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This is not a place where I grew up.

I did not inherit this house.

I built this house.

You built it yourself?

Yeah.

It looks amazing by the way.

We hope you can show it to us.

Oh yeah, you can look at it.

It's this, this is, I mean this is what I built in my spare time

and it's you know it's an architectural monstrosity,

but it's mine.

I don't owe any money on it and yeah, it's where I live.

How did you come up with the design?

I didn't.

It doesn't have a design.

Yeah I poured the foundation.

I milled the wood.

I cut down the trees.

I trucked the wood here and there.

I nailed the boards up, but never,

no construction crew has ever worked on this house.

You know it's like people what's it like to live off the grid?

I don't know.

I'm just living.

This is where I live.

On Lasqueti Island and when you're off the grid,

we spend our time dealing with the three things that you people

in the city spend the least time with

and that's heat, light and water.

- Yeah. - Is that right?

When your water goes down your water doesn't come

out of your tap.

You call up somebody and bitch

when your electricity doesn't work.

You call up somebody and bitch.

Well around here if your water doesn't go out you think,

oh God the hose is broken or something and you go out there

and find it before your water drains away.

After all the Y2K panic every community had

to have a disaster management plan.

They send over a woman from the regional district

so she starts off and she says, "Okay."

She says, "What are you going to do when your power goes out?"

And I said, "Well my power's not going to go out."

She said, "Well how can you be so sure."

And I said, "Well I make it myself.

I have solar panels and a water wheel and because

of what I'm doing I have three generators.

But basically if my power goes out, I fix it."

We've done a lot to have a convenient lifestyle,

but it's a lifestyle that we have really built up

and made for ourselves.

I mean I just like it when I turn on the water I know exactly

where the water's coming from.

You know I know when the washing machine is draining.

I know where that water's going to and I know

when I flick the light switch I know

where that electricity came from.

You know I can account for it all within a very small area.

I grew up on boats and in the bush, alright.

And one of my favourite sounds is silence.

I mean lived off the grid for most of my life

until I was about 28 or 29.

I had a cell phone for six months.

Yeah, I hated it.

It was terrible.

I mean I went from having no phone to having a cell phone

where people can call you when you're walking in the woods.

I don't want to be called when I'm walking in the woods.

I have very similar fears.

I don't where to start to become self-reliant.

Right, yeah.

And so I think that's a problem.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I have grown up as part of generation

that just flicks on a switch.

Absolutely.

That's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing is

to create a place where my daughter can survive really.

Because I, you know I don't want to sound like a doomsday person.

But I, we're virtually converting the biosphere

into a human sphere.

And you know it can't, it's just not possible

to sustain what we're doing at all.

So I mean this is one of the last frontiers if you will

of where civilization hasn't come

and fundamentally chopped everything down

and created human plantations you know.

I think there's a portion of the population probably mostly older

who find it you know more challenging to live here.

I would like nothing better than to have a power meter

and all the power they need for electric heat and not

to have to haul firewood in.

I think in general most of the people

that live here would not wish to connect to hydro.

In the 70s Lasqueti turned down hydro.

They didn't want to give Lasqueti electricity.

They wanted to use Lasqueti as a jumping, as a stepping stone

to get electricity from the mainland

over to Vancouver Island.

I think it was more of an anti-establishment,

anti-corporation kind of mindset.

In the 80s solar, wind and micro-hydro became sort

of viable options and a lot of people got really

into alternative energy stuff.

And so when people realised that they could have electricity

without running a generator they were pretty excited about that.

I mean the reality of Lasqueti is

that it's just not close enough to any connected communities.

This place as you probably found just getting here is

a pain.

It's not an easy place to live.

We don't want a car ferry.

Tell me why.

Because we know who's here.

The people that I know that live here really

like it being different and that you know we're wanting it

to be difficult to live here

because we don't want you know folks to come here

and just change the beauty that's here.

