Truly low tech

I figured the low-tech category would be a good place to see how many people out there are "Really Low Tech"
Now unless you're living with one of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest you probably need some form of higher technology.! Including myself I am contacting you all using a cell phone.
What I'm wondering is if there are any other folks out there that do not use electricity as part of their infrastructure, weather in their buildings or on the property. This would exclude occasional generator use and solar power for maintaining communications.
So here's the question:
Are you operating your homestead without using any electricity for doing the daily operations and necessities of your homestead?

I'm guessing the number of replies to the affirmative will be small, though rather interesting.
You can think of this as a sort of Poll to find out how many folks using this website are practicing a "medieval"  as one such person described this lifestyle.

Not me, but it's an interesting challenge.

I could go off-grid for a while if necessary but the current plan includes solar panels, a plethora of battery technologies, and a small emergency RV generator.

The hardest part would be lighting. Right now I have 7 hours of sunlight including twilight, so that means 17 hours of unproductive total darkness. Candles might bridge the gap (so I wouldn't bump into things) although it would require a fair bit of old-tech (not "no tech") to produce the necessary wax and fats.

I don't think it would be easy to be completely low tech for us, but I am setting up my Bulgarian house so we use mains electricity but could manage without it for a couple of weeks if needed. Outages can be frequent in winter, though unless there's some major emergency it would be unlikely to last longer than a day or two.

Wood stoves for cooking, heating, and water. Backup rainwater storage and a good water filter, because if the electricity goes out, the local water pumping station does, too. Portable solar panels and battery packs to charge lamps and phones, though the local mobile phone tower doesn't seem to have backup power so that network also goes down during a power outage.

Not currently, but I had minimal electricity for one year and none for another, many years ago. It was an interesting experience but I hope not to go through that again.

We have a kerosene lantern and lots of candles ready for the occasional winter blackout.

Rich Rayburn wrote:I figured the low-tech category would be a good place to see how many people out there are "Really Low Tech"

What I'm wondering is if there are any other folks out there that do not use electricity as part of their infrastructure, weather in their buildings or on the property. This would exclude occasional generator use and solar power for maintaining communications.

When I were a lass, 'off grid' meant exactly that - no electricity, no dependence on anything that needed it, everything set up to manage without it.  I was utterly gobsmacked when years and years later we had a helper on the farm who declared that we weren't off-grid, we just weren't on-grid, as we didn't have a proper alternative electricity supply installed. I just looked at him befuddled and stammered out "But that's what off-grid is!". But somewhere in the intervening three decades or so the meaning seemed to have changed.

As a kid I was raised in a very rural area of Wales and off-grid meant the areas that the grid hadn't reached yet. Anyone who lived there had likely been born and raised there and had never had electricity. Gradually the grid extended and more and more of the kids at school became 'on-grid'. Then as I became an adult there was a gradual shift of new-comers arriving, and as more time passed it became a thing to want to live unconnected to the grid. And then somehow the meaning changed again to mean unconnected but with all mod-cons, but somehow I'd missed that change...

These days I'm happily ON-grid because I like the convenience and I'm getting a bit long in the tooth. I'm even considering giving up the humanure so I don't have to handle so many heavy buckets.

But when I needed a new partner, I suspect it wasn't coincidence that I reached out to one of my old school friends who had been raised off-grid in a way that now seems to be called medieval. Yes we have electric lights now, and an emergency back-up battery, and some little battery packs with usb connectors and built in LED lights and a magnet to suspend it from the tin roof in the shed so that we can use the lovable loo in the night. But in the back of that shed is his old Bialaddin lamp, just in case, that he had as a kid in the old medievally off-grid welsh farmhouse when he were a lad...

And when we built the rocket mass heater, he was in full approval of my decision to make sure it was one we could cook on, as for many years when I first knew him his wood-fired rayburn was on pretty much 24/7 to provide hot water and the ability to cook. And neither of us really like the idea of being totally disconnected from the ability to do that.

I might go and sneak a photo of the old lamp later - watch for edits...

To me, it depends on what you (especially) and other consider what low tech is.

