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Setting up my homestead
Lucky7
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ok! So within the next 5 years, I will be living on a good 30-40 acres in rural Oregon State. Ive been looking through different properties for a bit now and my biggest concern with any of the ones I have looked at is electricity. The closest town to any of the areas I will be living in is roughly 20 miles. Does anyone know if it is possible and if so, how would one go about getting connected to a power grid? Ive looked at alternate power sources such as generators (gas prices, ouch) and solar panels(roughly 3-6 mil $ to support the power usage of a typical american home). Also, does anyone know any good sources online to kind of estimate how much monies it would cost to build a house? Thanks
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Lucky7 on
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Also... are you buying a built house on a property or building? Because that solar panel estimate is completely insane for a new place, and still completely insane for any established place short of the playboy mansion. Unless the 'typical american house' is built of tissue paper and has a plasma screen on every interior surface, there's no way you should need to spend like that.
You could also look into a small CHP (combined heating and power system) that could run off of either gas, or perhaps look into bio-fuel such as wood pellets. You may even be able to source such material on your estate. Again these have the advantage of using excess heat production (which in typical generators or power plants is a waste product) to heat your home.
You should also look into super-insulating your home. It can be incredibly efficient, and is as good at keeping the heat out as it is keeping the heat in, thus reducing the need for any sort of air-conditioning system.
You're in quite an exciting position here, and i'm quite jealous :-)
Well here's the thing: the average family home is roughly three times larger than it needs to be, is generally built of horribly inefficient materials necessitating larger power consumption to prevent you freezing to death, and its commonly designed and positioned on the block of land with no regard whatsoever for the direction of light, prevailing winds, possible shelter etcetc. Its also usually filled with a lot of power-sucking stuff too, but hey. I'm not about to pass up the big TV and PS3, so I can't really preach on that front. Anyhoo, you don't want to build the traditional american home, or indeed the traditional anywhere-but-maybe-sweden home. They're terribly poorly designed and executed. My advice: read a few location-appropriate books on green architecture and invest in good design and materials. you'll save a crapload in the long term.
Purely on the solar panel front, you definitely need to shop around more. It shouldn't cost more than a few tens of thousands at the most to kit the house out, and I'm including estimated heating bills in there (although living in the woods, you may as well just stick with fireplaces). Also check out of you can get any tax rebates on them, you can here with a lot of those green building measures.
Along those lines and in keeping with what Ponge wrote about super-insulating, You might want to consider partial- or full-berm construction. Using earth as your insulation is cheap and low-maintenance, though depending on the extent of the berming you may have to deal with dehumidifying the house and the energy costs that entails. There are some good places online to check out the techniques and the pros/cons.
And yeah, I'm jealous too. Good luck, and enjoy the process - building a house from scratch is fun as hell.
build using straw bales=v high insulation
turf roof
heat pumps
oh wow, the possibilities!
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"The power of the weirdness compels me."
Don't forget wind power - I've been on boats with wind generators (mini windmills) and they work pretty well.
Its looking like its going to be around the Klamath Falls area. We aren't 100% sure yet though, not even sure if it is going to be oregon. I would love to be able to do this in western washington state but it seems like land up there is kinda at a premium. Its kinda hard to pick out a place that will be benificial to my family. With my wife being a nurse, and by the time we start actually working on this i will be a cop, we'd like to live somewhat close enough to someplace that will provide us decent employment oppurtunites without an outrageous commute. Being 22 and in the military, it is hard to find peers who are homeowners to get advice from on this sort of stuff and even harder to find people in my age group to help brainstorm ideas on how to make this work considering most 22 year olds i know still dont even know what they are doing with their lives. When you say that the solar panels produce heat, like is this just from them heating up by being in the sun or is it heat generated by the conversion process?
Yeah, its starting to look like I may have carried a 1 or something when I was adding the numbers. Propane was already an idea for some of the home stuffs. Growing up we had a huge propane tank outside the house that ran things in the house (i was little so i dont know what things ran off of it)