Tour My 100% Off-the-Grid Home in the New Mexico Desert

Speaker 1: Back in April of 2020 during the covid lockdown, my family and I eventually got tired of baking and so we had to move on to a new pandemic project, which turned out to be buying a half-finished house here in the desert off the grid, learning how to install a solar system and all of our plumbing, and then fixing the first attempt at doing those things, and then the second attempt, and it's still kind of a work in progress. [00:00:30] Alright, let's go inside and get a closer look at how it all works. Speaker 1: So here we are in the heart of the house. This is what we call our levien. It's a combination living room and kitchen, and actually laundry room as well. You can see here we've got our socializing area, there's the TV and everything you need for a good work life balance. And then over here on this side of the room, here's the kitchen and laundry room. [00:01:00] So we've got our washing machine right here, the sink of course with some dirty dishes in it. We've got a 12 volt fridge over here in the corner, which you'll notice is a little bit small, but it runs off of, you could basically run this off of a car battery. Yet. Another thing that's kind of unusual about this house is that it was built with no wiring already in the walls. So I actually ran them all externally. If you look up there, you can see [00:01:30] are kind of haphazard wires that are running externally. Speaker 1: Alright, so here we are in the bathroom where we take the notion of a personal throne quite seriously. This is our step up compost toilet. We do add a little bit of this compost mix here on a daily basis. There is composting action that happens and it's waterless, which means we don't have to use up that valuable resource that we're catching from the sky [00:02:00] and storing in big tanks in the back. Then we've also got here a pretty typical shower, and we actually built this ourselves, installed the tub and built this wall here where all the water from this shower is draining out into the gray water system. The water is the garden. Living off the grid can seem intimidating, but it really comes down to just figuring out systems to provide steady streams of four different things. [00:02:30] We've got solar here for electricity. We use propane to heat, water and food. We've got wood pellets to heat the house, and of course a very large reservoir of water to survive. So here's how we get all of our water either comes from the sky is collected by those gutters and you can see where the gutters lead into two gigantic tanks, 1600 gallons each and water has been pumped into the house from there. When it doesn't rain, here's the backup. [00:03:00] Take this to a well down the road and haul it all the way back here and it's going via this hose into those tanks. Speaker 1: And so here we have a special treat where I've actually dug down to expose our gray water system. What happens is all the water that we use from either the kitchen or the bathtub or the washing machine comes out through a system of pipes in the ground and it goes to three of these very special Home Depot buckets that [00:03:30] have holes in them that then leak out into the soil. And I'm actually going to be putting a whole bunch of mulch and soil down right here to create our third garden bed. We have so much of this water. Speaker 1: There's really few things in real life that are closer to actual magic than having the solar system all set up and having electrons flowing into the house and just automatically powering everything without having to think about it much. The electrons [00:04:00] are actually coming in from the PV panels outside via these wires going to these two charge controllers. If we do get low on solar power, this is the charge controller right here for the generator that we can use to charge up those batteries, keep everything going in case it's a blizzard or the batteries are dead and it's dark outside. Speaker 2: Well, the pros of living off grid for me are being [00:04:30] more connected to nature, connected to our natural resources. Also, money we save is a really big undeniable pro. We don't have to pay any utilities and in our case, we don't have any mortgage payments either. Another pro for us would be living minimally makes us aware of what do we actually need versus what do we think we need. The immediate sacrifice [00:05:00] for me was having to give up some of my kitchen appliances, some more work, falling water, cleaning out the compost toilet, checking on the batteries, running the generator if we need to. Speaker 1: I think for me, one of the main benefits has just been kind of learning a little bit more about how some of these basic things in our lives actually work. We both grew up in the suburbs. I didn't understand [00:05:30] where my water really came from. Pretty good 800 gallons, how the electricity got to the outlets. It's been interesting to deal with sort of imposter syndrome on multiple levels where number one, not really having the formal skills or certifications to do a lot of this stuff and doing it all d I y, constantly doubting that I'm doing it right and then finding out I didn't do it right. And the other side of that is we have had [00:06:00] a problem with the pump here that has happened at 9:00 PM during December when it was cold outside and I was in the middle of a shower. So yes, I had to go outside and fix a problem with the water line when it was 10 degrees and I was wet with shampoo in my hair, but it was fixed. Speaker 3: It's Speaker 2: Really a fine balance of how do we use our resources sustainably and regeneratively [00:06:30] in a way that also allows us to live modern lives and have modern conveniences.