frugal living 19

FRUGAL LIVING 19

UTILITIES

ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES

One of the bad things about living off grid is that you can’t have a lot of electrical appliances.  One of the good things  about living off grid is that you can’t have a lot of electrical appliances.  You don’t need as many as you think, and when every watt counts, you’ll give up both unnecessary ones ( electric carving knife, deep fat fryer ) and what you thought were necessary ones ( microwave, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, 60 inch flat screen with X-Box game console ).  Actually, thanks to both semi-truck drivers, Chinese mad dog capitalists, microchips and the propensity of young and old alike to live in their cars more than their homes, your list of sacrifices will be pretty short due to relatively new 12v electrical appliances.  Okay, granted, a 12v vacuum is like a two inch mouth with the suction power of a 90 year old prostitute, but in theory it will clean your floor on a sunny day.  And while 12v televisions are barely bigger than your cell phone screen, hey, at least you can still watch a little TV and barely use more electricity than a very efficient light bulb.  You can still get some refrigeration, even if it isn’t much more than a 1920’s ice box ( the last one isn’t 12v.  You can in theory have a regular fridge by converting a chest freezer [ they sell a converter unit to knock down the power draw ] and having about $500 in solar panels, or you can just use actual blocks of ice [ to make ice in the summer, for about 200 watts, get the book Sunshine To Dollars ], but you can forget those crappy 12v fridges sold to truckers as they take a lot of juice ).  Actually, with a grand in panels you could have both a microwave AND a modern fridge, and it would be prudent to buy all the Chinese panels you can while they are still cheap at $1.50 a watt, but you don’t NEED all that much.  It can be a future luxury ( like, in the future before the wife divorces you ).  For now, living on almost no electricity.

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When I went off grid, they had just started offering bayonet bulb LED lights, TV was just changing over to digital and they were just introducing “netbook” computers to replace “notebook”.  Depending on how you look at it, I was either very lucky in having new and improved choices, or I had to waste a lot of money upgrading.  The incandescent bulbs that RV’s came with draw 18 watts each.  Within a month or three of moving, a cloudy Fall met with 30 watts of panels, those bulbs and two high amp batteries and I was in the dark.  I’m talking, it was cloudy for two weeks or possibly three.  Let me tell you, and Birkenstock wearing, Volvo driving, armpit hair braiding tree hugging stupid son of a bitch who ever theorized that candles are good illumination never lived with them as their sole light source.  I was lucky at the time to have a reader who clued me in to the new bulbs, which more than anything else ensured I’d never need to light another candle ( they use four to five watts each, and are brighter ).  Shortly after that, I bought my new computer which used 30 watts of power compared to my old 60 watt notebook ( the old one also had no USB slots, which in itself assured its eventual demise-try using floppies anymore, and I’ve NEVER had luck with recording CD’s ).  And the prices were a lot better than ever, although this would more than likely be my last Windows machine which is quickly pricing itself out of dominance by demanding ever shrinking time frames between obligatory OS upgrades-I’m liking the look of Google Chrome a lot these days, and by passing docs around in PDF I can say goodbye to Windows word processor.
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