Off-Grid Solar Living

This is a page for personal stories about living off-grid.  We have primed the pump with a story from Mark and Ellen Coleman's solar pioneering days, but we'd love to hear many more stories.  If you would like to share your own story, email it to ellen at wholesalesolar.com and we'll put it up with as little editing as possible.  Pictures are great, so don't forget to include a few!

Building a Life on the Land

In the late ‘80’s (Ronald Reagan was president; the B-52's, Tom Petty and Madonna were riding the top 10), my husband Mark and I had our first really tough lessons in economics.  The economic stimulus plan of the time was to negotiate lower oil prices with the Middle Eastern oil producing nations.  Oil prices dropped so low that Texans couldn't afford to even pump theirs out of the ground, much less sell it. Within a period of months, the real estate and housing markets crashed.  Our lovingly remodeled, older house turned into a mortgage we couldn’t live with and couldn’t live without.  Our newly-expanded cabinet business was suddenly near bankruptcy.  Couldn’t sell ‘em...couldn’t keep ‘em......lost ‘em.

From Texas to California to Pay Off Our Debts

Seeking greener pastures, we moved west to Southern California, land of milk and honey....and brown air, two-income families, kids in day care and ear infections.  After a couple of years we were once again squeezed by the nose-dive in the economy as Californians reacted to Bush Senior's "liberation of Kuwait".  Good friends and learning experiences couldn’t satisfy the need for a calmer, saner lifestyle.  We felt trapped.

Just as other families across America, we were working harder and harder just to maintain the same lifestyle.  We knew we couldn’t keep moving every time the economy plunged, so we started looking for a way out. We set our sites on building a house we could afford, wherever that might be.  A story in Mother Earth News on visionary architect Michael Reynolds of Taos, NM, turned us on.  For 20 years, Reynolds had worked on a house design that was energy independent, did not contribute to the destruction of the planet or its resources, made good use of recycled materials, could be built by people with little building experience, and allowed for food production inside the house.  Earthships are designed to catch and use rainwater and incorporate electricity produced by solar panels and wind generators.

What we saw in Reynold’s design was a house which could shelter us comfortably on undeveloped—and therefore affordable—land.  In California we had sometimes found ourselves powerless, disconnected from home-building opportunities.  Here, in Reynold’s design, was an opportunity to regain control over our home-building experience and the costs of it.   Continue reading.....