If you come here because you love it here and then leave it

and that's what I'm trying to do in my impact is develop it

in a way that's sustainable for humans, but not going

to forever destroy it ecologically

for all the other species that this is home to.

We have legislation in Lasqueti

that says one house per 10 acres.

And we brought that legislation in because we felt

that 10 acres was the smallest sustainable parcel

of land the family could live on for firewood, for water,

for the ability to grow food and be sustainable.

The general attitude of people that will trouble themselves

to live in a place like this is independent.

And most people you will talk to I think will tell you that part

of the allure of living

on Lasqueti form is that it's off grid.

And I think most of us have a great deal

of fun for that challenge.

It's not unusual to see houses with solar panels,

farms with wind turbines, people collecting rain water.

Some have even managed to disconnect

from those traditional connections

by going off the grid.

That's something Dr. Philip Vannini is interested in.

He's the Canada research pair in innovative learning

and public ethnography at Royal Rhodes University

in Victoria B.C. And Dr. Vannini joins me now.

I think we all know what off the grid means.

But what does it mean for the purposes of your research?

The government of Canada actually defines off the grid

as being disconnected from the electricity grid servicing a

particular region.

So essentially see

if you produce your own electricity you're off the grid.

Now we use that expression in other context as well.

Now generally people that are self-sufficient

for their electricity are also off other grids.

They may have their own water supply.

They may take of their own garbage rather

than have pick-up.

They may have no television for example and things like that.

I'm interested in this for two reasons.

The first reason is because we keep hearing as a society

that bad things are to come, because we are running

out of those resources that have made our life possible.

Oil, coal is of course still abundant but it's not going

to be with us forever.

The resources are becoming more and more expensive

and so we hear that our life is going to change.

Things are never going to be the same.

I can't tell the future.

I can tell the present though and I'm interested

in documenting the lives of those people

that are live in the future today.

And I'm relying on renewable resources today

and I'm interested in seeing what their life is all about.

So what we do by traveling the country and going

to every single province

and territory we actually learn different environments

where people adapt in different ways.

Actually I would say that what has made our work possible is

the fact that pretty much everyone who's off grid wants

to teach others.

You and I probably don't know half of the skills

that our grandparents had.

It's skills on you know how to build a fire properly or how

to can your vegetables that you've grown in your garden.

And the idea is that if we continue as a society

to forget these skills we'll be less and less self-sufficient

and more and more reliant on distant providers that burden

with non-renewable resources.

Generally we like to begin with a million dollar question.

We live in a country that is by historical

and global standards a pretty comfortable place.

We've got access to all kinds of comforts and conveniences.

All technologies that have supposedly made our lives

easier, better.

And here we have instead a group of people who go off the grid

and disconnect themselves from this kind of world.

Why?

Good question.

I told you it'd get deep and get you going for hours.

Yeah. Why indeed?

There's a certain amount of sort

of let's see how little I can get by with.

You know, let's see how basic I can make my life

or how simple I can make my life and still be,

and still be you know happy and comfortable.

It's equal parts necessity and philosophy.

When I decided that I wanted to live

at these locations there was no option of having electricity.

You know, I mean this location was off the grid.

The grid was miles away.

Right.

So there was no chance.

But I stayed here so long

that the grid has actually crept closer and closer and closer.

We need more power because we're,

you know our little farm has been growing

and we had actually made the decision that we were,

we were going to bite the bullet

and have the power come the rest of the way.

And then we got into all kinds of negotiations

and difficult things about easements and what not what not

and it didn't pan up when that choice seemed to be slipping

through our fingers

and we actually tripled our solar capacity.

Brian I wonder if someone from Yukon Power came in today

and said well, we're putting the grid closer to your place

and no extra expense here.

We can connect you.

Would you like to be connected?

What would you say to them?

I think we would do it to get the power in.

You know we've been off grid for 30 years.

It's probably time.

I mean this is our home.

We will probably always live here.

