Off Grid Two Step

We're now off the electrical grid and have been for a couple of days. It was a bit of an anticlimax making the switchover. The lights still shone, the fridge and appliances still functioned and life went on as usual. There were no pipe bands, dancing girls or neon lights. In fact no one even noticed. But then we had an amazing electrical storm last night with gale force winds and a lightning display like no other and it seemed that we were one of the few houses in the area not using candles. Sweet.

I'm beginning to realise that being offgrid electrically is like driving a Prius. You keep looking at your consumption and trying to improve on your last 'record'. I find myself telling my kids when they're watching television that it's being powered by sunlight. Awesome. I'm also now switching off lights in empty rooms and the TV at the wall to remove it from standby. The computer's power function, which was completely ignored up until now has been configured to switch off the monitor after 10 minutes, the hard disks after 20 minutes and to euthanize it after half an hour of inactivity. This may be a sign that I’m a little obsessive but whatever it is, being off the electrical grid was step two.

Step one was to get off the water grid. We finally installed three 10,000 litre water tanks after quite a bit of deliberation. Not that there was any deliberation about getting off the water grid, but there was quite a bit of research on how to do it. I went to several companies trying to work out how best to store water and every time I was told that stored water goes "off". How on earth does H2O go off? Apparently it's not the H2O, it's all the organics that are suspended in the water that go off. Then I thought that I'd distil it all using some solar panels and even did the sums to work out how much energy is needed to boil and evaporate 500 litres of water per day. This process would simply remove all of the 'bits' in the water and I'd have perfectly clean and healthy water to drink - until I learned that distilled water is not fit for human consumption! Apparently it has no dissolved salts and if you drink it, it leeches all the salts out of your body. It's not an isotonic solution! It makes sense if you follow the logic so that option was also ruled out. Then I was told that rainwater is not that good for you anyway. How's that possible, we've been drinking it for thousands of years without any problems?!! Well it's the acid rain argument, but it had a new twist. It's full of pesticides. All those inorganic farmers spray their crops with poison and some of this remains suspended in the air and the rain washes it out. There really was no solution to this dilemma and it was becoming as confusing as cell phone contracts. There seemed to be an infinite number of reasons why every type of ‘natural’ water was not good for me and then of course why I needed to pass it through a whole lot of gadgets that cost fortunes of money to make it 'fitter' for human consumption.

I thought I would sterilise the water using a UV light. I'd already been informed about the myriad of bacteria that could possibly harm us and of course it's their cousins that make the water go off in the first place. So sterilising seemed the sensible thing to do and UV seemed the least intensive option. Finally I went in search of a UV supplier to be told by the first water treatment company I visited that a UV light does not work. It works a little, but not enough. Then I went to another water company and they said it works perfectly. Apparently they had installations where people were running river water through one of their units and it passed all the potable water tests. Obviously I would also need a filtration system which is a series of filters down to as little as one micron, which is very small. It was very confusing. All of this work to stop my water going 'off'. I even explored a reverse osmosis system. Now that's seriously high tech. It's also seriously energy intensive and expensive. Energy is an issue to me and we don't have an abundance of it being 'offgrid'. I now fully understand the meaning of ‘finite’ so that option died a rapid death. Then of course there's the Hydrogen Peroxide option, which is a popular industry solution to a lot of bacterial problems. It would also entitle us to free hair bleach with every shampoo. It doesn't repair split ends though, so we dispensed with that option. In the end, I decided to speak to someone in the know.

John, who works for me, lives in kaBokweni. He has a trickle of electricity and no water at all. He collected his water every morning from a filthy nearby stream and that's what they used to wash with. He'd take home five litres of water from time to time for drinking. However, he does have a solid house with a tin roof and we decided to install a rainwater harvesting system for him around 18 months ago. The tank was full throughout the rainy season and it almost carried him over the winter. In fact he was a few days away from making it through to the first rains the following summer. Since there was no-one else that harvests and stores rainwater in this neighbourhood, I asked him how 'off' his water was. Well it wasn't at all. He said it was crystal clear and tasted good throughout the year (despite the leaves that had fallen in his tank) and he confirmed that none of his family of five was suffering from any mysterious illness either. They all still had ten fingers and toes. His biggest problem was that all his neighbours wanted access to his water also.

Well that sealed it. I decided not to treat the water at all except for removing the visible bits from it. To do this, I put in a tiny pump that circulates the water through the smallest possible sand filter. All the harvested rainwater goes through this filter and every day for half an hour, it circulates the water in the storage tanks through the filter also. Obviously not all the water is filtered every day but it keeps it 'moving'. I don't know if this is too little or too much treatment, but in the end 'moving the water' is ultimately only a psychological cure to some psychological ailment that now exists my head insofar as storing water goes. If I've still got ten fingers and toes next year, then I'll know things are probably OK. If not, I'll have to make some changes.

Step three is getting off the food grid. Now that's a completely different ball game. All I know is that everything else will be easy in comparison so I'm not shredding my credit card just yet.