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What happened when one family went back to basics for a month?

William Shaw
Sunday June 8, 2008


 It starts badly. When I arrive at the chalet the first thing I notice is that some idiot has stolen one of the water butts. The last time I saw it, it was full of 200 litres of water. It couldn't have just blown away.

Ginger, a swarthy local who earns cash gathering lugworms in the estuary nearby, is just walking by on the public footpath. 'What? Somebody's stolen your water butt?'

Ginger says incredulously. 'What the hell for?'

I am equally mystified. The small shack where I will spend the next month is remote. For the effort of 'off-grid'you might as well go to a garden centre and buy one.

Ginger starts to laugh. It appears to be the funniest thing he's heard in weeks. 'Ha ha ha!' He walks on up the path still laughing.

It's not so funny for me, though. The loss of a £30 water butt would be a minor annoyance for most. To me it represents a major loss of resources - not so much the container as the water inside it. My children and I are about to go 'off-grid'. For four weeks I intend to live independently of the water and power network I take for granted in my solid, urban existence.

In a world of dwindling resources and rising utility bills, more and more of us are toying with the idea of disconnecting from the mains, of generating our own supply of electricity and gathering water from springs, wells, streams or rainfall. Nick Rosen, author of the manual How to Live Off-Grid (subtitle: Ever Wanted to Unplug from the Rat Race?), estimates that there are 25,000 households living off-grid in the UK alone. These include remote agricultural cottages, caravans, mobile homes, teepees and boats. This, he says, is just the beginning. 'Off-grid is going to be huge,' predicts Rosen. Most of us, he says, are inching there by cutting our dependence on the networks, lessening our use of water and electricity. 'That's just dabbling around the margins,' he says. 'If we are to achieve the sort of changes in water and energy use that are needed, I genuinely believe off-grid is the way to go.'

I am thrilled to be included in this new vanguard, if only temporarily. The shack I'm moving into is a simple wooden building in the south of England. I bought it several years ago. It is a quarter of a mile from the nearest road, with no electricity and no running water.

I couldn't actually live in it permanently even if I wanted to - the lease allows only 90 days' occupation a year - but it strikes me as the perfect place to find out what this off-grid life means.

I'm in my forties, with two kids and a large mortgage: the idea of disconnecting feels like an escape of a kind. In the weeks running up to my adventure, I become intoxicated by the dream of this ecologically sound sense of freedom. I read Thoreau's Walden - the first true off-grid manual - in preparation. 'Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!' urges Thoreau. Yes, yes, yes! I cry inwardly, though I can't help wondering how simple life is going to be with three kids and no washing machine.

For a start, disconnecting is not as easy as I'd imagined. We had planned to set off on Saturday, but the children are looking mutinous. What? And miss Doctor Who? So we postpone departure until the following day and remain on-grid to watch David Tennant tussling with aliens.

In the end, on a Sunday afternoon, in a bitterly cold wind, I am finally here in the shack with three children, two of my own - Ellen, 12, and Tomas, eight - and a friend of Ellen's who is tagging along for the school holidays.

I have a couple of hours to make the place habitable before darkness falls, water butt or no. The thief has left me with one butt full, at least. It's bloody freezing. Inside I light the fire. At the heart of the shack is a small but efficient multi-fuel stove. This will provide heat and a means to warm water and food. As well as the fire, I have a small propane cooker, and I go to fill a pan full of water and put it on to heat.

While I wait for the water to boil I fill the lamps with paraffin; the shack is lit by candles and oil lamps. Snow starts to pelt down outside. I wonder if I'm underprepared.

After eating, we get out a board game; the kids crowd round the table. Despite the icy cold outside, the shack is suddenly lusciously warm.

A red glow seeps from the stove. Our faces are pink in the paraffin light.

Electricitylessness is an astonishing novelty in the modern age. My daughter's friend says: 'I keep reaching round the doors expecting to find a light switch.' Instead, they carry torches or candles to light their way. 'It's fun lighting candles,' says Tomas with a dangerous glint in his eye. I remind him that this building is made of wood.

