off on construction is allowing me time to experiment with different techniques to see what works best with the environment.
Thanks for watching 😊
Awesome video!! :D
Thank you 🙏 and thanks for watching 😊
Hi!
Very interesting and detailed analysis.
Curious as to the solar setup you have?
Thank you for a really detailed and interesting video. I would really be interested in a comparison between living off grid and on utilities, within Portugal rather than comparing to the UK. I know that our Portuguese water bills are only about 1/3 of our UK bills and obviously with the difference in climate, we use massively less energy on heating. What are your thoughts? 😊
Would be an interesting study. For us it would mean working out how much it would cost to get the grid to us from the nearest source, which is about 1km away. Would definitely be interesting to know. 👍
Thanks for watching 😊
Hello again, thanks for the video, most useful.
I follow many Van Lifers and Off Griders and I am always surprized that None of them seem to consider Wind Generators, if only for trickel charging at night, why ?
Looking forward to your next up-date.
mb
Thanks! We are considering a wind generator for exactly that. Once we have been through this winter, we will have better data on how much extra power we need to generate in order to keep everything running all of the time.
I think it is definitely good to have diverse methods of power generation. Thanks for your comment :)
because windgens in that size doesn't give anything worthwhile... they are better off charging from their van while driving + solar
There's very little wind at night for most of the year in S. Portugal. A windmill, along with its regulator, will cost around €5K plus installation. We had one for several years and got rid of it in favour of solar panels. The sheer nerve wracking operation of bringing it down to the ground made the decision. It also provided very little power. Maybe a better and easier to manage back-up option would be a solar generator, (Ecoflow, Anker, Bluetti etc) which in essence is a battery with an inverter that you charge when you have spare power and use when the service battery is low. Maintenance isn't an issue.
Thank you for a really detailed and interesting video. I would really be interested in a comparison between living off grid and on utilities, within Portugal rather than comparing to the UK. I know that our Portuguese water bills are only about 1/3 of our UK bills and obviously with the difference in climate, we use massively less energy on heating. What are your thoughts? 😊
My guess, before we start, is no. Definitely *no* if you don't factor in costs for the labour and sacrifices made to just continue living with anything like the comfort considered normal in the present day. However ... there are compensatory freedoms when you are no longer the indentured servant of the corporate entities that provide water, power and food to the usual population.
Which region of Portugal are you located? We spend six months of the year in Portimão on a Quinta, love it.
Central Portugal, not too far from Castelo Branco. It’s amazing here :)
well yes you walked more than 7km BUT you didn't pay a gymmembership to do that on a treadmil, so you saved money ;-)
Haha yes true. Carrying all that water also helps keep me fit. Could probably put together an off grid workout routine. ;P
Thanks for watching :)
Hi really enjoyed your video. I live an off grid live style in Spain, we also have a RUclips channel called "The Adventures of Mac & Anthea" basically"off grid living" with also an "off grid - time out or burn out" section. I built my own solar power system and chose to add additional solar panels and battery to cover the fridge freezer. On the face of it, it seemed a good idea, it was cheaper than a gas fridge and when not powering the fridge the additional solar could power something else, however it wasn't until the solar inverter packed up that I realised there was a fatal flaw in my plan. My house and therefore my fridge/freezer had no power for 10 days whilst my new inverter arrived. I also have a petrol generator for backup, but as your no doubt aware these generators are only designed for 4 hours max use at a time and when used for long periods of time are very expensive to run. I have now bit the bullet and paid the ridiculous cost of a gas fridge freezer. Maybe you have a plan for such an eventuality, but I thought I'd mention it just incase you didn't. Look forward to watching your future videos. Good luck Mac
@theadventuresofmacanthea thanks for the tip! We don’t have a backup, but when our fridge freezer stopped working last summer we had to buy a replacement pretty quickly.
I don’t really like having too much reliance on gas as it’s sometimes harder to get access to the bottles when you need them.
We definitely need to consider longer term backup systems tho.
Thanks for watching 😊
We personally don't like to use gas anymore than we have to but felt we had little choice where the fridge/freezer was concerned. Our supplier is a fair distance away as is everything, luckily here in Spain gas bottles can be bought for as little as 10€ each (far easier than going through the contract route) therefore we keep a stock of gas bottles along with fresh water from the spring, diesel and petrol, basically to save on travel and of course the most valuable commodity, which is always in short supply when off gridding "time". I note you plan to use diesel heaters as well, which we've been using and have proven to be a great solution for heating.
Would a wind turbine be a better option
In my opinion not for the homeowner unless there is some way that's very convenient to bring it down for maintenance. They weigh an awful lot. Solar is maintenance free, apart from washing the panels occasionally after a Saharan dust cloud has passed by. The dust in the summer air here gets into the workings of the turbines which means bringing the windmill down to the ground to clean it occasionally. Small windmills don't produce enough - in my opinion - to warrant their cost and maintenance.
It does seem windy here when the sun isn’t shining. I wouldn’t want to invest in something that wouldn’t fill the energy gap, which is part of the reason I’ve started keeping more detailed info on when we run out of power.
Thanks for watching 😊
Cheaper.. Ha! No way.
Im off grid in Portugal and being on the utilities here would be way cheaper.
But I'm not off grid for savings, it's the lifestyle.
Yes lifestyle first, but I thought it interesting to compare our old life with new. Like a ‘sliding doors’ moment, but with a focus on the financial 😆
Hi!
Very interesting and detailed analysis.
Curious as to the solar setup you have?
Thank you 🙏
I’ll make another video on the actual solar setup we have in a future update.
Thanks for watching