this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Living off the grid - homesteading and self-sufficiency
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For anyone interested or already living off the grid, anywhere in the world.
- Homesteading
- Solar systems
- Water management
- Animal husbandry
And how to live and thrive off the grid
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Howdy! I have 5 acres in Utah, USA, and I'm currently working to add a manual pump to my electric pump, set up a composting toilet, and build my food forest--I hope to become largely self-sufficient and off-grid within a couple of years
Hey, nice to meet ya! We also use a composting toilet, we're in a place with almost no natural water so we don't want to flush it away :P Have you got water on your land?
I do have a well, yes. It provides quite a bit of output when I turn it all the way on, but my city limits the total quantity of water that I use. I don't have any irrigation set up, so my focus right now is soil building, doing a lot of sheet mulching, and digging swales so that I can keep more rainwater on and into the land. It's really nice to have a well for the house and other normal water needs, or if I want/need to do some spot irrigation, but I'm hoping to keep irrigation pretty limited and get to the point where the land is mostly self-maintaining with it's water.
Jealous :) A well would cost more than we paid for the entire land but it'd be so worth it!
What do you do for water? Is it mostly rainwater collection? I spent a couple of years looking at land and the first requirement was always water availability
Yeah, the only part of Europe we could afford was dry af so we only have rainwater, and in the past couple of years it's hardly rained at all. We do collect from every single roof we have, we can store just over 11.000 litres (~3000 gallons) but if it doesn't rain there's nothing to store. after 5 years we're just about ready to dig a well or move but we can't afford either :) we're doing okay though, we have water in the house and all our animals have enough to drink - the one thing we're missing is irrigation for a veggie garden. so mostly we grow vegetables in winter.