New Member

[stuman]

I try and make a habit of introducing myself when I join a new web forum.

My name is Stuart.  I do software engineering work for a living, but I've taken care of my own mechanical/electrical/construction/health-management/etc...for years.  I am long-term married with mostly adult children these days.  I am on schedule for my first grandchild by the new year.

I am planning on parking myself and my immediate family on some acreage in Kansas this summer.  I desire to be off-grid, and will be off-grid by necessity at first anyway...since the local utility companies are all cooperatives to which it takes  three months or more to connect.

I will be initially doing a bank of deep cycle batteries and an inverter to provide "necessary" electricity, and tailoring my place for minimum electricity need.  We will be cooking and heating with wood.  I will start with the inefficient gasoline powered generator for replenishment of battery charge, but will soon be adding a windmill or two or three (space is NOT an issue) and some solar cells.  What will probably happen more quickly is to power the internal combustion engine generator with biomass gasification...I have friends who are doing this now with their cars and with stationary combined heat and power (CHP) units, so the information and experience is readily available.  Scrap wood will be plentiful as well, so handling it will be the biggest issue.  That and the fact that I work out of town during the week.

I will also be setting up a cistern/storage-tank based water system and hauling in water initially, replacing it with captured rainwater as soon as I have the roof space...the water utility is a cooperative like the electricity, and the cost of a water meter is prohibitive...besides the fact that I'm not particularly open to ingesting (or even bathing with) whatever chemicals the rural water coop feels the need to add to make the water "safe".  I plan on starting off with an outhouse and setting up a dry-mulching toilet as soon as possible...of course, that is what an "outhouse" is anyway...the simplest dry mulching toilet imaginable.

Anyway, what I hope to accomplish here is to learn from other's mistakes, and to let others learn from mine.  

To borrow a phrase from a well known tinkerer, "I haven't failed 10,000 times.  I have successfully determined 10,000 ways it doesn't work."

[wooferhound]

Hello and Welcome

You have come to the right place

Many of us are living the life that you are planning

[dnix71]

Sounds like fun.

Even if you use well water, you should have it tested regularly. I worked for the TVA in Chattanooga many years ago. We were sinking test wells for water cooling building ac's. The well sunk on the farmer's market on Missionary Ridge turned out to be into an old dump containing waste from a coal mine gasification plant that closed before WW1 (yeah, World War ONE). The guys who tapped the well had to be taken to the hospital after getting it on them and becoming ill.

The dump was so old, no one then living even remembered it first hand. The city of Chattanooga had used the pit for domestic waste, too, until they filled up the mining pit and capped it off and leased the land for an open air market. The EPA eventually cleaned it up.

[spinningmagnets]

Hello, stuman. I'm fairly new so don't spend any money on anything I say, but...

Have you selected the property yet? there are web-charts that will describe the average wind/sun profile of your location without you having to data-log that before making some wind-gen design calculations.

My daughter lives near KC, it is cold in the winter. If you haven't built the house yet, there are several hundred great ideas over at "builditsolar.com" (much more than just passive solar) It doesn't have to look goofy to work well with just a few design tweaks.

Anyone who gets hooked on Renewable Energy (RE) usually upgrades to 48V (vs 12/24), if you are certain you want to dive in with a significant investment that doesn't need upgrading, you may wish to look into this. A commitment to a specific voltage helps with component selection and system price estimates.

"Auntie Em! Auntie Em! its a twister!" -Dorothy, The Wizard of OZ, 1939