Electricity fills every corner of a house with light. In contrast, the paraffin lamps on the table light only our faces; it has the miraculous effect of drawing people together into a close, sociable circle. It's like being in a 17th-century Dutch painting. I am suddenly reminded of the joy of being a boy during the power blackouts of the Seventies.

I step outside. In an exceptionally starry frost, I look in through the windows at the children playing contentedly at the table and feel curiously proud of having provided for them, in a hunter-gatherer-type way. It's a sentiment that doesn't strike me much at home.

The next day is, again, one of devilish activity. Off-grid is not a relaxing idyll. First, with a glass-fibre kit, I attempt with limited success to fix a cracked water butt that is lying around to try to make up for the nicked one. Next, I have a large solar panel and a new 'deep-cycle' battery to connect up. This isn't one of these small elegant things you plug in your mobile phone to at Glastonbury, but a socking great panel with an inverter to convert the 12V power into a limited amount of 240V.

Going it alone without the big power companies is a major challenge. Unless you want to use a diesel-guzzling generator it's about harnessing wind, water or solar power. Photovoltaic power is a mystery to me, but I'm amazed to see, within an hour of my connecting up the panel and tilting it towards the thin sunlight, the read-out on my charge controller telling me that my battery is charging.

By the following morning the battery level is reading 100 per cent. I am hopping up and down with excitement. I may not be able to boil electric kettles or iron clothes, but I can charge my phone and laptop. The kids can use their Nintendos. I could even run a TV for several hours.

It is perhaps a male emotion, but again I feel the pride a father feels walking out of a delivery room. I have made a whole big battery full of electricity from nothing more than sunbeams. I point out the scale of my achievement to all the children. 'Look - 100 per cent full!'

They are unmoved.

From these first victories a routine emerges. Washing-up is a long operation, without a dishwasher or a hot water tap. Gathering and sawing driftwood from the estuary for the fire is a constant task. As is boiling rainwater for drinking.

'This water tastes disgusting,' says Ellen, refusing to drink it. 'No it doesn't,' I lie. 'It's rainwater. It's purer than the stuff that comes out of our taps at home.'

'It still tastes disgusting,' she says. (She's right. Like de-ionised water, it soaks up the taste of any container you put it in). Fortunately, my sister visits us, bringing two gallons of good old chlorinated tap water in a plastic container. 'That's cheating!' I say. Everyone ignores me.

Cheatingwise, off-grid is a flexible concept. Those pioneers of disconnection who live in vans are clearly connected to a grid of petrol stations. And though we may remove ourselves from the physical world of wires and pipes, this lifestyle is only possible because of the less tangible grids of internet and mobile phone.

But that evening, still touched with a neophyte's evangelical zeal, I read aloud from Nick Rosen's book: 'We are entering a post-consumer era where owning stuff and being busy and working too hard will seem unfashionable.'

'I didn't understand a word of that,' says Tomas. Ellen and her friend, on the other hand, curled up on the couch playing Nintendos together using my self-harvested electricity, say they quite like the concept of working too hard becoming unfashionable.

A pile of washing-up waits in the darkness. I reason that it's sensible to leave it for daylight.

One morning I attempt to bathe the kids, little realising what an operation this will be. Starting at 8.30am, I begin boiling kettles on the stove. An hour later there are still only a few inches of hot water in the bath and the girls are looking sceptical about the whole operation.

'We like being dirty,' they protest. After bathing in the lukewarm water they recover, shivering in front of the stove. Laundry is even worse. At the end of an hour of being hand-pummelled in a zinc tub, the clothes don't look much cleaner than they were when they went into the water. I hang them outside to dry. After an hour or two, Ellen asks: 'Are my jeans dry?' I look at them, suspended in the thin drizzle.

'Not quite yet,' I tell her.

The second week and it's finally getting warmer. I spend an hour trying to light a gas fridge I've bought from a man who tears apart caravans. It is the size of a shoebox, but makes enough ice for three gin and tonics. This is useful, because my wife has arrived. She, unlike us castaways, has been slaving in the real world and is looking for a chance to put her feet up.