Okay.

How long we'll continue to farm I guess will depend

on our level of energy and stuff.

But we will, I think we will live here

until we just absolutely cannot live here anymore.

There's something that I love and I've always loved

about the bush, the wilderness even as a child in California

and backpacking into the high Sierras.

The decision to live off grid was not sort

of saying we are determined to live off grid.

It was more we're determined to live in the bush

and the only way to do that was off grid.

Because I meet people who are similarly you know off grid

or whatever and sometimes it comes from kind

of an apocalyptic view of the world.

And we had a guest here the other day who's you know very

committed to storing up food and you know he sees what...

The survivalist.

Yeah, a survivalist kind of thing.

I mean he looks at what's happening

with the economy and all these things.

And you know for him it's the precipice

and so he was wondering you know what we had been doing

to make sure we are ready for the coming apocalypse you know.

So I am not off grid

in principle is probably the best way to put it.

I would have used their power.

It's just not feasible economically.

What did that cost you?

Well I never, I never, I never totally checked it out

but I'm guessing a quarter of a million dollars or something.

It's a common thing that people come and they see the winter

and they see the solar collectors and stuff.

And then they say wow, you know you get your power for free.

And I always have to laugh and say, "Well no actually it's,

what I did was I paid for 30 years of power up front."

When there's excess power the batteries are fully charged.

So if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining

and the batteries are fully charged,

basically it's just dumping.

We have more power than we can use.

So here is the what I call the upper array,

because there's the lower array.

So each of these, each of these is 175 watts.

Yeah.

So, six times 175.

There's 12 of them.

And there are 12 of them, 24 altogether.

Now how did you learn to do all this stuff?

By trying and made mistakes

so you know you had to redo stuff.

So I wasn't speedy.

Reading, researching, trial and error

and asking questions you know, yeah seeking advice from people

who know and who are happy to share their knowledge.

I mean think about anything.

If you thought about any kind of project and as a whole

and said how can I do that it's overwhelming.

You know but it's the old adage how do you eat an elephant you

know, one bite at a time.

And so I, I didn't have to figure

out everything before I figured out this part.

And as this part evolved then I needed to figure out this part.

Then I needed to figure out that part.

And as you move along it evolves and it works.

Then you find your way step by step and it's only looking back

that you realise oh my goodness,

wow how did I pull that off you know.

I live on a small island.

I am self-reliant for my own water supply

and when I moved there I realised how much your attitude

changes when you are self-sufficient for something

and you're much more careful with it.

And I wanted to see if other people also were as careful.

You have somebody taping this right now so you're kind

of documenting everything as you go along?

We work non-stop.

Yeah and so this is really becoming this I guess is part

of [inaudible] to...

Oh absolutely.

Document in whatever way you can.

If people listening want to get in touch can they do that?

Oh absolutely.

I would love to.

After Off the Grid we'll make our way there.

If you look back on any life it's a bunch of stepping stones

and you just never know where they're going to take you.

So my training was industrial electronics

and Joanna was a registered dietician.

And I was working at a company, electronics company

and I just felt there had to be more to life.

Joanna came up with the floor plan for the house

that she wanted to have.

So I took the floor plans and I,

I researched construction techniques that would deal

with a harsher climate and I was not impressed

with what I researched.

So I kind of came up with a unique design.

I've never seen anybody else do it.

Well everything has worked better than I expected.

I, I didn't know a lot of the things I've learnt because I,

everything, every challenge we came

up against what did I do, some research.

I found out how to do it and I did it, as simple as that.

And people said, well how'd you get this done

or you can't do that.

Well that's nonsense.

Of course they can do it.

We haven't run up against anything

that we haven't been able to do or handle ourselves.

We're retired school teachers and we spent...

Thirty five years in town.

Thirty five years in town.

And what we wanted to do is

when we retired the first thing we did was sell the house

in town and move out here to the bush.

Basically we've got everything we could

possibly want.

