For starters, being 100% self sufficient in our society is nearly impossible. You have to be insured, you often have to pay mortgage, you might need a doctor, you probable can’t grow you own rice or wheat or you might need a car.
But, there are some things you can do and they create good reasons to be, or get, as self sufficient as possible.

1. Utility Bills

   We, currently, pay about a gazillion euros per year on utilities. This is for water, gas and power. Plus a whole lot of taxes (actually more than half). We intend to reduce this to nothing (after investment of course).

2. Food

   Grow your own, we spend about 25 euros on groceries a week (this is what we can grow our selves). Again, you need to invest, but you can easily reduce this to a fraction. Especially if you have a nice garden, but you can grow food anywhere, all you need is water and sunlight.

3. Health

   Reduces the amount of supermarket food will invariably be beneficial to your health. Unless you buy everything organic, and then it would be an even better idea to grow your own, because organic food is expensive.

4. Outdoors

   You’ll spend so much more time outside (when you have a garden). It does take effort and quite a bit of work. We plan on having a fruit orchid, bees, a vegetable garden, chickens and a fair sized greenhouse (and that’s for starters).

5. Independence

   A study in Holland showed that the reliability of the grid will go down while the costs of energy will go up as a result of privatizing the sector. This is contrary to what the government promised (of course). Do you want to rely on a faulty and over expensive system?

6. Challenge

   Depending on how far you are willing to take it, it is without a doubt, a huge challenge. We intend to build a new house, designed to be as energy efficient as possible, build in a sustainable manner, grow our own food (and then some) and generate our own energy. Putting it in one sentence, it sounds easy, actually living up to the challenge is a whole different matter
   But you can pick some items and do a few things, everything helps.

7. Satisfaction

   But when you harvest your first batch of tomatoes, or see your windmill turn, or feel the sunlight and you know that when you turn on the radio in does so because of it. Does it get any better?

8. Eco Friendly:

   If anything, we need to rethink the way we live. It just has to become more sustainable. Every food item you grow is produced locally, it doesn’t have to come from far away and you know it is grown organically. All the energy you get from the wind or sun or water doesn’t have to be generated by coal or garbage or gas or  something nuclear.

So, there, my two cents. Like I said, you can work for one or for all of these things, the satisfaction you’ll get, or the money you’ll save will depend on how much you invest. We happen to go all the way (or at least 80% or so). But having one tomato plant in your window will be a good thing, you’ll see…

Any additions, any thing a forgot or got wrong? You can leave suggestions in the comments.

For us it is clear that something needs to be done to sustain our way of living and one of the huge impacts on our environment is the way we put a roof over our heads.

In order to create a clean personal environment and to minimise our footprint we build “green”.

The goal of our adventure is to be as neutral to the environment as possible. We want this to reflect in everything we do. And our house is the largest and longest lasting part of the project. So it will get a lot of attention.

Earthships. A short personal history…

You may well be aware that for a long time we’ve had the intention to build an Earthship, hence the name of the blog. It completely fulfilled our needs the first time we laid eyes upon it.

And our needs at the time were getting off the grid. Earthships are capable of doing just that. Not all the systems they use and the way they’re integrated are completely original, but an Earthship is more than the sum of its parts and the combination works.., beautiful buildings can be made. I even made a floor plan based on the Trott’s Earthship.

But, as time progresses so do plans evolve. We meet people, read books and educate ourselves. Ironically, or maybe it’s just the way of the Universe, we met a young woman during a volunteering week working on an Earthship who studies to become an architect specialized in sustainable housing. Isn’t that brilliant? And isn’t that one hell of an opportunity, even our time-lines kinda match.

So, what are we going to build? Honestly.., no idea…, yet. The house still has to be designed.

But I can tell you some of the criteria, and obviously it has to be build as sustainable as possible:

Materials

The materials are, of course, very important, they define the building. As a consequences the choice of material is paramount to anything else, thus they have to be:

• locally purchased (getting it close saves on carbon)
• recyclable (for when the house is torn down, or rebuild)
• from a renewable source (minimizing our carbon and resource footprint)
• non toxic (we do not want to poison ourselves or the environment)
• recycled (mind you, a lot of stuff is already being recycled, disrupting existing recycle chains might do more harm than good)

They can’t, of course, comply to all of the above, but when all materials apply to at least one of the points we win something. When more can be applied even better. Getting our wood, for instance, at a local mill would tick of three of the criteria: locally purchased, renewable, recyclable and non toxic, ahh.., that’s four… not bad.

