Posts by — Sally Buchan

Many people come to this site with a dream – They want to cast off this consumerist world and live off the grid.

Some achieve it.

Anyone can use the LandBuddy facility on this site to introduce themselves and talk about what they are looking for. Then others can find them and groups can form so people help each other, pool skills and resources.

There are no typical postings – everyone is different – Here, by way of an example, is a recent message from someone calling himself HardHead:-

“I am new to this website, but by no stretch of the imagination new to the concepts of living off the grid as some call it, self-sufficiency as others conclude, and to tell the truth, I really do not know why I decided to speak up. (more…)

Collingwood Enterprise-Bulletin, 16 November 2012 -

There’s no recharging cell phones or computers overnight. Lights must be turned off when not in use. And you don’t leave the bathroom until the toilet has finished its flush cycle.

Like most families, the Zoldys have a few rules to follow at their cottage. It’s just that theirs are a bit unusual. But it’s a small price to pay for the satisfaction of being off the grid, a conscious choice the Newmarket family of four made when they took their 1867 Confederation Log & Timber Frame vacation home offgrid. (more…)

Britain’s top energy companies have been accused of fiddling the price of gas and electricity. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. The UK Government is looking into it.

But has the same thing been happening in America?

British bank Barclays Barclays has been fined $470m by US regulators for manipulating the American electricity market.
The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has provisionally fined the bank $435m and ordered it to repay $34.9m in “unjust profit.” (more…)

Urban homesteading, growing or raising a portion of your own food, has become so fashionable that upscale cookware company Williams-Sonoma introduced the Agrarian collection, a line of tools and supplies for activities ranging from beekeeping to cheese making, delivered to 75 countries.

Photos of gardening beds thick with leafy greens, heirloom chickens strutting around picturesque coops and shiitake mushrooms growing on a log make the homesteading life look beautiful and delicious, while also playing down the hard-work aspect of these chores-turned-hobbies. Copper gardening tools are so shiny and pretty they seem more like rustic decorations for a farm-to-table restaurant than tools for working in the dirt. (more…)

Small wonder that interest in off-grid living is at an all-time high.

Four million homeowners have already lost the roof over their heads; 3.3 million others are in or near foreclosure, and more than 11 million borrowers are underwater by $700 billion. Of course the market will recover at some point in the future….but when?

If you have a dead-end job and a mortgage on a property which is worth considerably less than you paid for it, the temptation to hand back the keys will be pretty immense. Unless you have kids in the middle of schooling, or an ailing parent to look after, it would seem to make a lot of sense to find some cheap land in a nice community of like-minded people, and forge yourself a new life.  You can start the process by registering on LandBuddy, our free service. (more…)

The Toledo Museum is celebrating the trend towards smaller homes in new exhibit Small Worlds. Everyone with internet access can participate in learning more about small homes and they can participate in an eBay auction for charity to March 25th, 2012. (more…)

Looking for ways to lower your utility bills or maybe just reduce your electricity consumption if your power is from sun or wind?

Lowering the amount of power you use to light your home is one place to start.

About 20 per cent of your monthly energy usage goes toward illuminating your home. Slashing that bill takes a little more effort than simply turning off the lights.

Here are seven tips to help you cut your lighting costs and make instant savings.

1 Pick the best bulb: There are more energy efficient light bulbs to choose from than ever. Start by migrating to more efficient bulbs as your old ones burn out. Newer bulbs can outlast traditional ones by up to 10 times and can save you up to 75 per cent in lighting costs. (more…)

One of our readers commented recently “It’s sad that municipalities force people into huge homes, by refusing to let people build small homes. It’s all about the money (taxes) that they want to rake in.”
but now help is at hand, in the suprising shape of the National Association of Home Builders. The size of new homes shrank in 2009 for the first time in three decades, figures from the NAHB show.

The recession has driven the trend, but financial necessity isn’t the only reason behind the move to downsize. (more…)