You've got all the comfort.

All the comforts of home.

All the necessary conveniences.

We watch all the TV.

We listen to the stereo.

We have all the lights that we want on.

We have a computer.

We run the coffeemaker.

You know we run, we do all those kinds of things.

That's a rare thing fortunately

that I haven't been able to fix something

or joy rig something to get it to go.

You must have had some contractor do some part.

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

We've done it all ourselves.

I did absolutely everything.

Part of living out here is having an inventory

and then anticipating what things

and spare parts are you going to need.

We have degrees coming out of our ears in this place.

So many books.

And so we have tonnes and tonnes of books.

With anything machine or engine wise I may refer

to things that you can kind of take a wild stab at.

I built this thing and then she said, oh well that's not enough.

And generally if something's going to break

down I mean it's going to be something simple.

Just this fall I built this air compressor

out of a lawn mower motor.

Very rarely have we had to deal with something

that couldn't be fixed out here.

The generator was definitely one of them.

I guess that's really...

Well the first winter that was the second one.

Yeah, but that's not our problem.

I mean that's kind of faulty

or we could debate the design of that.

Well, there's a million things.

I also want to build an electric car.

That's definitely a feeling that most

of the population is really dependent on others and being

out here we're dependent on ourselves.

The oven is a little bit tricky sometimes to get used to,

but once you kind of get the hang

of it I don't know it just becomes like second nature.

If I was to have this on all day long even in the wintertime

on a sunny day it would get stiflingly hot in here.

What's really important in this country is that first

of all we have massive amounts of insulation.

That's the most important thing.

The second thing is that we have tonnes of material

that can be used as thermal mass.

So once you warm it up it regains the heat

and radiates heat for days and days and days.

Here, for example, I have 5000 gallons of water

in the crawl space under the floor,

under where you're sitting.

All these different jugs, different sizes,

two gallon jugs, five gallon jugs, 13 gallon jugs.

Soap and wax jugs.

Yeah that originally had soap and wax in them.

Laundry detergent, and some of these are the

from the hotels in Dawson.

Well they just, they don't recycle them.

They just throw them away.

And these are questions that I haven't asked before

because you know sort of how often do you leave the house

on a yearly basis, or monthly basis, I don't know?

Generally twice a year, usually in spring

like March before the ice goes out and then in the fall,

end of September beginning

of October before the ice starts forming.

Our daughter lives in Edmondton and we go

and visit her quite often and our son lives in Dawson Creek,

which is only 35 miles away.

But we have a lot of friends that come from other cities

and camp out here with us in the summer especially.

We're, we're comfortable with our own company.

We're not antisocial but we're just happy to be out here.

We have no set schedule.

We see the rest of the world is working

and spinning their wheels like a hamster in a cage trying

to just make money to live and survive.

isn't intimidating

to be off by yourself out here?

I think initially I was a little bit nervous

about how am I going to react to that.

But I'm basically in introvert to begin with,

so I'm not like Ron said, we're not antisocial.

I mean we had friends when we were

in Maine we had friends that I worked with.

But we're not social butterflies either.

When the road is open between freeze up and break

up I make a trip every three weeks.

And when I'm done loading my truck everything

on that truck is paid for.

And then I bring it here and sell it.

Okay.

If I could go down into Washington state

and just Seattle or someplace like that without having to go

through the hassle of the border or whatever I would do

that because it's going to be that much fresher.

You never what the prices are going to be from one trip

to the next anyway you know.

I mean I pay a price for like say broccoli one trip

and the very next trip three weeks later and it'll be double.

It's all supply and demand right.

So what you have now is a town that only grew to three

and a half thousand although it was projected to one day go

to 10 and everything is laid out needs over there.

We do have our year round water supply.

We of course have the road.

We have you know shipping still comes in on the river.

We still have the highway.

Basically they're fully functional towns sitting

in the middle of nowhere in the arctic,

which is really quite fascinating.