Do you use a cell phone?  Do you use a computer? Do you use a cell phone as a computer?

Do you have a smart car?  A smart house?

I consider myself low tech though I have been told I cannot be low tech because I have a 5g cell phone that I only use to make/receive phone calls.

Also my dear hubby require much more high tech than I do so again I cannot be low tech because of his living situation?

No one on this forum can be truly `medival` because to be on this forum there must be some forum of the internet ...

We lived 13 years with what I would call 'no tech'.
Kerosine lamps and candles, wood heat and cooking, laundry by hand.
BUT...we had an old clunker truck that parked at the bottom of the trail to the cabin, and we used a neighbor's phone occasionally and did 'catch up' trips to the laundromat in town.

no phone, no screens....and two sons, goats, chickens and rabbits.....and dogs and cats.

Now, I think of us as 'low tech'...we are on the grid but minimal use of both water and electricity  and a single cell phone is our communication and online ability...car is a 'high tech' hybrid though.
turntable and dvd player...washing machine...no dryer but the sun🌞

Maybe 'low tech' is relative?

Interesting thread. Does make one ponder 'if conveniences dropped, how would I deal with it?'

I do hate "smart" phones but I use one (minimally compared to most) and  I'm very much a "do things guy" so I'll  gladly take advantage of electricity to be more productive: saws, drills, welders, metal fab equipment, concrete mixer, on and on....  But we've also made it though an 11day power outage without stress.

I applaud folks that live totally off-grid, and those extremely minimal on-grid. What's important is- am I prepared (physically AND mentally) to get by without what we have come to think of as "necessities" for an unforeseen time, without going bonkers?

The better prepared one is to do without grid connection for a period of time, the better off one is.  If not there  yet, start making steps to get there.

Jane Mulberry wrote:Wood stoves for cooking, heating, and water. Backup rainwater storage and a good water filter, because if the electricity goes out, the local water pumping station does, too. Portable solar panels and battery packs to charge lamps and phones, though the local mobile phone tower doesn't seem to have backup power so that network also goes down during a power outage.

Sounds quite like here, but I have a gas cooker, with hopes to wean myself completely off of it.

I have seen people in Senegal and Zimbabwe who have a water well, solar panels, water tank, pump, fish pond with the waterline dripping as it goes to the house and chicken house, led lights, tv, cell phone charger , water for animals and garden etc
In Malawi only solar panels for led lights and cell charging. All other wood burning and hand labor including fetching water

It's not a homestead per se, but my family built a log cabin when I was a child in the 70s. It was off-grid by necessity, and we used hand tools for everything (though I do recall in the 80s Dad used a chainsaw to widen the doorway so we could replace the old door). We used a pit outhouse. We used a Monarch woodstove to cook (in the summer we might use a white gas Coleman stove) and another stove for heat. We had kerosene lamps for light. We tried using an oil lamp, but we weren't adept at it and it always sent out black smoke. Down the draw from the cabin a couple hundred yards there is a perennial spring, so we ran a pipe to it (the trench for the pipe was hand dug) and hooked up a hydraulic ram--that way we had running water. Well, we had running water as long as the temperatures stayed above freezing (the pipe wasn't buried deep).

We never lived there (except for the summer after college graduation when I did), but we went there frequently for a few days or up to a week. In the summer we could drive to it, but in the winter we had to ski a mile and a half in. Mom cooked amazing meals on the Monarch stove, including Christmas turkey with all the trimmings and waffles for breakfast. I learned to make sourdough bread in that oven.

Over the years we added conveniences. We swapped the pump lanterns for propane. We replaced the Coleman stove with a propane stove. We brought up a car battery to run a boom box. As the spring's flow went down, we replaced the hydraulic ram with a pump run on old bike parts, and eventually we had to install a cistern that we fill with water from town. A couple decades after we built the cabin, my parents added an indoor composting toilet and solar panels; my brothers and I advocated against both, indulging in nostalgia for our childhood.

