Geoffrey Chew

Eric Chrisp wrote:If you had the choice to put your resources into either going off-grid solar with battery back-up, or on-grid solar for less than half the money (just 20% of the current electric bill), what would you choose?

We didn't have the resources required to make that choice when we bought our place, but I'd have preferred off.  Jan is on point though.  

Eric Chrisp wrote:Does it really matter if you are off grid and you live close to a major city?

The pros and cons don't change a whole lot based on your proximity to a major city, imo.  If you're close to large groups of people and the grid goes down temporarily, you make a lot of new friends, real fast, if you still have power.  If you're close and the grid goes down more or less permanently, you make a lot of enemies if you still have power.

Eric Chrisp wrote:What, given the interesting times we live in, are the relative pros and cons of off-grid versus on-grid living?

If you start a project on the grid, you've got the flexibility to use more than you can generate, to run cheap electric tools and accomplish a lot of one-time tasks quickly.  Grid-tied tools are more plentiful, therefore easier to come by used and inexpensively.

If you start a project off grid, you're getting used to living within your means from day one, which is good.  But you're probably having to use more battery powered tools, which cost more, and you're still tied to the grid because the grid builds your replacement batteries, expansion panels, controllers, etc.

If you're in an area where the grid has to buy back your excess generating capacity for an attractive price, and you have the resources to install something that meets their standards, then maybe you want grid-tied solar to help offset the installation cost.  Don't plan on that arrangement being permanent.  A captive regulator can flip those buyback rules around and cut off that kind of cost offset pretty quickly.

So, like most things, it depends.  Going off grid is frequently framed either as referendum on the methods the grid uses to generate and distribute power, or a strategic choice about how long you expect the grid to continue to function in your area.  Things fall apart.  Eventually the grid connected to whatever you're thinking of connecting it to will permanently cease to function, but without a crystal ball, none of us can say when.  If you're building with the intention of passing something on, being grid tied may mean passing on a serious systemic weakness.  If the inheritors are aware of the weakness and you pass on the resources or skills to work around it, maybe that's good enough.

Personally I feel like we should be encouraging decentralized generation and consumption to the furthest extent possible for each use case, but the ethical dimension of any decision is always personal, so that's for you to mull over.  Knowing where the juice in your grid is coming from may be the thing that sways you away from being tied to it, even with solar.  As long as you can flip a switch in an emergency and disconnect yourself from the grid, grid-tied solar still makes strategic sense to me.  If that switch isn't automated, and your local substation eats itself, how much damage can that do to your equipment?  If your system can be killed by the grid, that's certainly a point in favor of being off-grid from day one.

Practically speaking though, as we age, our society leans heavily on electronics to keep us alive.  Who knows what kind of technology you'll feel justified in using, as time goes on?  Would you change your resource investment based on that kind of speculation?  If you answer "yes", then do you risk falling back on a grid that may or not be there to catch you, or do you build a more robust off grid system that may cost more to maintain?  Up to you, based on your understanding of the nature of the grid where you live, and your tolerance for difficult-to-quantify risks. All grids are not created equal.

leila hamaya wrote:well i agree with your sentiment, and agree with what you said here, except i would add (fake) before the word power...in all that you wrote.
thats not power, it's more like abuse

While we may not see eye to eye on where the borders of reality are, I absolutely agree with you that impermaculture is a culture of abuse.

If my kids were buying land, I'd tell them not to buy any more than they could afford to have surveyed and boundary-marked.  Sort of arbitrary, and maybe it just reflects my frustration with the point we're currently stuck at.

We've got about 40 acres in the US, with about 6.5 of it zoned for agriculture, and the rest for "forest resource", but now we're stuck saving up for a survey so we can find out *exactly* where it's (legally) safe to put things like firebreaks, walls, and berms.  Lots of projects on hold until we've got a significant chunk of cash to hand over.

Picking an ideal amount is really a bunch of questions though.

How much can I legitimately make use of?

How much can I afford to buy?

How much can I afford to pay taxes on?