A lot of times when you know researchers or people

from the south whether it's a journalist or researchers

or people from the south whether they're journalists come

to [inaudible] they come up and try and sometimes sensationalize

over the isolated north.

But when you're living here, I've been here 18 years,

it's no different than any small town in Canada.

You need with probably 60,000 people

to get the amenities we have here.

You know and I know we're off the grid and you say well,

and you look on the map and where we are.

because it's a small town in Canada

and it could be a small town anywhere in Canada.

Yeah starting sort of mid to late October that's

when it starts because things start to freeze

in the two river crossings.

And it's impossible to take a boat across so they have

to close the ferry crossings and just wait

until it's frozen enough that you can drive across.

When they're doing that during freeze

up everything perishable has to be flow in so the cost

of dairy products goes through the roof.

The flip side of it, the actual break up when it happens in May,

that's kind of when people are celebrating or placing bets

as to what day the river will break up.

That ice road is, it's kind of an artery for transportation

around here because a lot of local folks have camps

and they can take the ice road, you know can take there skidoo

out there and just go up to their camp.

It's sort of off the river.

I have three cabins really.

I got the one for chopping.

I have the summer one for whales and I have the far one

for hunting the caribou.

And there are whale, beluga whale and we get

that in the summertime.

It is a way of you know subsidizing ourselves

because we can do it.

It's our right.

Before the weather gets too warm here we try

to bring all the heavy stuff on the road

or ride skidoos to the cabin.

Up here we know how to travel on that ice.

For me it is you know top to me.

My grandfather and my father are pretty confident in what I do

and that's how I learnt.

Like if I'm not confident then I won't go.

If I'm confident I'll go.

It's, it just how I travel.

This is where we are now, okay.

Yesterday we went up this way and part of this river.

And then we went this valley through that lake.

So that's what we did.

Way far away from anywhere.

As far as I can remember I've always wanted

to have my own house because that's,

I was already drawing houses that looked like this,

except the only difference was

that I was using cement to build the walls.

An earth ship is an idea and I came

to Michael Reynolds about 35 years ago.

He wanted to build a house that would be easy to build

for everybody so everybody could have a house instead

of having a mortgage.

So they made the earth ship create its own power,

collect its own water, reuse the water as much as possible

and also build it out of material that is available.

And the principle component that everybody talks

about when talking about an earth ship is the tyres.

And you just basically use the tyres as a form

to pound dirt into it.

So it's really a rand earth house where the tyres are used

as a form that stays in place.

So this is tyres and covered with mud

and then there's lime plaster finish.

They provide mass so they're like a battery that stores heat

or drains heat when it's too, too warm.

So are these Michelin, Good Year,

Parelli, what, just kidding.

It doesn't matter the make, only that it's four seasons.

My design comes from the earth really.

Like I look at the rocks and they go okay, this makes sense

for a cog building since in the sense of less work for me.

I looked at where the rocks were and a lot of the foundation

of the main house was not needed to be built,

because it was already there.

This is, this is called.

Yeah.

This is what's called the house right?

What you're feeling is plaster.

But inside, which you can see on the outside easily is a mixture

of sand, clay and straw mixed together with water

and it's a sculptural technique.

There's no posts here holding up the roof at all.

It's the cog itself is strong enough to do that.

It's a technique that's been used by humans for millions

of years, more or less earthquake proof.

And it's insect proof, rodent proof, it's dirt cheap.

I probably paid 200 to $300 dollars

for the sand to be delivered.

Okay.

And I don't know what else I paid for.

I mean I bought the doors used.

So, yeah this whole place, which is very small,

but I might have spent a $1000.

Is that some kind of energy efficient genius behind...

No. not really.

Okay so it's just style?

It was just an, it's very cheap.

Part of living off the grid

for me has always been living with less money.

Wood is cheap and now roofing and foundations are expensive.

