Off grid in suburbia - no power bill | Living Off the Grid: Free Yourself

Off grid in suburbia – no power bill
by NICK ROSEN on JULY 26, 2011 - 6 Comments in SELF-SUFFICIENCY

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – JULY 25 — I have been living off the grid for the past three years, however, my 13 year old daughter and I do not live in a rural or isolated setting, instead, we live in the middle of suburbia.

It has been interesting to note the various reactions that people have when they discover we are “powerless.” My family were initially horrified; the two eldest girls both in their 30’s were incredibly embarrassed and still are, as are my brothers and sisters. Apparently it is not the done thing to take oneself off the grid, as only hippies or the very poor would live like this.

Well, I’m not a hippy, therefore I am poor, or at least I was when I was paying for power. Others act as if I am abusing my child, however, she has no problem with it, and when I did go through a phase of wanting to put the power back on, the child, who had become used to having disposable income, fairly shrieked and screamed.

She pointed out the fact that her school work had improved, that she was now reading rather than watching TV, that she was sleeping better and that we were actually sitting down and really talking to each to each other, and given all these factors which were directly attributable to going without power, I accepted the fact that until something absolutely dire was to happen, we would be powerless for the foreseeable future.

It is not a way of life that I would recommend for everyone, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live like this if I had hordes of children, but with just the two of us, it has been very easy.

The one area in which I notice the lack is with our laptops, However, our local library provides a free wireless service to the local community and we power up there, we also take our mobile phones in and keep them charged, but I am waiting for our local computer store to bring back solar packs so that we can do more from home.

Laundry has been the other area that I have issues with as it is time-consuming, however, since adapting the instructions that one of your contributors sent in regarding the plunger and bucket, this is no longer a big deal.

I would like to say how much I appreciate your website as this has been a gold-mine of information, I send my detractors to check you out so that they can see that many perfectly normal people live off the grid.

I normally spend time at our local Papakura library each day — however, as it is the school holidays, I have been avoiding it as if it were the plague (local hoodrats take it over and it becomes a warzone).

I do not work. I am a stay at home mother which means that the government supports me, but I act as the local Community Advocate for my district which keeps me quite busy. Oh yes, I am also a Maori, which means that my people were the original inhabitants of New Zealand.
Living off the grid in suburbia seems to be a lot easier than living rural. We do not need to worry about refrigeration as I grocery shop most days, so there is no need to worry about keeping meat cold. My mother lives across the road from us, and our family have a garden plot that we maintain and share produce from, so vegetables are always straight out of the garden. Our climate is reasonably temperate, but winters can be quite cold. Winter nights are generally cool but most days the sun comes out. This is handy because our lights are solar floodlamps from a local hardware store and I think they have been the best buy I have made so far. I do have gas lanterns, but because there has been enough sunshine to charge the solar lights, I haven’t needed to use them for the past 18 months.
We cook using gas and in summer we have loads of B-B-Q’s. This has probably been the most challenging part of being off the grid as I love to cook when my family comes back for family celebrations, I haven’t really progressed from stirfries, stews and grilled meats and consistently turn out burnt offerings when I attempt to roast meats. Ah well, it’s all trial and error isn’t it.
I don’t know whether there is much more that I do that is different from other householders. We don’t watch TV at home, but if there is a program or programs that we do want to watch, we can do that through our laptops at the local library. Our life is just a bit more labour intensive and we have to wait for things like solar showers to heat up, or water to boil when dishes need to be done.
General housekeeping is pretty much the same as before except that the floors and carpets are swept rather than vacuum cleaned, and ironing is done with a pot of water that is heated on the gas stove and then used pretty much the way an iron is.
Well, that’s pretty much it for now,

