[Cob] why do people want to be off grid?

[Amanda Peck]

Six people is quite different from 1-3.  Especially if it means that some of 
those can WORK ON THE HOUSE.  One woman is cobbing her living room and 
bedrooms, putting the kitchen, maybe bathroom in as a vertical log cabin.

Where is the nearest mains/grid electricity to you?  At maybe 350 feet down 
the road from my trailer, this was what I did:

1) HAD to get an approved septic system--$100 to the health department, $500 
or so to the backhoe guy and his wife, who was the assistant on the job, and 
the local concrete company who also makes septic tanks.

2) HAD to have a trailer pole set up, breaker box installed, backing plate 
ready to install meter, have it inspected. I think all that that was around 
$750. Plus $25 for the inspection.

3) HAD to clear a couple of acres down the hill so that the wires were well 
away from the trees.  (long process--eventually I had to hire a crew) seems 
like that was $600 or so.  See below, I might have been able to not do SOME 
of that if I'd buried wires, but I do believe it would have been a major 
deal to get that wire buried under the paved road, and I'd still have paid 
for at least one pole

4)THEN the utility company put in two poles (and a transformer)--and that 
was $750 a pole for $1500. I spent another $35-$50 on plugs and immensely 
thick wire.

Remember that this was a pretty short run.  And this is up-front cost.

My electric company doubles (or more) the rates for people who try short-cut 
the process and get what's called a "temporary pole," i.e., no septic tank, 
work off of extension cords.

Other areas may do things quite differently, but they'll charge you one way 
or another.

My neighbors across the road--they are farther off the road, and there were 
some easement problems to start with.  Their original estimate from the 
electric company alone was up around $10,000--more than the shell house 
they'd had put up.  I think it ended up costing them quite a bit less, 
unless you count the extra land they bought.  They buried wire instead of 
clearing land they wanted to leave in woods.  They were still not half a 
mile off the road on a little road.  Since their place is down a hundred or 
so feet on a NORTH-facing slope, PV was not an option.  and they have less 
in the way of breeze than I do.  They've got the river, but it floods a lot 
in the winter.

Here, don't want a septic tank--do want composting toilets, extensive 
greywater system?  You've got two choices:  put the tank and drain field in 
and don't use it, or don't have mains electricity.

For $10,000 you can have a pretty good-sized PV (photo-voltaics) system.  If 
you've got plenty of wind (I have wind chimes that remain silent 6 months of 
the year, only sound off occasionally the rest of the time) WIND power might 
well be cheaper--and the tower will probably cost more than the unit on top. 
  The cheapest is WATER power, which is inexpensive enough sometimes to put 
in even if you only use it four or five months out of the year.  I don't 
think I have enough flow or head to put in a home-made ram pump that a 
friend of mine designed, to get water up here.

Generators are mostly considered a necessary evil--what you use to charge 
your battery bank in January when we often (well, one year in six or so) 
don't see the sun for two and a half weeks, or some other crisis--there can 
always be some other crisis.  They all use some kind of (usually fossil) 
fuel, most are noisy and annoying and that's not why we moved to the 
country.  And to get enough to really use for one's electrical system can be 
really quite expensive.

......................
Jill asks,

Okay, so what are the options for energy sources? Living without electricity 
is not an option for me. What about solar? Generators? Apparently getting 
on-the-grid requires a lot of changes to my building process...so what now?

I was wondering... campsites have electricity. Could I not get electricity 
to my land / building site for the purpose of hooking up an RV (but really 
running it into a cob house)?

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