Posts from — November 2006

“It’s going to be how much?”

Off The Grid with Stroud is a 90 minute special airing on the Outdoor Life Network Channel in Canada on November 28th at 8:00pm ET. Its the story of one family’s move to 170 acres in central Ontario, where they live without mains power or water and walk 2 kilometers to get to their car in the winter. Les Stroud, his wife, Sue and their two small kids Raylan and Logan, jump into the world of solar power, rain catches, root cellars, outdoor ovens, and building with logs.

Les Stroud is a Canadian Bushcraft expert and musician. I spoke to him about what he learned. (more…)

spotlight on Vanadium

A big wind turbine or array of solar panels is all very well, but you need to store the power you generate, else its wasted. Battery technology has barely advanced in the last century. The base standard is still lead-acid, but that may be about to change.

Although fuel cells will not take off any time soon because companies have not cracked the safe production of hydrogen, a new Vanadium battery has been launched which might change the economics of renewable energy and off-grid living. VRB Power Systems Inc. (www.vrbpower.com) of Vancouver makes large scale power storage units based on “flow” batteries. (more…)

Sher: secret science

Amazing. A gizmo which sucks the air in, then sucks the water out of the air, and then spews out clean fresh water. 500 Gallons of it  a day. Every off-grid home should have one. Only problem is it’ll set you back a cool $500,000 . FEMA have already bought two, and the US Army is said to be on the verge of buying many, because getting our boys pure water is one of the key logistics requirements of any operational planning.

The box o’ tricks is from Aqua Sciences Inc, and the company says the high cost is justified because in the end it “only costs you $0.25 per gallon. For those of us without an entire battalion at our command, however the price is still a little steep. The makers are working on a consumer model, but it won’t be out any time soon. (more…)

Lives and breathes greywater

Art Ludwig, author of Create an Oasis with Greywater has been living off-grid since he was 15. Here he describes how it all began. Tomorrow’s he will excerpt an introduction to managing Greywater from his new book.

On Christmas Eve of the year I turned 15, my present to the family was to move into a decaying tack room in the lower reaches of our backyard. The plumbing consisted of a lone garden faucet outside. If I could deal with a lack of plumbing while backpacking, I reasoned, I could deal with this. The eco-cidal adult establishment thought it needed all that over-engineered infrastructure, but I surely didn’t. (more…)

Stumped: Nicu Tudorache

A remote off-grid village in the Carpathian mountains has been humiliated by the new movie Borat starring British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Glod is a mountain outpost with no mains power, sewage or running water. The name Glod means Mud in Romanian. Locals eke out livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land. Now the villagers have discovered the blockbuster movie portrays them as a group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

Disabled Nicu Tudorache , a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene, a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of his missing arm – but he had no idea what it was.

Watch the trailer for Borat’s movie here: www.substance001.net/borat_trailer2/borat_trailer2_850k.wvx (more…)

Cheap is beautiful

The architecture world has long been in love with shipping containers as homes, but Australian politicians seem unaware of this trend.
Container Homes, known in Australia as Dongers (careful, Mum, don’t do an internet search for this word) have got Ozzie MPs hot under the collar. Laborite Shane Hill says it is not Australian to put people into the disused sea containers converted to accommodation for as little as 20,000 Ozzie dollars (about $15,000 US). (more…)

Stock up on propane and Solar panels. The world is in for a roller coaster few years of lurching from one energy shortage to another as crises intensify. This is the forecast in the latest authoritative report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Unless governments switch from increased burning of fossil fuels to more nuclear and renewable, and unless there are huge energy-savings, there will be skyrocketing fuel prices, blackouts and supply disruptions, says the report, World Energy Outlook 2006, produced by the IEA with input from leading international experts. It has long been recognised as the leading source of energy analysis.

It pointed to a 50 per cent surge in energy demand by 2030, saying Chinese and Indian economic growth will propel global oil demand from 84 million barrels per day to 116 million bpd by 2030 with most of the increased supply coming from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. (more…)

Island Mel

Off-Grid welcomes Melissa Chapple, who will contribute articles and an island diary from her remote location:

My husband and I live off-the-grid on a tiny island in Southeast Alaska. We had lived for many years on a float house – which is a real house built on a large log raft, anchored in a protected bay. It seemed stable but would move gently about. Occasionally a relaxed guest would jump in fright as the view through the window would drift sleepily to one side. The winter storms got a bit much, so recently we slid the house off the float and on to a small island nearby. (more…)

Theilen – has not taken Meth

Off-Grid endorses Cynthia Thielen in the race for United States Senator from Hawaii. Thielen has made an unequivocal committment to off-grid energy provision for emergency services and schools as well as switching all State and Federal funding away from oil or nuclear, and solely to renewable energy sources. She is the voice of the future in Hawaii which has an island perspective on energy — different from most US regions.

Although we are amazed to find ourselves endorsing a Republican, the incumbent Democratic Senator from Hawaii is a waste of space. Thielen has also supported abortion rights, physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill and industrial hemp. She has opposed legalizing gambling and expanding the right to carry concealed firearms. (Source: Honolulu Advertiser Oct 1, 2006). She has not had sex with a male prostitute as far as we know, nor taken meth, but we would not mind if she had.
(more…)