Cheers,

Margaret Kingi

Tags: cheap living, low energy blls, suburban green living

6 comments

1 Len { 07.26.11 at 5:18 pm }: Good stuff. I have been trying to cut down on our power use and consider what it would be like without. What things do we have to have. We are also living in the city. The only thing I think we have to have would be our freezer. My boy is sensitive to the anti-biotics used to grow meat and so we buy meat side at a time. I am slowly putting together enough solar power to keep the freezer going.
2 Margaret { 07.27.11 at 6:59 pm }: Hi Len,
Do you need to go totally off-the-grid, or could you manage with cutting back on power usage? Maybe a trial run without power would give you and your family an opportunity to see whether you do want to take this step, my reason for turning off the power was rage at the charges I came home to after a holiday, and the fact that the power had been disconnected 2 days before returning. It was my own fault for not ensuring that my bill was up to date, and in hindsight, I might still have power on had that been the case, but I doubt it. I had already reached a point where every month when the bill came in I was referring to the power companies as a pack of thieves.
Going off-grid in suburbia wasn’t so difficult for us because we tend to holiday for 6 weeks at a time at the northernmost part of where we live, and power and shops are not part of the landscape. It takes a great deal of preparation to live in that way, or at least that was my experience, so coming back to suburbia and turning off wasn’t hard. We make the most of what’s on offer in our local region as far as power supply goes, using our local library to power laptops and phones but as soon as summer comes around our local electronics store has solar packs on sale suitable for recharging these, so we will be purchasing a couple of those.
The greatest cost saver that I have is my three burner gas cooker which costs me around $200 a year to operate. This provides hot meals and hot water for dishes and solar showers, for the few times we cannot heat from the sun or when we are in a hurry.
We do things like using cheap ($5) solar garden lights for night lights and we have solar charged motion detector lights for security ($60). Our main form of lighting is from solar floodlamps ($30 each, and with an on/off switch) and during power cuts many of my neighbours gravitate to my home as there is lighting, hot food and hot drinks.
Laundering by hand was my main gripe but after discovering the instructions from another contributor for a washing machine, that is no longer a time-consuming process.
At least by giving it a trial run, you and your family will know whether or not you want to make it a permanent lifestyle choice. I applaud you for having the courage to consider going off-the-grid in suburbia, my personal experience has been that people have considered me mad, cruel to my child, odd and foolish. I am none of those, I am just a woman who knows that power is not a necessity to living in the 21st century, and I am sick of filling the pockets of international power companies.
Good luck with whatever choice you make Len, and if you do go off-the-grid I would enjoy hearing about your experiences. I don’t actually know anyone else who is doing this in suburbia.
Cheers Margaret
3 karl { 07.28.11 at 10:03 pm }: Just how expensive is electricity in NZ.? Here in northern Illinois (usa) the line to the house costs me $17 a month and the electricity is $.07 a KWH. My bill for last month was $22. I heat water with Nat. gas. Being able to run the window A/C for a few hours when the temp. gets above 34 C is worth $22 a month. Not to mention lights, tv, washing machine, and power tools.
4 MarySaunders { 07.29.11 at 8:39 am }: I have a friend who tried to go off in the summer. They would not let her. They said they would not turn it on again if she went off. It costs about $16 per month for connection charges, even if you flip the breaker and don’t use anything. I expect there will be pressure to change this, especially if our U.S. economy gets even worse.
5 bob { 07.29.11 at 6:29 pm }: I live in east central Illinois, the local power coop has a $26 month line fee and the more one conserves the most expensive it becomes. under 500kwh and it is somewhere around 16c kwh.

I dumped them last march, they will reconnect me if I end up needing it but if I a disconnected less thsn 12 months and they will back charge me for the line fees. incentive enough to keep it turned off. I have a pv and wind system with generator back up. was jerked around too many times by the coop and decided it was time to get by with the electricity inproduce myself.

when I was on grid my bill was never under 70 or 80 a month and I was low usage, lower income neighbors that can’t afford to make lifestyle changes have bills several times greater this what I had.

at least now I have one less utility bill.

bob
6 Margaret { 07.31.11 at 10:38 pm }: Hi Karl,
I think when I went off the power grid, my monthly line charge was about $43 per month. With this, as well as power consumption my monthly costs ranged from $160 – $420 at the worst. However, that was a winter bill and I was using an electric fan heater through the night, so I had no-one to blame but myself; by next winter I had invested in a gas heater which cost me $75 to operate for the whole month.
Currently New Zealanders are experiencing unheard of power bargains thanks to a campaign started by a consumer watchdog group who set up a website and showed in easy to understand graphs what individual companies were charging for line fees, per kilowatt and the difference between low and high user costs.
Within a week the costliest power company lost 7500 customers with more opting out daily, and guess what? Now they are scrambling to offer customers savings of 22% on early payments, however, this still does not bring them in line with the lowest charging groups, but they do promise their customers the best service available. I’m not sure what that means in terms of supply or customer service but judging by previous promises, once they have their customer back in the fold, they rapidly revert and sneakily introduce higher charges.
Prices are currently at a level that I could live with; however, we are comfortable with how we live. As a young mother many years ago, I hand washed for 6 years before we could afford an automatic washing machine and that was through 2 babies with cloth diapers, disposable nappies were unheard of in the 70’s in NZ. How I launder now is so much easier than that, although on freezing cold days the odd swear word has slipped out, and I wish I’d known then how to construct a bin machine with plunger agitator, that would have been sheer bliss.
We in NZ have been hearing how consumption has increased to the point where companies may not be able to provide uninterrupted power supply so many families are looking at the challenge of how to cope should this happen; we saw from the earthquakes that devastated Christchurch how swiftly our creature comforts can disappear, and more and more New Zealanders are looking at options that are not reliant on external providers for power and water.
For my daughter and me, living the way we do is now normal, we don’t consider any other way because our basic necessities of life have been met, and because holidays are generally taken in a part of the country where no services of any kind are available, we actually know how fortunate we are to have the services that we do take advantage of.
Personally, I don’t blame you for wanting to operate your AC, I’m fairly sure that if we had temperatures of that kind and no beaches or rivers around to cool off, I’d be scrambling to get power back on. I know that in the lower part of New Zealand, summer temperatures of that range are the norm, but here in Auckland, we think we’re hard done by if the temperature goes over 30 degrees.
Cheers Margaret

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