By our standards, it feels pretty plush to go there now. We have water year round. We don't have to go outside to use the john.  We have electric lights and a fan. My parents even watched dvds up there sometimes if the batteries were charging well enough. We have a cell phone signal booster, which has its advantages in a connected world, but cell phones mean nobody is ever bored, and boredom prods us to interact more, exercise more, and read more.

Yeah, I'm old now, and I miss those days when our cabin felt like it was from the turn of the twentieth century.

I've been working on our land in southern Utah over the past nearly ten years. I only get down there a few weeks a year, so it's slow going. I have a cob privy, an open air sleeping shelter, a storage shed, a ramada, and a partially complete earth-sheltered bunkhouse. (You can see pictures on my website randyeggert.com) It's more and more comfortable to go there now--I even have solar panels and a small battery. Cell service is surprisingly good. It now feels more like glamping than roughing it. Eventually, we plan to build an honest-to-goodness house on the property. It will be off grid, of course, but, as Burra said, off grid doesn't mean what it used to. As technology advances, it's hard to see that it will feel a whole lot different from any other house.

Welp, not off-grid and not a homestead...BUT I try to be low tech where I can.
  -Speaking of, I can and dehydrate rather than freeze because of the everlasting power needed. I have some of the solar generators if needed (refrigerator and a fan for the wood stove).  
 -Intermittently do laundry by hand, but don't have a wringer (yet) so I spin the stuff either with the washer or a much faster (both time and revs) small spinner, meant mostly for spinning wool dry. I would like to get a hand washer from Lehman's (Kidron OH, Amish) but the $1400 plus freight is scary. If I take the plunge, it has a wringer as part of the package so no spinning. Watched a good video on using it (Fy Nyth).
  -Clothesline and wooden drying racks.
  -Electric lights, but have solar lanterns and a collection of around 15 oil lamps for when needed, also LOTS of candles.
  -Mother Earth Living, Backwoods Home, Self Reliance...both digital and paper.
  -Propane stove, spark provided by an 8 pack of AAs, the first round lasted 4 years before needing replacement.
  -Deep well, pump hangs at 375 ft so I keep a backup water storage good for a week.

As I am 70 now, going completely to off grid systems is losing some of its appeal, as well as the fact that my husband doesn't back me up on this. Oh, well, we do what we can!

I grew up on grid, as far as electric went, on a small New England hill farm. Well, dairy and meat cows, wood furnace til high school, big garden,

The longest I've had to be without power lately is 3 days, but some years ago our well went dry and took FOREVER to recover We hauled water

Lynn, I have the same issue with hubby wanting more modern conveniences. So at our retirement home we'll have both mains electric and off-grid options and see how we go, with my aim being to use as little mains electric and bought-in propane or butane as possible. As we age in place or our health worsens, having the electric options might feel like a huge blessing.

Yes, sticker shock at those off-grid washers, too. I haven't seen anything similar available in Europe, only the old fashioned roller wringers, which are also expensive here. I haven't installed a washer there yet, we do laundry by hand when we stay there. Fine in summer, things dry fast even if they're still dripping when I hang them on the line. But for winter I'll need some sort of spinner or wringer to get the laundry dry enough to hang in front of the woodstove.

Randy Eggert wrote:... (You can see pictures on my website randyeggert.com) ...

Randy, your place is awesome.  I love to travel Utah, someday maybe I'll get to see your place when I'm passing through.

Trace Oswald wrote:

Randy Eggert wrote:... (You can see pictures on my website randyeggert.com) ...

Randy, your place is awesome.  I love to travel Utah, someday maybe I'll get to see your place when I'm passing through.

You're welcome to visit. Just let me know when you're coming.

From attempted participation, watching, helping and more and it seems many folk should be doing more 'low tech' for their originating homestead projects. One of the biggies I've seen is electricity and trying to do off grid electrical via solar. "My car has a battery. I know batteries because every vehicle I've had has one. Easy peasy." And not just the solar DC but the interior AC wiring. Oh my gosh. Connections, gauge, materials, workmanship and safe practices - it's scary stuff. And not a place to learn from mistakes.

