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February 2012

The Renter’s Energy Dilemma

Four ways to save money on energy without installing permanent equipment (ie when you are renting or in temporary accomodation)

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Afghan cook stove

A video from USAID shows the details of how to design a cheap efficient stove to cook your food and heat your home.

you have to sit through a little lesson on life in today’s Afghanistan, but you get to see how to put together their traditional cookstove, which can also be used as a space heater.

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The hows and whys of going off-grid

So you wanna go off-grid… now what? How far do you wish to go? There are lots of decisions to be made when you are deciding your future. Are you on your own or do you have a family? Are you at the beginning of your adult life are are you in your twilight years? Do you have lots of money to spend on this or are you wondering how you’ll pay this month’s bills? Do you want to do this on your own or do you want to start or join a like minded group?

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Energy

Houses that put money in your pocket

These days, with so many builders touting themselves as green, the whole idea of a green home can seem like a marketing ploy.  Instead of stepping into someone else’s business plan,  your home can be your own financial survival tool – that is what you can learn from looking at the off-grid way of life.

When a builder markets his homes as environmentally friendly because they feature water-saving toilets and high-efficiency gas furnaces, that’s a problem: You’d be hard-pressed to find a new home without these features. But here’s the thing:  the relative improvements in resource consumption compared to the wasteful old ways are still way out of whack with the way you live if you are harvesting your own power and water, off the grid.   You can live a comfortable off-grid life on 25% of the water and electricity that people regard as normal.  But LEED standards are more like 50% or more – ie half what is “normal” but double what off-gridders would consume.

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Hollywood loves to hate freedom and indie lifestyle


Wanderlust Trailer — sucky mockery of  folks living their dream

Wanderlust is a new film starring Jennifer Aniston. It is the latest showbiz product to pour scorn on the off-grid lifestyle.

Feb 19th there was the 500th episode of The Simpsons, which had a laugh about people living on the edge of Springfield in an “off the grid community”.  Then there was Apocalypse Preppers, a TV series about a gang of carefully chosen eccentrics who live off-grid for all sorts of crazy reasons of their own.

Now there is Wanderlust – a film in which a couple quit their stressed out city life in order to live in a (non-vegan) nudist commune, where Aniston is taught to “stroke the shaft” of a cow in order to milk it.

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What is living off-grid?

There are many grids. Few leave them all behind. But it is not a competition – each individual just does what feels right for them

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