The children have adapted easily. They spend long hours hunched around the table drawing cartoons, or playing on the beach, or in the mud of the estuary. They return excitedly one afternoon, having found a dead rabbit half-eviscerated by a fox, and discuss in some detail what its innards looked like.

'I like it here because we see lots of interesting animals,' says Ellen's friend. 'Even if some of them are dead.' The others agree. So what's the worst thing? 'The bugs. There are spiders everywhere. They're horrible -'

'I love bugs!' protests Tomas, offended on behalf of all creeping things.

' - and the toilet stinks.'

Nobody disagrees with that.

Yet by the end of the first week they don't even clamour for Doctor Who. We spend the evening on the beach, in front of a bonfire, toasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories.

The chalet is next to a public footpath. A few people make it down the muddy path this far. Mostly they seem to be elderly widowers; they regard me with curiosity. 'Heard someone nicked your water butt,' they chortle. Most passers-by live in the village I walk to, to visit the local shop, sneering with a sense of off-grid superiority as I pass the acres of bungalows.

The British, the first industrialised nation in the world, share a collective dream of a lost bucolic idyll. In the middle of the last century, the postwar Labour government attempted to restrain the chaos created by the urban classes rushing to buy their slice of countryside. East Londoners had created a wooden shanty town of holiday homes in places like Jaywick Sands in Essex. Something had to be done. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act began a web of legislation that now dictates how we can and can't live in the British countryside. These squat, toad-like bungalows are what the Act and its successors permitted.

A proportion of off-gridders are those who live in houses so remote that they never joined the grid. But since the Eighties there has been a growing movement of rural workers and urban escapees who either can't afford what passes for rural housing these days or who want something different.

I call up Merlin Howse, an environmental protestor who decided he wanted to go totally off-grid. Since 2000, he and a group of like-minded enthusiasts set up a community living in temporary dwellings at Steward Wood in Devon (stewardwood.org). They live in 32 acres of woodland, home-educating their children, using composting toilets, chopping wood for fuel, consuming small amounts of electricity generated by solar and a micro-hydroelectric systems. They've now been eight years off-grid. 'Yes, it can be hard,' says Howse. 'In the autumn, before we get enough rain for the hydro system to kick in, we're short on electricity. But mostly after eight years I'm excited that it's still working so well for us.' Steward Wood's off-grid experiment may soon be over, however. After seven years of legal wrangling, Dartmoor National Park Authority has refused them planning permission. Their last hopes rest on an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate.

I'm starting to feel that it's one of the failures of the legacy of the 1947 Act that the low-impact housing championed by off-gridders has become so hard to achieve. The British countryside has instead become a sterile landscape of dormitories and retirement villages. True, a few individuals have managed to charm their way past the regulations - like Ben Law, the woodsman whose off-grid cruck-framed house in Prickly Nut Wood, West Sussex, became famous when it was featured on Channel 4's Grand Designs - but they remain the exception. Bungalowville wins, and its inhabitants are often the ones who protest hardest at the lo-tech squatter camps of travellers and idealists.

As the days pass, this dangerous sense of smugness intensifies. While the average Briton uses 155l of water a day, we're using 15-20l per person, and it all comes off the roof. And I can heat my home mostly by picking up local wood.

I had grown up thinking of 'the grid' with the same warm feelings I reserve for such collective triumphs as the National Health Service and the World Health Organization's eradication of smallpox. The grids brought health, wealth and security by spreading scarce resources evenly through the nation.

Off-grid enthusiast Nick Rosen doesn't see it like that. Sure, piped water beat cholera, but it was essentially a means of allowing private companies to sell us a natural resource that's rightfully ours. The gas grid began to spread across the nation as early as 1812; as British gas runs out, we may soon regret our reliance on it, Rosen says. In terms of electricity, the National Grid automatically favours massive pollution-generating systems instead of small-scale renewable sources, and encourages us to think of electricity as a limitless resource to be squandered.