So I thought I'll get extra square footage for cheap

by building lots of floors.

When I started this house I might have had a couple grand

to my name that I'd scraped together

over the last seven or eight years.

So everything had to be low tech and low cost.

So, most of the choices I have made are just kind

of your default off grid choices.

It makes sense conceptually in a way unless you think of,

unless you try to live in it

and then you realise you know, I'm 40 years old.

I can't run up and down seven flights of stairs twice,

three to four times a day every time I forget a sock

or whatever.

A lot of peoples' houses are fantasies.

You know everybody is building their fantasy little dream house

and in some ways I consider

that to be a ridiculous way to spend time.

It's just a distraction from important things.

It's the same way as everything else.

It's not because the house is big

that it's more complicated than anything else.

It's just one step at a time.

You just have to try and see the big picture and then split it

up into little pieces and it's not living off grid

that is the answer.

And it's not living in an earth ship that's the answer.

It's a way of thinking that needs to change,

being able to realise where things come from

and what they actually cost.

So there's obviously no water here right now?

No. It comes from way up top and then

through this pipe all the way down here.

A little turbine you might be able to see

that the water hits right.

And so it spins and it makes electricity.

It sounds stupid and it sounds like I'm being hokey

and spiritual or whatever, but you do.

I had to anyway.

You have to figure out where the water is coming from.

You have to change things to suit.

You see how far the frost goes.

You see how far the water goes

into the ground when it's not moving.

It's not rocket science.

Actually it's more precise than rocket science.

Yeah, right.

That's all there is to it.

This, this disc here,

this flywheel there's very high strength magnets underneath

and as it turns it passes by.

There's a whole lot of coils under there.

I don't know, is it 24 of them?

I can't remember.

Anyway as it spins it makes power.

If there was enough fall,

if there was enough water it could make 500 watts.

Me, I've only got a 32 foot fall, over 300 feet

so there's loss in the pipe.

So, when the pond is up and it's running I would say maybe 90

watts, 80-90 watts.

But, the good thing about it is, it's 24 hours a day.

Each panel, each of those panels is 180 watts.

So there's 360 watts.

That's ideal.

So let's say 340 watts really,

full direct sunlight which is rare.

When does that happen in the summer?

Now basically you've about 400 watts worth of PV

and then we added 600 there.

That's about 1000 watts worth of panel.

So that's a 1000 watts or it's a kilowatt.

So if I get five hours of sunshine on those panels I end

up with five kilowatts or five kilowatt hours of electricity.

And the average family in Ontario uses

about 35 hours of electricity.

So I can, I can live on five hours in kilowatt,

five kilowatt hours if I shift my thermal

or my heat loads to propane.

So what we've done over time is increased our panels

like we've added a second set of solar panels in the wind turbine

so we can, we can reduce how much propane we have to use.

But you know we lived off grid and everybody talks

about kilowatt hours and I never understood it.

So I said, until I got, I figure this is a 1000 watts.

I get an hour worth of sun comes on I get one kilowatt hour

of electricity and it all started making sense to me.

My solar panels are all up on the roof.

That's so small.

I was expecting it to be something,

we have more than that.

There's also another, that's about one kilowatt.

We have two more kilowatts right on the roof.

I built this myself.

I'm very proud.

You built this yourself.

I, I, it's my first wind turbine tower that I ever built.

Yeah.

Mind you I had a kit.

It's a kit comes from Michigan and it has instructions.

It's wind tower building for the complete idiot.

I need to lower it once a year because this wind turbine,

that's yeah it needs to be inspected.

And it's infinitely easier to lower the pole

and look the generator than it is to climb up the pole and look

at the generator okay.

Well one thing that does come to mind and we're kind of proud

about it is that we've never had a power bill.

We've heard people, we've heard talk about it.

We really don't know what they are.

One of our design factors was that people coming

to visit us would not know that we lived off grid.

Is this a normal dishwasher?

