Growing Up as an Off-Grid Child

Reader Contribution by Aur Beck and Advanced Energy Solutions Group
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I grew up living off-grid and without electricity, as my parents consciously did not want to be burdened with bills. We did have a phone (which we took off the hook after 5 p.m.) and a truck, which both cost money but were used for business purposes. We used kerosene lamps and candles for light and had a woodstove for heating and cooking in the winter,and a gas stove for summer cooking.

We didn’t have regular refrigeration, running water, or a laundry machine.We hauled our water from a spring,which also doubled as a cooler for our fresh vegetables and food. For bathing, we set up a solar shower with a black tank, which was gravity fed. In the winter we heated water on the stove for doing dishes and for taking baths.

Our family’s lifestyle (four kids and parents) was very simple and unhurried. We canned and dried a lot of our own food, although we did make a trip to town to do laundry and shopping every two weeks or so. Town trips were always exciting, as I remember buying a cooler-full of perishables such as cheese, ice cream, sour cream, other dairy products, and some of the more perishable vegetables. We had our own goats and chickens for fresh dairy. On town trips we’d pick up a large block of ice and, once home, store everything in an unpowered refrigerator to keep it from spoiling.

For entertainment, every person in the family was allowed to choose one hour of TV a week, which we watched on a little four-inch screen, a 12-volt DC television hooked up to our truck battery. (To this day I rarely watch television.) In place of regular TV, we were all very much into listening to the radio, including BBC broadcasts from London, on our shortwave radio, which operated on D-cell batteries.

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