Not Expensive

Well, this is a cheeky one. Off course we don’t want to spend to much.., one of the reasons is, we don’t have that much to spend. Another reason is an exemplaryone. We’d like to show that people can build a self sufficient and sustainable home.

Off the Grid

As mentioned before, we’d like to be off the grid.
It is possible to buy “green” energy from the utility companies, but you’d still be depended on them. I would like to suggest that anybody who wants green power should choose that option, not everybody can go off the grid, or completly self suficient. I know we can’t in the house we live in at the moment.

So, in conclusion: We still have find a piece of land. After that we start designing the house. But, work is in progress, the architect is investigating possibilities and we are still searching.

Don’t forget to read the previous episodes: Process of Elimination and Off the Grid.

Comments and/or questions are welcome…

The second part of the “How are we going to do it” series covers the going-off-the-grid part.

As a people, our reliance on the utility companies for power, water and gas is complete.
If anything goes wrong in these vast networks you’re lights will not come on, the tab stays dry or your house stays cold. Any one of the above causes real problems for a lot of people. In the future the cost will go up while the reliability goes down…
We want to minimize our dependence on an overly expensive and unreliable system and use what can be free to everybody.

In short, there are two flavors of “the Grid”. One is the information grid, like the banks, insurances, health care, a car.., anything that requires you to register or enable somebody else to track you, for whatever reason. One lives like this if one wishes to stay under the radar, out of sight.., hidden. This is not the grid we intend to get of..

We’re talking about the Utility Grid. Power, gas, water…

In Holland we pay all sort of taxes to keep everything running, more than 50% of our utility bill are taxes, no kidding. Next to the fact that it can be cheaper, it can also be, a lot, cleaner. Additional bonus of prducing our own is that we minimize our dependence on others. So, how are we going to do it?

Water

Water falls from the sky, at least in the better part of the world, and where we’re going to live for sure. We collect it via the roof and it gets collected in tanks. These tanks will be large enough to sustain us through dry periods.
From the tanks it is pumped through filters and comes out of the tap. We can shower, drink, wash clothes, whatever…
The waste product of these activities is grey water.., it’s dirty but not unusable. The grey water is used to feed indoor planters. The Earthship systems also use the filtered grey water to fill the toilet, which in turn is a low-use flush toilet. The black water from the toilet is flushed outside into a leech field where it is filtered until eventually leaving clean water to enter the ground.

This is of course a simple description of a complicated proces. When we have the design of the house ready, we’ll have a much better understanding of the finished system.

Power

We have one of the greatest energy sources in the universe at our disposal. Our Sun.

Next to wind this an abundant source and we’ll be focusedon utilizing this as much as possible. Depending on where we end up wind energy is certainly a viable option, the wind turbine, however, is visually intrusive and we’ll try to avoid them.

Solar energy is relatively easy to implement. Put a couple (i.e. enough) photovoltaic panels on the roof, have them face south at a proper angle and hook them up to a couple of batteries. The power created is 24 volts on which you can run, at least, the lights in your home. A 24v fridge is also possible.
Systems which use 230v will get their power through an inverter. At the moment the initial costs are still pretty high, but prices are dropping all the time with the systems getting more efficient all the time.

A wind turbine can be hooked up to the same system.

Heat

The house will be solar heated through the windows. Any additional heating will be done by a wood stove.
Warm water will come from a solar water heater with assistance of a regular, but energy efficient, gas heater. The gas will also be used for cooking and will be derived from tanks. We won’t be producing that ourselves…

Simple

As mentioned, the above is of course a simple view of a complex system. As with Earthships the whole point of the building will be its systems. Without them, it will be just a (sustainably build and environment friendly) house.

Later on, when we have a design and are actually building, we’ll get back to these systems with more detail.

Any questions or comments, feel free… and, in case you missed it, don’t miss the first part: Process of Elimination.

