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June 2014

Urban

Interview with America Unplugged character

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Sportsman Channel are running a great series about ordinary people who live off the grid or off-grid ready – meaning they COULD go off-grid if they wanted to or needed to.

One of those is Mark Patrick, a straightfoward, stand-up guy who gave us a skype interview about his reason for living this way

The show airs on Thursdays at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sportsman Channel.

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Community

Greenpeace “loses $5m” of donations

Greenpeace, the environmental charity that lost its way over a decade ago, has announced it has also lost money – over $5 MILLION dollars of donations have been frittered away in currency speculation.

Greenpeace headquarters, a marble-lined former bank in Amsterdam is a place where self-important Greenpeace executives plan their next vital air journey to visit a politician or industrialist. Greenpeace executives work is too urgent, you see, to follow the rules they prescribe for others. Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo loves to be photographed at meetings around the world.

Now, one of their management cadre has embarrassed the organisation by running up the huge losses on money markets. The cost helped push Greenpeace into a loss for the year of €6.8m on a global budget of €300m Euros.

It raises the question,why they have $5 million sitting around? Surely the environmental emergency they are always fighting requires spending the money we gave them, not sitting on it?

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Community

Happy Father’s Day

Dad

My Dad is much of the reason why I am getting to live my dream, he gave me a sense of adventure from a young age, as a family we would watch nature and science shows on PBS, we also watch Grizzly Adams, now THAT was how I wanted to live, in a small hand built cabin, on a mountain side, with few neighbors, a few good friends and independent.

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Stars of “America Unplugged” are modern MacGyvers

Building a tiny homeRyan Lapinski always wanted to be MacGyver, the TV character solving problems with a bit of candle wax and a plastic bag.

“I watched that show religiously … that pretty much got me interested in outdoors. Blame it all on MacGyver, I guess,” he said.

The 26 June show in the new series “America Unplugged,” on the Sportsman Channel, will feature. Lapinski and his wife, Adda Lamon, as they build an off-grid home in East Brady, Pennsylvania.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I just preferred camping over being in a structure,” said Lapinski, 38, a native of the South. (“Pick a Southern state and chances are, I’ve lived there for a little bit.”)

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off the grid but on the cloud

Cloud computing may seem incompatible with being off-grid, but there are ways to live in the cloud even when you don’t have an Internet connection. The most common situation occurs when you are actually in the clouds — stuck on a remote mountainside with no Wi-Fi, or, more likely, Wi-Fi so slow it might as well be nonexistent.

The key to using your cloud services without a connection is preparation: You must set up offline access before you head off the grid, either to individual files or to an entire collection. Here are instructions for some of the popular options.

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Community

Short cycling? Problem solved :)

1x1placeholderShort cycling, it makes me think of riding a bike a very small distance, or someone riding a really short bike…. actually it’s when a motor or compressor runs for a short period of time and is off for a short period of time. This will shorten the life of said motor or compressor.

We have had our current/new freezer to fridge conversion for a couple of months now, as the weather began warming up, I noticed the box ran more often than I thought it should, so I really started paying attention to the cycle. I didn’t officially time anything, but I estimated it was coming on for only a few minutes at a time every 5-10 minutes, that was definitely wrong. Of course this was during 100 degree days, it was also happening that way whether I opened the lid or not.

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Self-Sufficiency

Tiny Homes – the Big Picture

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OFf-Grid News reports on the booming Tiny Homes movement.

The houses are the size of a regular settee or a little bigger. They are painted in happy colours — yellow, pink, blue — and have names, RDX2, The Chuck Wagon, Uni-Bomber and so on. The floors are made of wooden pallets reclaimed from leftover construction material; the windows are discarded washing machine doors. The insides are insulated with the help of pizza delivery bags. And these dwellings have wheels. Total cost of construction: $30-40 per house. Selling price: Free.

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Former Law enforcement officer has had it with the man. Living off the grid is his solution
People

Ex-cop predicts collapse

Former Law enforcement officer has had it with the man. Living off the grid is his solutionHarold Smith cam on our YouTube page today, commenting on our video Inside the Movement as follows:

I spent 20 years in law enforcement, and over that time I’ve seen a lot of changes not only in the federal government, but state and local.

At this moment I’m making plans to go totally off-grid. Why?

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Community

Spring in the Sky Castle

Sky CastleI do my best to see the bright side of life and everything in it, take winter for instance, the cold temps means there are no bugs or other creepy crawlies out and about, it’s nice to snuggle up next to the wood stove. Now spring hits, the warm weather is great, don’t have to worry about bundling up over night, but with the warmer temps comes the critters, snakes, squirrels, mice and bugs.

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Energy

Utility companies are toast

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Latest episode of Off-Grid News focuses on the death of the Utility company business model as more people go off-grid.

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Nova Scotia bans new off-grid homes

Dear Off-Grid,

I live on the south shore of Nova Scotia and I want to build a tiny, off-grid homestead. So far, it is proving to be a near impossibility.

The building inspector says I have to have 3 radiators and an air exchanger and these must be powered by electricity (as per the National Building Code). He says I must be able to maintain a temperature of 22.5 degrees Celsius in my home at anytime during the year! Who keeps their heat that high anyways?

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Community

Lost Faith in the System

hagopianJoachim Hagopian voices the feelings of millions of Americans

The forsaken American population finds itself more in poverty (46.2 million people) as well as more in debt ($57 trillion) now than ever before in history.

Young generations of the college educated are having to pay off mounting college loan debts ($1.2 trillion and rising) that without jobs they can never even hope to repay. Rather than marry, have kids and buy homes like generations before them, we worry how to pay the light bill and avoid eviction. Sometime in the last century, when we weren’t looking, the American dream died. Foreclosures and unpaid debts are now sucking the lifeblood out.

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