The principal downside is that living off-grid and trying to continue working as a journalist is almost impossible. On a practical level I can charge my laptop and phone using the solar panel. But I feel curiously isolated from the cut and thrust of the world. On my first day, I found, to my astonishment that my laptop connected with a wireless internet signal from a town two miles down river. Like a junkie seeking a grid-fix, I ran around the chalet trying to find a place where I could connect reliably.

After two weeks I have evolved a technique: the wireless connection I have discovered works best when I'm sitting on a small swing I had put up over the cliff edge. One day I miss my footing and tumble down the steep slope, scratching myself on brambles, dropping the computer and wrenching my knee.

Comically, too, the connection only seems to work when the tide is high. I have no idea why. Maybe the high water bounces the signal towards me. But this means there is only a short window when I can send or receive mail.

My children return to school; I am left to fend for myself alone. I may be getting very little paid work done, but the days are full of routine low-level tasks - clearing the gutters of debris so the water butts fill properly, sawing still more wood, tinkering with paraffin lamps.

It's a temptingly stress-free life. And cheap, too. Over my stay at the shack, I use approximately one propane bottle's worth of gas, cost £27; a negligible amount of butane for the fridge; two gallons of paraffin and a single £7 bag of coal which kept the stove warm on the coldest nights. My real house starts to feel like a ravenous, carbon-munching monster.

'The mass of men,' writes Thoreau, 'lead lives of quiet desperation.' Pah! Not me, I tell him. Human nature and the industrial system, Thoreau believed, lead us to acquire too much. We become slaves to our luxuries. It feels like a luxury now to have to worry about so little.

At night, I hear noises. Is that cracking of sticks outside people or animals? It is easy to become paranoid, living in this kind of vulnerable isolation. Lying awake, I plan how I could live like this forever. I'd plant vegetables and keep chickens. I could eat fish from the estuary. Against the everyone-for-themselves apocalypse predicted by global-warming doomsters like James Lovelock, I will be future-proofed. I'd be OK, oh yes. I find a darker side to myself emerging - a streak of misanthropic individualism which sneers at collective effort and the more mundane lives of others.

The truth is it's much easier to go off-grid when you know that the grid is still there to run back to. Rosen himself is only a part-timer, taking his camper van out on the road for trips.

I am but a tourist in off-grid land. That said, I feel sad at having to let this all go. The day before I leave, I am filling a kettle when I hear a voice outside calling, 'Hello?' A woman in her late sixties is standing on the footpath by the chalet. 'Do you live here?' she asks.

'Er, no,' I confess. 'Not exactly.'

'Does anyone still live here?'

I must look puzzled, because she explains this is where her grandparents used to live - in the chalet next to mine. I'm amazed to hear that she used to come here 50 years ago, visiting her grandparents who lived here right up until the very end of the Fifties.

'They lived here?' I say, impressed, peering over the fence at her grandparents' shack.

'Yes,' she says, eyes tearing to have found this childhood idyll. She recalls the days they spent there in the small wooden shack with candles and lamps, and just a hole in the ground as an outside privy. The off-grid world is just a generation away. It can't be that hard to reinvent it.

Tomorrow, though, I will go home. I will fill a bath full of hot water and lie in it, topping up the heat with my toes. I will turn on lights, watch TV and spend too long glued to my computer. I will consume. All these things will feel like extraordinary guilty luxuries. For about 24 hours. And then I will revert to my normal self, accustomed to the limitless supply the grid offers.

Celebrity Off-gridders

Daryl Hannah

She's lived 100 per cent off-grid in a solar-powered organic farm in the Rocky Mountains for 18 years. She campaigns for the use of biodiesel fuel, drives a bio-truck and a bio-tractor, gets her water from a spring and insulates her home with newspapers. She even uses a big mossy stone as a couch (which she regularly waters).

Robert Redford

His home has achieved the highest level of sustainable design according to the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and his Utah ranch is entirely solar-powered. His TV channel - Sundance TV - aired a 13-part series last year that looked at the environmental challenges we face today. He's also keen to get involved with extracurricular activities as a board member for the Natural Resources Defence Council.