For people out there who are thinking of tumbling down the same rabbit hole as we are at the moment, or for those who are just curious, we create a series of posts in an attempt to explain how we intend to live off the grid in a sustainable dwelling and produce (much of) our own food.

In the first episode I’ll explain our process of elimination for land, or rather the criteria we set and why. We have a few basic criteria to which any piece of land should, preferably, abide to. These are, in a slightly specific order:

• South Facing
• On a Slope
• No Utilities
• Quiet
• Not in Town
• No more than 3 hours away
• Big Enough/Affordable
• Pretty

Some are more important than others and we can put a value on them and then simply run the numbers.., or the process of elimination.

South Facing is imperative and belongs at the top of the list. If it the lot would lie on a north facing hill the sun would be behind the hill for the better part of the year, leaving us cold and powerless (except when you live on the southern hemisphere of course). On a flat piece of land a clear view to the south would be needed.

On a Slope is just really nice. Our architect absolutely likes that. One can use the earth as walls when digging in and a multi level house is easier to build. Also the rain (capture and irrigation) or sewage is easy to direct (downwards). Gravity assists and saves power needed for pumps.

No Utilities is pretty much a must. I wouldn’t mind having them, especially electricity, we could make the meter run backwards if we have plenty and maybe even earn a bit of cash. But the site is more expensive with utilities.., although a telephone line would be nice…

Quietness is something we yearn for. We now live in the city and it’s just never quiet, well maybe in the middle of night it is, we do live in a more quiet part of the city, but still.., the neighbors, the tram, the cars, you name it and it makes noise.

Not in Town, a bit related to all of the above, but this is about people in general. While building we don’t want to bother too many people, it might take a while. When we’re done it comes back to peace and quiet.., mind you, we don’t want to shunt all human contact. We just don’t want to draw curtains to have privacy.

Driving distance is just a personal favorite. Anybody can determine where they’d like to live and at what distance form where they are now. We just need to drive up to Holland regularly, so minimizing the distance saves on frustration.

Big Enough is more in the line of what we want to do, rather than just status, or keeping your neighbours at bay. There are a few things we want to achieve for which we need space. Our own vegetable garden, chickens, a bee hive and maybe a goat or two, for this one needs space.

1000m² is a very bare minimum. The bigger we can get the better. But, every square meter costs money, so there has to be balance. And for the region we’re looking at, 15€, or so, per square meter seems reasonable and 2000m² or more is preferable.

Pretty, well, quite obvious. We want a nice living environment and the surroundings are as important as the building we live in. So it has to feel right.

Mind you, living out in the country is also very beneficial for ones health. We live in Rotterdam and I can tell you, it’s not the healthiest city in the world. Add growing your own organic vegetables and you prolong you life.., at least we hope we will.

Any questions or comments, please let us now…

I just couldn’t resist posting this. 50 ways to help the planet, man, there has to be something there that you can do. I myself came up to 20 (nice round number).

I just love the Internet. I really think it benefits mankind in ways we yet have to understand. The Chest Fridge is an example of that statement. It’s ideas like these that make it all good. Reverting a freezer into a fridge.

“Using vertical doors in refrigeration devices is an act against the Nature of Cold Air.”
“My chest fridge (Vestfrost freezer turned into a fridge) consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. It works only about 2 minutes per hour.”

Mt. Best offers a kit or a complete thermostat, which is the only custom item for the fridge. If only we could find a 24v DC freezer to convert, we’d loose even less power.

Read the full article at the Mt Best website.

XCR is a wonderful flooring product from the company Expanko. It is made of a mixture of recycled rubber and cork including recycled tires and post-industrial waste. XCR is a colorful, waterproof, durable flooring option. It is also slip-resistant, fire-resistant, and quiet and comfortable to walk and stand on. There are 27 standard colors to choose from including earthy neutrals, jewel tones, and brights and bolds.

Found this at Green Building Elements. Could be a nice addition to a low energy consuming environment.., like an Earthship. You can buy these in the States for a meager 30 bucks.., that’s just 20 Euros.., without postage. Or you can try and make one yourself.., it is doable. Luckily, Heat Stick explains how they made them…