Category — WATER

Rousson and friend

A low tech, man-powered  yellow submarine may not be high on the list of requirements for la vie off-grid, but French adventurer Stephane Rousson and designer Minh-Lôc Truong have gone ahead and made one anyway. In Rousson’s garage.

The Scubster  is the world’s first pedal powered submarine and it has recently successfully finished its first test in the Mediterranean off Nice. (more…)

After the rain-a rare colored sunset in the high desert mountains

Living in the high desert means having to deal with long periods of dry weather punctuated by periods of mega-rains. We got one of those yesterday. I was not at the skycastle when this occurred, I was at a friend’s house. My drive home was a bit tricky, our roads are dirt, some gravel, some boulders and several places are clay. The clay is the problem, when it gets wet, soaked, it becomes a car eating muck pit. There are several places I have to cross that have lots of clay, one place in particular is a S-curve just before my place, I avoid it when it’s wet. That means going over an even steeper,  higher, rougher road, but it’s worth it to miss the mucky S-curve. As I was going over the alternate path, I noticed a couple of cars that were abandoned on the road, not a pleasant thing to see where I live. That usually means a long, rough walk for the occupants, unless they are lucky enough to find someone else driving though or are close enough to walk to a friend’s house, that usually means at least a half mile or more walking either up or down steep hills. Did I mention that cell phones don’t work out here? (more…)

Cynthia Berger

They are piloting their solar-powered hybrid canal boat around “The Great Loop” — the system of waterways circling eastern North America. The first leg of their journey took them east on the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario. Berger filed this report: (more…)

The cost for water and sewerage in Brisbane for the average household is now AU$2.59 a day. If you lived off the grid getting water trucked in could cost $2.23 to $2.30 a day.

Residents in the Moreton Bay Regional Council area were facing a rise of between 27 and 66 per cent from July 1 until the local council stepped in to subsidise it. (more…)

Leary, his bike-powered-water-pump and friends

A British engineering student has invented a bicycle-powered water pump that could enable huge areas of ‘off-grid’ land to be irrigated for the first time.

Jon Leary, 24, a masters student at Sheffield Department of Mechanical Engineering was tasked to ‘make something useful out of rubbish’ for his dissertation. He came up with the idea of a ‘bicicomba movil’ –an inexpensive mobile bicycle powered water pump made from salvaged materials that can be used for irrigation and general water distribution almost anywhere in the world. (more…)

Off Grid Washing Machine

What do you get when you combine a 5 gallon bucket and a toilet plunger? An off grid washing machine. Well, maybe not a machine in the traditional sense, unless you consider my hands the motor. This is something I have been wanting to make for quite some time now. The other day while I was in town, I saw a toilet plunger on the shelf and put it in my cart. I also picked up 3 bottles of Mrs Stewart’s bluing, I’ll explain more about that in a bit. (more…)

Time is slipping away...

So, just what does that mean? I can tell you from personal experience and from the responses I have received from people over the years that it definitely has different meanings to different people. From living completely without any utilities, no electricity, water or gas (think hunter’s cabin, wood stove, candles or kerosene lamps, no running water…), to generating one or more of these items on site yourself (think solar panels, wind power, methane digester…), I even had one person say that for him, living “off the grid” meant living so remotely that the government couldn’t find you, essentially hiding from the world. For some people it brings up a picture of a hermit living in a shack on a remote location, others envision a state of the art home that independently takes care of the needs of all occupants from food and water to electricity. (more…)