Learn About Getting Off Grid

GettingOffGrid.org is my personal site where I explore getting off grid for myself, and share what I learn with those of you who interact with my content.

For a couple of decades, I’ve been slightly off-grid, but not nearly enough. The extent of my journey has been limited to being on a well and using a septic tank for waste disposal. That may seem too rudimentary for most readers, and it is to me, too. I’d like to be more off-grid for power, and certainly for technology like phone and internet to the extent possible.

As a real estate agent, I find it nearly impossible to be completely off-grid. And some of you in other professions or trades may find yourself in this same dilemma. I need to support my family, which means communicating with a broad audience of people who may have expressed interest in a real estate listing at some point in the past. So we may be connected through social media due to that previous contact, no matter how brief.

But in a truly off-grid living experience, there would be no possibility to connect with a wide “sphere of influence” online. Because having an online presence, and publishing to an internet platform (like this blog, or to social media like Facebook or LinkedIn) by definition means being “on-grid” to that extent.

There are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs

A wise man once said (Thomas Sowell to be specific) that “there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs.” This quote has stuck with me, and informed my thinking in many areas. It’s true of political solutions, professional solutions, phone and data solutions, and real estate solutions. This latter category would also include improvement solutions.

Finding solutions for getting off-grid, while partly political to some people, perhaps, I believe are most broadly real estate and home improvement questions. I will be researching and writing many articles on the real estate aspect of getting off-grid, and probably many more on the home improvement implications.

Some of the greatest challenges to getting off-grid come in the phone and data department, so I know I have much to research and write about this aspect of getting off-grid (including answering as accurately as I can the question of what extent it is even possible to get off-grid in a technologically connected world).

Can one have a smart phone yet truly be off-grid? Perhaps not, in the truest sense of this phrase. But when we consider Sowell’s statement that there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs, then we can proceed to at least clearly explore what the available trade-offs are. Are the available benefits worth the required sacrifices?

That presents a host of individual questions that we must all answer only for ourselves. Some of us may be comfortable with one trade-off and not another. One thing I believe we should not do is demean those who choose different sets of solutions and trade-offs than we do. This site is not about telling you how you need to get off-grid. It’s about exploring and providing factual information to help all of us make educated choices about the solutions and trade-offs necessary to live in the world we currently live in–while at least moving in the direction of getting off grid.