How much do I need for purposes X, Y, and Z?

And I'm sure there are other questions other folks would immediately add to that little list, or remove.  X, Y, and Z are always going to be the hard math, in my book.  Our long term goal is to establish a 20-year coppice management cycle and put most of the 40 acres into a trust that will return it to the tribe it was taken from, over the next few generations.  We manage to avoid property taxes with veteran status, so that's nice.  With all that in mind, I'd probably have bought more if we could have found more that met our criteria, but this place took a year to locate and we were pretty burned out on the property search at the end.

paul wheaton wrote:Maybe, in time, this community will safely nurture Gert so much that Gert will decide that she is a writer and write that book.

Or, nurture Ferd so much that he will become a lawyer who defends Gert from having her dream crushed under a bypass?

One of the subconscious attractions of impermaculture is that when Bob the Builder decides to nuke and pave, it's an inconvenience rather than a death sentence.  You can "just" move to another place with all your precious stuff, eat the same junk out of the same boxes, and tell yourself things happen for a reason.  Whatever else Gert is, she's also exceptionally vulnerable to forces that only respect power, and gauge that power by the number of zeroes in bank accounts.  

I suspect that the most effective way to nurture the largest number of Gerts over the longest time span is to convince as many lawyers as possible that they personally have something to lose by unhoming them.  If you can convince them that that "loss" doesn't have to mean "cash", so much the better.  Can you train them to reflexively defend Gert?  How?  What would it cost Gert to take advantage of that reflex once it was in place?
 
How much propaganda value would you find in a high profile example of Gert winning a lawsuit after being defended pro bono by lawyers simply because she was a Gert?   Americans fetishize raw political power.  Repeatedly bending governments to your whim in defense of "individual" rights, and being seen to do it, could sell the value of permaculture to people who don't even know there's a dream to have yet.  If you can pull it off, how do you build a simple system that encourages the event to repeat?.

How do you organize a system that turns the abundance of a Gert, who chooses to work 11 hours when they only need to work 10, into legal protection (legal celebrity, even) provided by a Ferd?  Maybe you use automation.  Maybe it's just a data problem.  I have neither an answer or the inclination and aptitude to develop one.  I'm too busy trying to become an 11-hour Gert.

***

When certain types of people find out that I'm a veteran, I hear "thank you for your service".  It's reflex.  I say "thank you for your support".  Also reflex.  They have no idea what my service entailed, or if I was any good at it, but they've been encouraged to believe that it benefited them.  I'd rather have lawyers say it when they find out I'm a permie.  

I know you're not exactly short of things to think about, but maybe this idea can just here on the side of the road and look cute until someone lets it follow them home.

Thank you to everyone who replied.  You've given me food for thought and some possible solutions.

My apologies for wandering off in the middle of the conversation.  I got distracted by a business project that has since failed spectacularly.  

So...silver lining, more time to read threads on Permies.  

Eric Hammond wrote:How deep do you think it is?

That's a good question, and I don't have an answer.  I'll have to go drop a line in it and find out, once Fenrir gives us the sun back.

The house was built in 1940, so it could be at least that old.  Our water table is measured in inches at some spots on the property, so it's quite possible that there's no physical connection between the two supplies.  Unfortunately our drilled well isn't in the online state database, so I don't know how deep that is either.  Mysteries abound.

Thanks for posting this.

It's just what I've been looking for.

Interesting idea.  Goldfish might not make it here.  Our average lows are well below the range that the internet seems to think is suitable for them, even during mosquito season.

I'll have to look into locally adapted species and see if any of them could make a go of it living in a well.

We'll see how it goes.  Trying to mitigate climate change on that kind of hyper-local level is a bit like tilting at windmills, but I hate to do nothing and just watch them die out.  It's not as if we just need to get them over the hump and wait for it to cool back down.  They'll either make it or they won't.  DNR thinks of the species as a resource with a dollar value attached, so slowing their decline this particular way makes more sense to them than it does to me.  Still.  We do what we can.