But frankly I believe the low tech thing is really cool not to include a leaky roof or windows, an over fired wood burner or a lamp knocked over. Mice and bugs. Sponge baths or a 37f creek. Or the fact there is nothing on TV any given night. Neighbors. But the other downside is that it is really hard work that never ends and not necessarily the most comfortable life. If comfort is any goal. Then there is longevity. It may be romantic at first but is this what your really want to do day after day, year after year decade after....  And then you start getting older. Darn, it happens. What happens when you can't do what you did 10 years ago?

I'll probably get ripped for the above but it hurts to see folk pile resources into a project and come out with little to nothing just to have to start all over in the city. And all that work.... I sometimes see ads for a live in homesteading person, couple or family. This would be a way to see if you have the stuff.

Jr Hill wrote:
. But the other downside is that it is really hard work that never ends and not necessarily the most comfortable life. If comfort is any goal. Then there is longevity. It may be romantic at first but is this what your really want to do day after day, year after year decade after....  And then you start getting older. Darn, it happens. What happens when you can't do what you did 10 years ago?.

Jr,
the purpose of the post was just to see how many people were out there not using electricity as their main infrastructure.
As far as the hard work and comfort aspects, I have been living this type of lifestyle for over 43 years, and living in a log cabin with wood heat is one of the most comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing places you can be (in my humble opinion).
The hard work  as you put it is what people are designed for, it's in our genetic makeup.
At 67 I still split over 10 cords of wood a year with an ax, and enjoy every minute of it. Think of it as the Jack LaLanne lifestyle, he worked out everyday of his life until he died in his 90s.
I'm not saying this life is for everybody, although up until about 100 years ago this life was for everybody as there was no alternative!  
And I really can't believe that everybody up until 100 years ago was miserable uncomfortable cold and hungry.
Just something to think about, Rick

I live in a large city in a single family homestead.  We manage to do a few things low tech.  A wood stove heats our house with the help of the furnace blower to circulate the air. We enjoy cooking on the stove, also.   We gather the wood, and split it by hand and stack it in the back yard.  We sometimes use a chainsaw, depending on where we are gathering the wood.  If it is on the street, we use the old fashioned two-person saws or smaller ones.  We do this to cut down on noise.  Much of our wood has come from rehabs in the neighborhood.  Builders are happy for us to haul lumber away so they don't have to pay to landfill it.  The beautiful old growth or reusable lumber is given away to people directly.  We only cut up and burn scrappy wood after we have removed the nails by hand.  But that is still a lot.
On another subject, I do use a washing machine.  However, I use it as a semi-automatic machine.  I learned this when I lived in Asia in the 70's. and I washed clothes by hand. When I got a semi-automatic washing machine, I thought it  was an absolute luxury.  You do all the wash loads first using the same water, one after another.  Either take the wet clothes out of the machine and put them into buckets, or let the machine expel the wash water into buckets.  You then reuse the water for the next wash load.  You do the same procedure for the rinse cycle and then the spin cycle.  I usually get three loads from one amount of water;  first, light colors, second, dark colors, third, dish towels.  There are pros and cons  :   You use a lot less water, but you are stuck near the washing machine to prevent it from going  into a full cycle. The buckets of water or wet clothes can also be heavy to lift.  It forces me to exercise or do a project near by, while baby-sitting the machine during this time.  Not really low-tech, but maybe lower-tech?
I hang my laundry outside on the clothes line or on the trees,  or inside near the stove when the weather is bad.  That is just me, as others in the homestead prefer to do their own laundry in the conventional manner.

Some very interesting contributions! I'm currently about as on-grid as you can get. But as we are developing our place on a little island, we are building it with loads of off-grid back ups. We will connect to electricity (it's already on the property) but our water is a well and will be supplemented with rain water catchment. Still figuring out an off grid solution for pumping the water, will likely use gravity and/or a water hammer pump. Where we're building gets frequent black outs, often during the coldest, darkest parts of the year, so having wood heat is essential. And solar back ups won't be useful when needed most. One of the benefits of working from scratch is, I can say, I want a cement foundation so I can put in a masonry heater with a water jacket. That will save us loads of time and energy spent procuring and chopping wood. Our area is mild enough (and house small enough) that most of the winter we could just have one fire a day. And a coppiced woodlot means less chopping of wood, more bundles of small diameter stuff. I think time spent now building these systems will pay off massively when we don't have to haul water or very much firewood at all.

