Living off the grid (c. 1970's)

J

Josiah

Senior Member
Location
50 miles east of Cincinnati, OH
During an earlier chapter of my life my wife and I lived on a mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks miles from the grid. After living completely without electricity for a couple of years, I installed some solar panels (c. 1970's) And bought 12 second hand telephone company lead acid batteries. Each battery weighed 180 lbs. The solar panels were mounted on a cobbled together free standing mount that could be manually rotated so the panels would be directly facing the sun. Depending on the how low the battery reserves were we would reposition the panels every couple of hours to track the sun's movement. Mine was almost certainly the least high tech solar setup in existence. Still it did provide us with 12 volt DC electricity even after five sunless days in the winter and in 17 years of operation we never lost power once. The picture below shows the solar panel array with my wife adjusting the direction..

Maggie adjusting PV array.jpg
 

You and your beautiful wife were pioneers, Josh. Good for you! :thumbsup1:
 

That's pretty darn cool. Beautiful lady also.

I'm a bit obsessed with simplifying life. But doing so seems very complicated. If that makes any sense. (Like the tiny house movement)
 
Superb. I do like innovative people..I have such little imagination and commons sense myself, I totally admire those who can not only think of good sensible common-sense ideas, but put them into practice.
 
Great set up you had there Josiah, quite an innovation, my brother-in-law has those sorts of ideas, he lives in Scotland and has made a small hydro electric generator from a stream in his garden.
 
Josiah, have you ever looked at that picture (great one, BTW) and wondered what a current installation would look like?

I played around with solar energy in the late '70's / early '80's and, from what I can see now, the tech is amazing - lower price, smaller footprint and much more user-friendly.
 
SifuPhil said:
Josiah, have you ever looked at that picture (great one, BTW) and wondered what a current installation would look like?

I played around with solar energy in the late '70's / early '80's and, from what I can see now, the tech is amazing - lower price, smaller footprint and much more user-friendly.
Click to expand...

Actually the biggest differences would be the improvement in battery technology and the efficiency of dc to ac inverter. Back in the 70's I operated my house on 12v dc because the then state of the art inverters wasted so much energy.
 
It looks like you had a good solar setup for your property, Josiah. Having the solar power would definitely be much better than just using candles or kerosene, or even a generator.
When I moved back to North Idaho in 2000, I was 55, single, and the last thing I wanted was to be a pioneer. However, finances were short (as always), and I lived in a small older single wide trailer out in the country. Before I was able to get electricity, I used kerosene lamps, and carried all of my water in the back of the truck in barrels.
Even after I got power back there; I still hauled water for another two years before i could get hooked up with the county water system.
I hauled the water in the back of my little Mazda pickup, two 55 gallon barrels at a time. One barrel was for watering the livestock and one for the small garden. The next day, the two barrels were siphoned into two more barrels outside of the back door of the trailer. These were connected to an RV pump with was connected to a car battery. When I turned on water inside the trailer, the RV pump came on, and I had water, although I used it sparingly. My drinking water I packed home in gallon jugs.
In the winter, I couldn't use the barrels, of course, because they froze solid.
So, in the winter, when I came home from work, I would shovel snow into 5-gallon buckets and pack those into the house. I filled up the bathtub, and a tall garbage can that i used just for water, and that is how I could flush the toilet and have (cold) washwater.
Showers were out, so in the winter, I stopped at the laundromat on my way home after woork, went into the bathroom and cleaned up with their sink and shampooed my hair. Not the greatest; but it worked.
When I finally had both electricity and running water; life was a whole lot easier; and having gone without it sure made me appreciate having it. Having to live like that is a whole lot different than wanting to live like that.
 
We live way out in the deep forests of Central Missouri, but we have all the "amenities" of city living...including a well that supplies some of the best water I've ever drank. However, we still have the exposure of downed electric power lines, so I keep a generator and plenty of gas on hand....have only had to use it about 30 hours in over 12 years.

I have a Son-in-Law who is an executive for a solar power company in KC, and they are usually backed up with work for weeks. Although technology has improved in recent years, and prices have come down substantially, it would still cost me over $17,000 (at his cost) to have his company install a complete "off the grid" system. Much of that price would be a huge bank of batteries sufficient to supply backup power for several days when we get into our extended periods of cloudy weather....which would take up half the basement. Most of the solar work in this area is commercial applications, and very few individual houses are trying to go solar. Maybe if Elon Musk makes the "breakthrough" in battery technology that he is working on for his electric cars, the day may come when solar is practical and affordable for homeowners. At the rates we pay for electricity, it would take me about 10 years to break even, and by then much of the solar system would probably be in need of repair/replacement.
 
Of course most domestic solar installations are connected to the grid and "sell energy" back to the power company during the day and use carbon sourced energy from the grid at night. Not a perfect solution but it eliminates the need for battery storage. What made our c.1970's setup so cheap were three factors. Jimmy Carter was President and a strong proponent of alternative energy. Thanks to legislation he proposed there were handsome subsidies for buying solar panels. The batteries we used were retired (second hand) from the telephone company and cost next to nothing. Finally, after living completely without electricity for a couple of years our electrical habits were minimal. Our biggest energy application was our super efficient refrigerator which I constructed out of plywood and R20 ridged insulation.
 
Happyflowerlady : How your tale hit home! If I may, my own and my wife's experience so closely resembles yours! Laid off from the then highest-paying job I ever had, Reagan Recession, I came home on my wife's birthday to reveal I was suddenly jobless! We had been making payments on a 40-acre plot in Northern Arizona, elev. 6700 ft., 26 miles Northeast of Show Low, no water, no power, no phone, unable to secure work, I built a 16 X 40 foot cabin, two stories with gambrel roof, and we proceeded to move everything there from Phoenix, 180 miles. Bought an Elmira wood-burning cookstove, plenty of firewood, I chose propane over kerosene, fitted up a Coleman gasoline lantern hanging above our table to run on propane instead. Nice, bright, white light to read by, but emitting radioactive gas (mantles use Thorium Oxide coating). By the time we moved in, I was in the toughest physical condition of my entire life, at age 41. We hauled water from the Show Low City Park. Had a good milk-producing Nubian Goat, 6 chickens. The sad ending to our year there occurred when the company asked me to return to work; I lasted 6 months at it!

The following couple of years were strange, to say the least, but produced a nice, red-brick custom home, the floor-plan of which my wife conceived, the entire construction carried out by me, with only the exception of the septic tank & evap. field "farmed out". Completion took 3 years. Thank you for reading my story, too wordy, as usual. imp
 
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