It's an energy star compliant dishwasher and we have choices

to run it low power, so it's consumption is minimal.

And we choose when we want to run it.

So, if we you know if we say, hmm it's a good time

to run the dishwasher when the sun's out.

We utilize our stuff as much as we want.

But there's always an eye on the battery.

There's always that thought in the back

of your head are we using too much

and what's the weather like?

What's the weather, it looks like we've got to...

You know, oh great we're going to go in the hole.

And I just like to stay fully,

fully charged as much as possible.

This is where the electricity lives.

We have a 1500 amp hour 24 volt battery bank

and 2-1/2 kilowatt inverter.

Okay.

A couple charge controllers,

maximum power point tracking charge controllers.

This is the what's called the mate.

It's the brains of the system.

So right now, we just, I just heard it kick on.

So something's just turned on.

So we're now using 1800 watts of power.

The batteries are 49.2 volts.

The output today in terms

of generating power we've generated goes back and forth.

We've generated what was it, nine there nine amps, 440 watts.

So not very much.

Today's a Grey day and there's no wind.

Right now we're inverting 1800 watts.

So we're using more power than we're producing.

I figure the whole system probably cost ninety, ninety,

in the neighbourhood of $60,000.

Including the solar panels.

Including the solar panels and the wind turbine, yeah.

What would you say is the percentage of power that you get

from wind and the percentage of power...

Oh we probably get about 10% from wind and about 70%

from solar and about the other 20% from our backup generator.

You can use a generator.

We don't have a qualm about using it.

But we are aware that it costs money to fly the fuel in.

Fuel costs money by itself and all these gizmos

and gadgets have a lifespan.

So let's maximize that lifespan.

If we don't need to fire up the generator we won't.

I've met a few people who live off the grid.

There's one not too far from here, a big system,

big big system, huge system really.

His whole roof is covered with solar panels

and he should have all kinds of power.

But when I went to go see this huge wonderful system,

he couldn't even watch TV.

Why can't you watch TV?

Oh well you know, it's not very, it's not very sunny today

and I don't have enough electricity.

Where does it all go?

He's got a central heating system and he uses electricity

to run his hot water pumps.

He's got three hot water circulating pumps.

What in the world are you doing?

You know and he heats the water with wood.

If you had a decent stove in the basement, a wood furnace

in the basement for crying

out loud you could heat your whole house

and your electricity could be put to better uses.

Water pumps, constant hot water, oh.

It's just, it just, some people have the idea

that like you say I'm lucky.

I can rationalist things.

Our son challenged us a bit, quite a bit.

He went to an outdoor ed leadership camp when he was

in high school and when he came back his mantra was

if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down.

We have a tank up on the hill.

We'll show you when we go outside,

but it's buried so it doesn't freeze.

Okay.

And it's probably level with the upstairs floor

which doesn't really give enough pressure for you know

for normal pressure in a hose.

But the less pressure you have the less water you use.

So, and this is what we do, a 100 pumps a day.

A 100 pumps a day each.

Each.

About like it and it comes through the pipe down into an,

it's an old milk truck tank and that's what feeds the house.

And so it's made to go into a drilled well so that's why it's-

And I've hit the top of the water now.

So that's fills up.

And when it fills you'll hear the blurb.

And then it's full.

So then you pull that.

And then you pull the trigger.

Two gallons of water.

That quickly.

So it's not too hard to do.

Nope, quickly.

It's actually quicker

than actually sitting here and priming the well.

you know for like 15 minutes

and then finally watch it trickle out you know.

I haul water.

So I bring the water from the fire station

where they have bulk water.

It cost me two dollars every time I,

to fill my 300 gallon tank, typically about once a week.

Once a week?

Yeah, it depends how many,

you know if we have guests it's more frequent.

And if I have to fill the hot tub it's more frequent.

And for the price it would cost me

to drill a well here I can buy a truck

and haul water for 10 years.

What we do in here, we heat the water or we put...