My personal belief is that in the not too distant future, many of us will be forced to be entirely off grid (in the truer sense you describe). Those of us who have experience and systems in place will be able to help others through this transition. I hope to be able to keep my community going strong!

Rich Rayburn wrote:So here's the question:
Are you operating your homestead without using any electricity for doing the daily operations and necessities of your homestead?  

We are, sort of. However, so far we only live there in the summer/autumn, since there is as of yet no building on our land, and the climate there doesn't make winter tent dwelling hugely attractive. We do hope to live there year round eventually though, and the plan (right now at least) is to keep doing everything by hand. We have a tiny solar panel to charge phones, LED lamps and such, but that's it for higher tech. Tree felling is done by axe and hand saw. Cooking and heating water for laundry etc is done with fire. The water is from the stream. Transport is by foot or by canoe (there's no road to the land).

Time will tell if we stay this low tech permanently, but we hope to. I'd agree with Douglas that the hardest thing would be lighting in the winter. Don't have a complete low tech solution to that yet, but we plant northern bayberry bushes and dream of bayberry candles...

I made the "pulser pump" which is a low tech way to pump water, on a little steam in Ireland.  It is a trompe and airlift pump combined.  My trompes and airlift pumps were much smaller scale than what was normal.  Commercial airlift pumps operate with high pressure air and the relative density of "water filled with bubbles" causes the pumping. My airlift pumps operate on plug flow (which has different physics).  It was used over about 15 years on the farm in Ireland to pump water for sheep and cattle. Things have changed and the little stream is much more often dry now so it doesn't work too often.     Now in the city of Victoria, I  use mini airlift pumps in my greenhouses and garden planters to circulate water to the plants.  It is automatic and runs from a little aquarium air pump, and the slightly compressed air is distributed through 3/8 inch aquarium tubing to currently 10 mini airlift pumps in my 2 greenhouses and in various places in my back garden. I have been doing this for over a decade.  If I had a stream or little river,  I would be compressing the air with a mini trompe.  Last year I did "low tech solar tracking" with a parabolic dish solar cooker.  It wasn't exactly parabolic because I didn't think my solar tracking would be accurate enough. (turns out it was a lot more accurate than I expected).    Anyway,  I had it working like a "2 bucket dripper tracker" earlier in the year before I converted it to waterwheel winch drive,  which was powered by an airlift pump!  This worked very well, and it had more torque than I expected too.   The next stage  (this year)  will be to make a proper parabolic dish, and get it on my mount,  for more accurate direction of the heat to one spot (this will make it cook much faster) and to start cooking amounts maybe 3 or 4 times the size.  I steam soil to put in the greenhouse without bringing in bugs and weed seeds. And I also steam the weeds and roots I pull up.  Cooked weeds rot way faster than weeds that aren't cooked,  plus they don't need to be composted, they can be used directly as mulch.   (I cook them in water, because it distributes the heat better and more evenly.)  I am hoping to use the waterwheel winch also to winch up and down night curtains in the greenhouse,  and maybe over plant rows too, but I have been lazy and haven't got round to it yet.  Heres a video about the solar cooker. Note that I am changing the dish shape quite a lot in the near future.  I will also get rid of the central axel in the next version and have the pot hanger separate from the dish entirely.  

I have tested it occasionally and it was not a problem.
But, since I work online as well, I was using small portable off-grid solar setup to power my laptop and to stay online. I also have solar lamps, and a small solar water pump for rainwater tanks. Other than that, as long as no other people are present, I am perfectly fine without electricity. I use solar cooker, I have a very efficient wood stove and plenty of hand tools.
Also, normally I use my solar kit to charge some Bosch power tools and I use refrigerator, but I can live without it.
Unfortunately it is not the case for the family and friends, so power is on when anyone else is on site.

