Could you live without electricity?

I was wondering if it was possible to live without electricity. At the moment we use electricity for lighting, heating and entertainment. We also have a small fridge.

Heating would be an easy one to get rid of as we could use gas and fit a wood burner and lighting wouldn't be too hard as we could use candles, gas or oil lamps. Entertainment would be harder because I use the internet quite a bit but as long as I could visit a cafe or library for that. My wife is addicted to TV which might be a difficult habit to break. Refrigeration is a convenience here in the UK but not really a necessity but we might be moving to Portugal in the near future so it might become more difficult to live without a fridge but it would still be possible.

Electricity is only a a few generations old and we used to live quite happily without it. Could we do it again?

I doubt I will ever live completely electricity free but I would like to live on a very little amount of power usage as that means that we only need to build a very small off grid system. Plus when living off grid you must be prepared or days when there is not enough sun/wind.

Could you/Do you live without electricity?

Paul

 

I've lived without electricity, although I did have access to someone else's power that was on a gennie a few hours a day (so could charge batteries for the radio, torch etc). I used a kero lamp or a gas lamp, and candles for light. No TV coverage there and pre-internet so that wasn't an issue. Shit, now I'm trying to think what I did with all that time ;-) (read a lot more books, listened to more radio).

Currently I'm living on a 120W panel and battery with something like 200 amp hours. It's doable for laptop, water pump, phone charge but that's about it at the moment. I don't run the lights at this time of year, but use candles or a rechargable LED light. The biggest thing about light is that I do less in the evenings in terms of things that need good light (and spend too much time online). I like the low light though and think it's healthier given we are evolved to have darkness or semi-darkness to long periods of time each day not just when we are asleep. Candle light is a very claming thing to be around. It's late autumn here and the power is starting to get tight if we have too many cloudy days in a row, even for my minimal usage. But my system could be doubled in capacity pretty easily, which would probably be enough to run lights.

It really makes me consider what I am doing, both in term of not leaving power on, and in how I value living with a finite resource. I recommend it. In terms of resource use, I'm less clear. I use parafin wax candles, which are in no way sustainable. At the moment I use a couple of candles every few days. I try and imagine replacing them with someone renewable like beeswax and realise there is no easy answer to this. I think winter in most places traditionally is a time to do less, spend more time with other people, telling stories, learning things that way. We are so used to having bright light and light whenever we want it.

Getting rid of the fridge is a good one. I would guess in your climate you could cope pretty well with a cool store and passive cooling. My mum grew up without a fridge, they had a big solid cool store out the back of the house for the meat and dairy. Worked really well. Even in Portugal you could do this I think (hot climates have passive cooling techniques, I think we've done threads on this here). You know already from having a smaller fridge that lots of things don't need a fridge, we're just used to it now. Plus I've learnt a lot about fermenting and other ways of preserving foods.

I don't have a tv, but do watch quite a lot of stuff on my laptop. You can get 12V low usage TVs, check out the RV suppliers.

I have a woodstove for heating, and cooking in the colder part of the year. Gas for cooking too, but if I had to that could be replaced with various solar, hay box, and rocket stove techs.

A big part of all of that is good design. I'm still sorting all that out, but good design and systems make a huge difference in how easy it is to live well with less (am guessing you already know this looking at your blog).

 

some of you may remember that I mentioned earlier, during the ages of 16 and 20 my family and I lived without electricity in the Catskill Mts. of upstate New York. We had the advantage of a "living spring" coming down the mountainside to a pipe emptying into a hogshead. Wintertime we had the whole outdoors for a freezer-refrigerator and in Summertime the spring kept whatever needed cold storage from spoiling. Heat was no problem if we cut enough firewood from the surrounding forest. Dad made sure the dead and/or diseased trees were taken down first. cooking was done on the wood fired cook stove Summer and Winter. The ground was far too rocky to grow most veggies, but we had Apples, Butternuts, Berries, Mushrooms, Maple sap, boiled down to syrup was our sugar for preserves and we had a neighbor whose house was less than a half-mile from our cabin He had electricity and a phone until an overturned kerosene heater burned the house and killed the man and his wife. I would milk his family cow for him in return for milk and eggs, as he had more than enough for them. Solar panels would have been a boon back then, though they would have been out of reach for us. Summertime we wouldn't stay up much after dark, but we carried in kerosene for light in the Winter. And don't let Dad catch us boys lighting the fires with it. I was the one carrying it up the hill in glass gallon jugs on my way home from school. There was a school bus that passed right by the road up to our house, but I couldn't ride the bus with the kerosene jug, and my brothers and sister didn't mind the trek, except on the coldest Winter days. On one of those days, several degrees below freezing the glass ring near the top of the jug cut off enough blood-flow to my finger to cause frostbite, and I still am sensitive in that hand to cold weather today. Just one more reason to be down south.

