Unplugged and off the grid
The lure of a simpler life is drawing hardy souls out of the city and into the wild.
Peter Endisch has been planning his “graceful exit from the Lower Mainland” for nearly two years.
It is not Vancouver’s high housing prices or cost of living driving him out. He owned a suburban home and earned enough to pay the mortgage and support a family.
It is the pull of a simpler, more sustainable life that moves in tune with the rhythms of the Earth.
No longer satisfied to work long hours at a job he found increasingly unfulfilling simply to pay living expenses, Endisch longed for work that would allow him to help people and make the world a better place.
Through his involvement in a community effort to prevent the construction of a cellphone tower next to a school, Endisch met a mother and daughter who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a collection of symptoms that can include everything from burning and tingling sensations to fatigue, nausea and heart palpitations. Those afflicted attribute the symptoms to exposure to the electromagnetic fields created by things such as mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks.
The women and their family had purchased a 32-hectare property near Sorrento, in the Interior, and planned to turn it into an off-the-grid organic farm. The idea held immense appeal for Endisch.
“If I want to have a better ... future for myself, my son, something more fulfilling than just a day-to-day, 9-to-5 job, this might be a way to do it.”
Leap of faith
After a painful divorce and a great deal of soul-searching, Endisch decided to join his friends and buy into the farm. He sold his house and invested half the money in heavy equipment such as dump trucks, excavators, Bobcats and tractors to prepare the land. He quit his job as a computer programmer and became a contractor, which gave him a 40-per-cent boost in income. He plans to move to the farm in a few months and purchased an RV to live in until he is able to build his own house out of either rammed earth, straw bales or cob.
Endisch and his friends plan to build in-ground greenhouses heated using geothermal energy. Their vision includes fruit trees and vegetable gardens, and the goal is to become self-sufficient in both food and income. Because the trees and greenhouses will take time to become productive, they may also raise chickens and rent their equipment out to bring in money in the short term.
Power will come from solar panels, backed by a diesel generator that Endisch hopes to modify to run on recycled vegetable oil, as his car does.
Gas generated from burning wood will heat water in radiators to warm the buildings.
Gas generated from burning wood will heat water in radiators to warm the buildings.
“We have our heads on our shoulders and we know we can think outside of the box; that’s very important,” Endisch said, adding that the group is studying other off-grid permaculture farms in similar climates.
“It’s not one of those things where you have a problem, you go to Home Depot, they give you the piece, you come back and you plug it in and it all works. It’s one of those things where you disassemble one thing and take some pieces and put it into something else ... and you somehow make it work.”
Using what’s available
Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart saw many such improvised systems in the two years they spent travelling across the country, documenting the lives of people in each province and territory who live off-grid, a term that refers to houses not connected to the main electrical grid or natural gas pipes.
The energy sources used by off-gridders depend heavily on what is locally available and often there is more than one system in use. Solar power is a good option on the Prairies, for example, while wind turbines work well in Atlantic Canada.
Vannini, who is the Canada Research Chair in innovative learning and public ethnography at Victoria’s Royal Roads University, and Taggart, a photojournalist and doctoral student at the University of B.C., wrote a book and created a documentary based on their research.
They spent much of their time in B.C. on Lasqueti Island, accessible by passenger-only ferry from the Vancouver Island town of Parksville. There have never been paved roads or power lines on Lasqueti, so the island is off-grid by default.
The island’s small population and the region’s temperate climate make it possible for residents to be highly selfsufficient, harvesting firewood and groundwater at a sustainable rate, disposing of human waste unobtrusively and growing a portion of their own food. Houses are positioned to make optimal use of solar power and natural light throughout the day, Vannini and Taggart observed.
The space and privacy even allow one couple, who have a small cabin on a 14-hectare property, to take outdoor showers year round. Their shower is fed by rainwater flowing downhill from a nearby pond, which runs through a section of coiled black pipe sitting on top of a piece of plywood facing the afternoon sun. Between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., the sun beats down on the pipe, heating the water inside. This is when the couple takes their daily shower, with their toiletries hanging from the branches of a nearby apple tree. Another pond on the property, which the couple constructed uphill from the house, collects rainwater which is funnelled through a plastic hose toward a small water wheel, which spins continuously and generates electricity 24/7. This system, known as micro-hydro, is common on the West Coast, but less so in other parts of the country where water freezes for part of the year, Vannini and Taggart found.
The lifestyle, however, is not for everyone. Those who do it must, by necessity, plan their movements carefully. Cooking dinner in solar ovens, as one Lasqueti resident was doing when Vannini and Taggart paid their visit, can take all day if it’s cloudy, and the ovens — waterfilled glass and metal containers — must be constantly moved to follow the sun. Others the duo met in their travels could only run the dishwasher when the sun is shining, or vacuum when it was windy. It is not a lifestyle that works well for people who have Monday to Friday, nine-to-five jobs that require them to be away from home, Vannini said, because off-grid homes require much more time and attention.
Not a lot of ‘freaks and hermits’
One thing that surprised Vannini and Taggart about the people they met over their two years of research was how normal their lives were.
“You walk into some of these houses, you wouldn’t even know they’re off the grid. They’re absolutely gorgeous villas somewhere in a beautiful landscape ... and you look up and there are solar panels on the roof,” Vannini said. “I think that’s one of the beauties of this project. It wasn’t just a lot of freaks and hermits.”
They also learned that being disconnected from the grid did not necessarily mean disconnected from society. Some of the people they visited had cellular phones and even Internet.
“If you believe that you absolutely must have enough wattage to power Internet because you work as a consultant and you need to check your email every hour, then you put in an extra couple of solar panels,” Vannini said. “It’s really all choices that you make.”
Nor were all the people they met environmental activists who made conscious decisions to go off-grid.
“We had always thought that going off the grid was an ideological, countercultural lifestyle move. One day you would ... say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ But the process was actually a lot more subtle than that. You have people who found themselves wanting to get away from the city, to slow down, and they bought a piece of property and they found out that connecting to the nearest pole, because of the distance involved, would have them (spend) a quarter of a million dollars,” Vannini said. “It’s a minority of people who wake up one morning and say, ‘That’s it, I’m going off the grid.’ ”
Both Taggart and Vannini said the experience made them think differently about how they use resources and relate to their homes. While Vannini said he believes he could live off-grid one day, Taggart, who describes himself as outdoorsy, was less certain.
“What this project has done for me is really strip any sort of sense of romanticism from that existence on a permanent basis and given me a real appreciation for where I live here, not just because electricity is provided for me, but so many of the people that we met in these remote places were reliant on cars,” said Taggart, who lives in downtown Vancouver. “I can walk everywhere that I need to go.”
Endisch, who is about to make the leap off-grid, said the change in lifestyle presents an enormous number of challenges, only some of which he has been able to address beforehand.
“If you wait until everything is worked out, you will never take that step,” he said. “So there is a bit of a leap of faith and that’s the part that’s truly, truly scary.”
VANNINI AND TAGGART’S DOCUMENTARY, LIFE OFF GRID, WILL BE RELEASED LATER THIS YEAR.
AN EXHIBITION OF TAGGART’S PHOTOS WILL BE ON DISPLAY IN THE LOBBY GALLERY OF UBC’S LIU INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL ISSUES, AT 6476 NORTHWEST MARINE DR., IN APRIL.