I've lived without electricity or running water for my full time living for almost 5 years and did on and off mostly out of tents and families backyards etc for 8 or 9. My partner and our son have lived almost since he was born 4 years ago without electricity besides a couple batteries we sometimes hook up to a light or an occasional appliance no running water, get it all in jugs at a mountain spring we often walk or push carts to or get it on the way home from town. use a lot of rain water when it isn't freezing solid. we live near family now so do use their facilities at times, laundry-especially in winter, computer(as we keep no internet or computers at our place). we only cook and heat with wood all year. outside on open fire or rocket stoves.
we use no petroleum on our 'stead, from cutting wood to watering our herd or chickens.
we burn mostly candles and fat lanterns I made from an ox we killed and butchered with zero modern technology. we keep our meat hung outside dry and in the open air till it is eaten.
I'd almost call us stone age day to day. I only use hand tools for working lumber to burying timbers. we are more focused on an ecologically honest lifestyle with little impact. we are not perfect of course as we are all products of our hyper extractive industrial society.
our son knows for most days wood heat and sunlight, generally to bed after dark and up when it feels like time to get up.

if we want to get back to the land we can't keep a bunch of extractive technologies between us and skill and craft and experience. we often take our herd of subsistence sheep(sometimes other critters) into the back country and stay primitive and semi nomadic.
we have to start to wean off of industrialized everything.
recommend reading Mark Boyle's book The Way Home-Tales from a Life without technology

Hi Douglas,

Referring back to a post you made much earlier, I keep a bank of  4 deep cell batteries in my barn on a trickle charger.  Although I have solar available for my house,  those 4 batteries provide back up lighting for my barn. And, at least 2x, I have dropped an extension cord to them to provide emergency lighting to my house (in case this is confusing, I am hooked up to the grid; I have 12v solar, but I found the independent battery bank in the barn to be convenient …it can be cloudy for several weeks and generators don’t always start when I want them to).

Lloyd Locust wrote:
we have to start to wean off of industrialized everything.
recommend reading Mark Boyle's book The Way Home-Tales from a Life without technology

.
I will have to agree with Lloyd,  what is necessary for survival of us and the planet is to "start to wean off industrialized everything"   or at best minimize our technological footprint.
Doing as much as possible by hand would make people stronger physically and sharper mentally, and also reduce resource extraction, production waste, transportation waste and the eventual disposal of almost everything manufactured currently, as limited lifespans are engineered into almost every product made today.
Consuming and using less is doable currently, it is a matter of a shift in cultural ideology, though unfortunately not likely to happen.
And also thanks for the book reference, it definitely sounds interesting and appropriate for this posting!

Exactly Rich. It really is quite simple. I dream my son finds the right people, we are trying to find, to tribe or commune up with and finally stop using the machine.
I spend most of my meager dollars I make doing manual labor or selling lambs on non industrial infrastructure. A better trailer, always used, to pull my son with my bike, handtool maintenance tools, quality food, local lumber or scaveneged lumber etc.
its about adapatability. becoming uncomfortable and then your baseline changes because you are adapting to climactic change, physiologically becoming tougher without tech. to support the comfort habit. my partner lived with more comfort than me when we met but has adapted herself to this lower tech lifestyle. she also is doing it for our child so he can hopefully have a cleaner future and a healthier upbringing.
it doesnt mean it isn't hard at times because it is. and when we visit family and use the grid for a couple hours or stay the night (sometimes a hot shower or this computer or to cook a  meal with everyone via modern conveniences) it is like a little vacation. though we go weeks and have gone quite longer without. but you have to watch yourself because tech. is very sneaky and i feel it can set you back from physical and mental growth away from being reliant. this morning my son and I bicycled the few miles to my mothers to do some work for her. we built no fire this morning in the 20's, just got up put on chilly clothes and did it. if my son lived in constant comfort and knew the ease of a vehicle(which he does) at all times he wouldn't have enjoyed it. but he knows this is reality for us and dad doesn't like life to be contingent on our living destroying other life.
big subject and i never can take the time needed to really extrapolate on these things(computers).