Yes. given the need, you could get along without the modern convenience of electricity, as our ancestors did in the distant past, but with all we've become accustomed to, Not easily.

Love is the answer

Benjy136

 

9and1lf; I couldn't even make a test today. We have two freezers in the house and 2 in the garage. We have emergency elec. but only enough to run lights in the house and emergency 12v to open the garage door when power fails if we need to vamoose with the suv (Yes.... we drive a SUV when I take the Mrs. out) We keep trying to "unload" the freezers, but when the food is there and can't survive without preservation they get loaded back up again.

 

We lived without electricity for about a year. Cooking was done on a two burner LPG stove. house heating was wood. House cooling was close windows in the day open them at night. Lighting was candles. Milk, cheese and eggs were bought maybe twice a week and consumed that night and the next day, kept in insulated box. Entertainment was reading by candle light. By the end of the year I thought I should write a book recipes for 2 burner stove, because I got pretty dam good at cooking meals with only two burners. The other thing that was funny was at first when I walked into a dark room at night my hand would automatically reach for the light switch but when we finally got power I would just walk into and do whatever in the dark. I no longer reached for the light switch. So while I have gotten very used to having power I know I could live without it.

 

Ten or so years ago I might have tried living off the grid before Willie and I met, and might have established a system by now, but at 83, I would not like to think about setting up off the grid, although, the way things are going over here, We might not have a choice. Solar runs the greenhouse and the gate-opener, but that's about it.

Benjy136

 

Heh Dreuky, I get the two burner meal skills.

Re going no power, what is the purpose? Is it to reduce one's ecological footprint? Mitigate climate change? Save money? Future proofing/self sufficiency. It seems important to know why we do these things eg I'm not sure an LPG stove is much better than an electric one (I use LPG because it's easier and a much cheaper infrastructure set up cost).

 

We were without electricity because the house we had bought was a ruin without electricity & it took us a year to do enough repairs to be able to rewire & connect to power. We weren't doing it with any "green" thoughts. But it did prove that it really isn't that hard to live without all mod cons.

 

Most of things I do and learn at the moment are geared towards building the skills and knowledge for when we finally get our own piece of land. This is why I spend so much time growing my own food etc when it would be far easier to just go to the store and buy food.

When we get our land we will be totally off grid with regards to electricity, water, waste etc. The off grid energy system is going to have to be small and very simple because I am going to have to build and maintain it myself. Doing these thought experiments now will not only tell me what sort of system I will need to build in the future but also what we can get away with now.

We already have quite a low energy footprint because we live in an old Airstream and most of the stuff we have runs on either gas or 12 volt. We are also in a position where we do not pay separately for electricity as we are on a camp site and the power in in with the camp site fees. I would like to find out from the camp site owner if we can negotiate a decent reduction in rent if we don't use their power. If I can get a couple of pounds a day off the rent that would mean a saving of £700 a year. It would be interesting to work out if we could reduce our electricity consumption to a level where a £700 solar system would produce enough power. We would always have the back up of being able to plug in and pay for electricity when we really needed it say in the winter when there is not enough solar energy.

Also, when we do get our land we could move on with our Airstream and have instant power etc.

We would like to fit a wood stove to our trailer but at the moment there is little incentive when we can effectively heat our tiny space for free with electricity

Paul

 

Ok, that makes sense. I'm in NZ, where much more of our national electricity generation comes from renewables, so if I was buying land/building a house electric would make more sense than LPG ecologically (assuming the property could connect to the grid). But I'm also in an motorhome and love the fact that 12v is so easy to work with, and if I was building a place I would probably build small and use 12V. I would look at rocket stove tech to replace or lessen LPG use (can't really do that in the housetruck while I'm mobile though).

700 GPB is probably about what I paid for my system, but prices have dropped a lot since then, esp panels. Batteries are the big cost here, it would be interesting to consider using secondhand car batteries to lighten the load on the deep cycle ones (I think batteries out of cars that have been in accidents are pretty cheap here). Lots of messing around though, and I built a system that was simple and didn't need much input.