Cate Blanchett

Cate and her screenwriter husband Andrew Upton are co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. Their ambitious aim is to make the theatre company the first in the world to go off-grid for an entire season. Cate's well practised; her Australian home is off-grid, running entirely on solar power and she has installed a timer on her shower so as not to waste water.

Edward Norton

Not only does Norton power his LA home with solar panels, he also set up the Solar Neighbours Programme: he rounded up celeb buddies Danny DeVito, Brad Pitt, Daryl Hannah and Alicia Silverstone and agreed with BP that when they signed up for solar systems the company would donate matching systems to a low-income family. Norton doesn't own a car, instead renting hybrids, is looking into renovating an extension of his home using recycled materials and wants to cut his water usage.

bounce – wpadać, wrzucać

bramble - jeżyna

bucolic - bukoliczny

butt – pojemnik na ciecz, kontener

carbon-munching – żujący węgiel, pożerający węgiel; munch- żuć, chrupać

chortle – chichotać, rechotać

clamour for- domagać się

collective - zbiorowy

contentedly – z zadowoleniem, z ukontentowaniem

crack – trzaskać

curled up – zwinięty, skulony

cut and thrust - dyskusje

dabble- angażowac się w niewielkim stopniu, pluskać się

diesel-guzzling – pożerający paliwo; guzzle- pożerać

doomster - czarnowidz

dormitory - sypialnia

downside – minus, zła strona

drizzle - mżawka

dwindling – zmniejszający się, spadający

eradication - wytępienie

escapee – zbieg, uciekinier

eviscerated - wypatroszony

extracurricular - ponadprogramowy

fend for oneself – dawać sobie radę

genuinely - autentycznie

glint - błysk

gutter - rynna

habitable – nadający się do zamieszkania

hand-pummell – okładać pięściami

harness – użytkować, wykorzystywać

haul something away – odholować coś

hunch – kulić się, garbić się

inch – posuwać się (w kierunku), zmierzać

incredulously – z niedowierzaniem

innards - wnętrzności

insulate - izolować

inwardly - wewnętrznie

junkie - ćpun

kick in – zacząć działać

like-minded – myślący podobnie

lugworm – piaskówka, nalepian, piasecznica (Arenicola marina)

lusciously – ckliwie; smakowicie

mossy – omszały

mundane – przyziemny, doczesny

mutinous – zbuntowany, buntowniczy

negligible – nieistotny, bez znaczenia

nicked – ukradziony, zwiniety

off-grid – ‘poza siecią’; grid- sieć (energetyczna, wodociągowa)

peer over – patrzeć ponad, wpatrywać się ponad

pelt down – padać (o śniegu, deszczu)

photovoltaic - fotogalwaniczny

postpone – odkładać na później, przekładać

power blackout – przerwa w dostawie energii elektrycznej

privy - wychodek

proportion – odsetek, część

put one’s feet up – odpoczywać, relaksować się

ravenous - wygłodniały

reliance - zaufanie

renewable sources – zasoby odnawialne

restrain – powstrzymywać, ograniczać

revert – wracać do (stanu pierwotnego)

scarce - niewystarczający

shack – chatka, lepianka

shanty town – dzielnica slumsów

slope - stok

smallpox - ospa

smugness - samozadowolenie

sneer – szyderczo spoglądać, szyderczo się uśmiechać

soak up - nasiąkać

solar panel – bateria słoneczna

spread - rozpowszechniać

squander – trwonić, marnować

squat - przysadzisty

starry - gwiaździsty

steep - stromy

streak – element, rys

superiority - wyższość

suspend – zawieszać, wstrzymywać

swarthy – śniady, smagły

tag along – przyłączać się

tangible – namacalny, rzeczywisty

temptingly - kusząco

tilt – przechylać, nachylać

tinker (with) – majstrować, dłubać (przy)

toy with – bawić się (czymś)

tumble down - upadać

tussle with – szamotać się z

underprepared – niedostatecznie przygotowany

vanguard - awangarda

vulnerable - bezbronny

wrangle – kłócić się

zeal – zapał, gorliwość

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