Beautiful sunset near my possible new home!

AnnieA

AnnieA

Well-known Member
Location
Down South
....In the Ozark Mountains. My brother recently purchased 200+ acres and I hope to move there. It's most likely a five year plan but it never hurts to start getting ducks in a row. Am going to renew (let it lapse years ago) my Arkansas dietetics license, cull lots of junk. If it works out, I'll have a small steel frame earthbag cabin with mostly solar power. Earthbag structures have an amazingly high R value which cuts heating needs and are impervious to bugs, fire and earthquakes. Some appliances such as fridge, freezer and clothes dryer will be propane. My health isn't good enough to completely do without appliances, but with the combo of solar, propane and a deep water well, I'll be independent of the electrical grid.

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Looks good,but, when you said deep water well, that raises a flag. It takes a large amount of wattage to run a deep well pump and solar pumps are upwards of $2000. :eek: Shallow wells, (up to around 25 foot were easy to run off solar. It wasn't cost effective to go with the 12 volt pump, (really expensive) and we needed a generator of around 6500 watts to runs it on electric. (the well was 480+ foot down. In the end, it was cheaper to just have a power pole installed.
 
squatting dog said:
Looks good,but, when you said deep water well, that raises a flag. It takes a large amount of wattage to run a deep well pump and solar pumps are upwards of $2000. :eek: Shallow wells, (up to around 25 foot were easy to run off solar. It wasn't cost effective to go with the 12 volt pump, (really expensive) and we needed a generator of around 6500 watts to runs it on electric. (the well was 480+ foot down. In the end, it was cheaper to just have a power pole installed.
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I've looked at Simple Pumps that are solar and have an easy to use back-up hand pump. They're expensive, but I think worth it in the long run. My brother had a well guy out before he bought the land but I can't remember the depth for deep water; it's surprisingly less expensive to drill deep than my current location of 250 feet above sea level.

Should I decide to not go that route, there are interesting set-ups for large volume rain collection cisterns, but some of those are expensive as well.
 

AnnieA said:
....In the Ozark Mountains. My brother recently purchased 200+ acres and I hope to move there.
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The Ozarks are a beautiful place to live. We're on the Northern fringe, in hilly forestland. There's a couple weeks of bitter cold in the Winter, and about the same amount of stifling heat in the Summer, but most of the year is quite nice.

Going "off the grid" is good, but it has few "long term" advantages, IMO. One of our Son-in-Laws is a VP for a large solar company, and even at his cost, it would take 8 or 10 years for us to break even....and by then it would be time to spend thousands to replace the batteries. Plus, half the year seems to be quite cloudy, which reduces the efficiency substantially.

Our well gives us the best water I've ever had, and at 240', the water table holds at about 120'....plenty for all our needs.
 
Don M. said:
The Ozarks are a beautiful place to live. We're on the Northern fringe, in hilly forestland. There's a couple weeks of bitter cold in the Winter, and about the same amount of stifling heat in the Summer, but most of the year is quite nice.

Going "off the grid" is good, but it has few "long term" advantages, IMO. One of our Son-in-Laws is a VP for a large solar company, and even at his cost, it would take 8 or 10 years for us to break even....and by then it would be time to spend thousands to replace the batteries. Plus, half the year seems to be quite cloudy, which reduces the efficiency substantially.

Our well gives us the best water I've ever had, and at 240', the water table holds at about 120'....plenty for all our needs.
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Part of it is concern about grid vulnerability. If I can make the earthbag thing happen, heating and cooling costs will be minimal. Cooling is a huge expense here.
 
AnnieA said:
Part of it is concern about grid vulnerability. If I can make the earthbag thing happen, heating and cooling costs will be minimal. Cooling is a huge expense here.
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We've been lucky in that we have only had one big power outage, for about 18 hours, in the nearly 20 years we've been here. Our local electric Co-op does a good job of keeping tree branches trimmed so they don't impact the power lines. I bought a generator when we moved here, and in the rare case where we have an outage, the power usually comes on before I can get the generator started.
 
AnnieA said:
....In the Ozark Mountains. My brother recently purchased 200+ acres and I hope to move there. It's most likely a five year plan but it never hurts to start getting ducks in a row. Am going to renew (let it lapse years ago) my Arkansas dietetics license, cull lots of junk. If it works out, I'll have a small steel frame earthbag cabin with mostly solar power. Earthbag structures have an amazingly high R value which cuts heating needs and are impervious to bugs, fire and earthquakes. Some appliances such as fridge, freezer and clothes dryer will be propane. My health isn't good enough to completely do without appliances, but with the combo of solar, propane and a deep water well, I'll be independent of the electrical grid.

View attachment 174650
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Beautiful sunset @AnnieA, you have exciting plans for the future, wishing you the best! :)
 

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