I called up my neighbor and church friend, Shelly, last week.
“Hey we’re planning to go up to Nikiski for the week since Andy is working up there. Would you mind stopping over on Thursday and filling up the generator and starting it?”
“Sure!” She said, “That’s no problem.”
“Once you start the generator, there are two cords to plug in. The green one runs the freezers and the orange one runs the cabin with the refrigerator in it.”
“No problem,” she said again. “I’m used to starting generators.”
It wasn’t until I got off the phone that I realized how strange this conversation would have been if I were still living in PA. After living off grid for a year and a half I don’t think about it very much, but my mother in law gave a me a strange look as she was doing the dishes when they visited.
“The water stopped!” She said.
“Oh that just means the pressure tank is empty. It takes electricity to pump it into the pressure tank from the well, so that only happens when the generator is running. If I use water sparingly I can usually wash dishes twice as well as the normal food prep and hand washing on one pressure tank.”
I had forgotten that this is not normal in most households.
There are a few ways we have changed our lives because of living off grid, but for the most part we’re still pretty spoiled. I don’t use a cellar, we have a refrigerator. I don’t wash clothes by hand, we have a washer and dryer.
I did cut down on appliances. I realized that I can make coffee in a tea pot on the stove, so out went the electric coffee pot. (A coffee pot actually uses a significant amount of electricity) We got rid of the Kitchen Aid since it really isn’t that hard to make bread, cookies, bars, etc by hand in a mixing bowl.
I have a crockpot but I don’t use it at home. I take it to church carry ins and plug it into the church’s on grid outlet!
I kept the blender since I can’t blend things by hand, but that is the only electric appliance in my kitchen. That makes the countertops less cluttered!
Another thing that saves electricity is the way we use our fridge and freezers. We usually run the generator 4-5 hours a day. This freezes things solid in the freezers and cools down the fridge.
When the generator is off and the house is running on battery power, I usually run the fridge a little more throughout the day. We definitely leave everything off overnight because we aren’t opening the doors and it acts like a giant ice box. Doing it this way saves us a lot of electricity and we haven’t had food go bad. I can keep milk in my refrigerator over a week and yogurt lasts a month.
One more thing we do to conserve electricity is to do laundry less. We have come a long way from the days when you had two sets of clothes – one for the week and one for church. This doesn’t mean we go around smelling nasty, it just means that we wear our clothes more than one day if they aren’t very dirty. When we have the mentality of getting as much use out of our clothes between washings as possible I only wash clothes once every week to week and a half. Note: this does change if we are at a social event or two throughout the week; we inevitably have more laundry then.
Honestly, a body can adjust to a lot of things. I hardly think about it anymore when the generator runs out of gas and dies. I just go out the door and unplug the house cord, turn off the well pump and refrigerator and turn on the inverter to switch power usage onto our battery bank. No problem.
The best thing about off grid living is that we are generating our own power. If the electricity goes off it means there is a problem with our own (not very complicated) system and we can easily go and figure out how to fix it. No waiting on the electric company, no wondering when they’ll get around to our area, etc.
We live off grid because the electricity simply stops about a mile closer to the main road. But even though we didn’t exactly choose it, we like it.