Make a fire.

Make a fire in this little stove there,

heat the water on top.

So this is boiling essentially and we take cold water

and then we add it and then we feel it.

And that feels about right and then you'll put it up there

in that little thing there and you take a shower,

which is about five gallons of water or less, really.

This right here.

I usually sit and take a shower actually, but.

Yeah.

These can be self-serviced

so there's you know we can fix them ourselves.

All the insides are stainless steel so they're going to last

for a long time and they were made on this continent.

I've just been amazed by this,

because it's super lower energy use and super low water.

Yeah.

It works for us because it's got a separate wash side

from spin.

So you can wash a load, spin it and aim the water back in here

so you can do your second load.

You don't do a second load of whites

because the water's got a little bit of dirt in it by then.

But, you can, I do three or four loads using the same water.

When this gets filled

up you know you take it outside and dump it you know.

And we don't really use any kind of fake chemicals too much.

So we, you know we just put it in different place all the time.

And so we don't really feel like that's necessarily a bad thing.

Water from the sink, the kitchen sink will go

into the planter into an infiltrator,

where it will be treated if she wants.

Let's say I use something nasty in the sink

which I try not to do.

It'll go into the septic system.

It's like a Grey water you know situation

and we don't use harsh chemicals in here either.

Right.

And the one thing that I feel pretty strongly about

and you'll see within our house within our house too is

that it's like it's our own waste.

We should, we have the responsibility dealing

with our own waste and if we die from it it's our own fault.

I think that people are so afraid of like poop

and not afraid at all of chlorine bleach.

It like blows my mind.

There's involvement with your own excrement.

Okay.

And living off the grid.

You can't get any simpler than pooping on the ground.

This outhouse is basically just a compost box

or really it's just a few compost boxes in a row.

When the first area fills

up I just shovel it into the second area.

Okay.

This is non-scientific.

If you want to get really into it people by the composting ones

with the rolling drum and things like that and the peat,

throwing peat moss in.

Then you're making serious compost.

So underneath the house is sort of a big tank

and it has a handle on it for raking.

And so everything goes in there every day.

You put a coup of peat moss down it, which I haven't done

yet today so I'll do that first for your benefit as well.

And it just goes down in there and every day you give

that handle on the tank outside a little rake and it,

the gadgets inside of it, aerated.

We got to a big hole you know and we build our outhouse

over the hole and we made this so you can actually pick this up

and move this and the whole thing comes off.

And so when it's full

and we start getting what we call a stalagshite,

which is actually, but you know what I mean.

What we do is we pull this off and we take a shovel and we put

into a wheel barrow and we take it

and we go dump it somewhere, you know.

In the woods?

And you can't even recognise it is poop at that point.

It looks like you know some kind of dirt or something like that.

So this is the product.

You know it's a fantastic product you know

like it really is worth waiting.

It smells like dirt.

It's just dirt.

Yeah, it's good top soil.

Like you can get these plastic compressing

that people keep under their kitchen counter.

But this is what I find hard about this you know.

And I was amazed.

Like in four days it was gone, completely gone.

So I thought oh, I'm onto something here.

So then I started setting up systems for it.

Now it's ubiquitous.

And then the cycle begins again.

You eat your...

Yeah you go back and forth like you know.

You can do it forever.

There's something that I've always dreamt of doing ever

since I was a teenager and I've been lucky enough

to be able to do it.

And that's sit down to the table and 90% of what's

on the table is stuff that you grew or made yourself

and you're not depending on the grocery store

and you're not dependent on some farmer in California

and that whole distribution system.

I had a huge garden out there, vegetable garden

and I always managed to find the time for that.

I do a lot of canning and pickling

and those sorts of things.

So, I actually can have my headphone on

and be doing a business meeting and I'm pickling

at the same time you know.

Carrots, tomatoes, peas, marmalade.

We would have corn, juices, tomato soup, tomato...

- Sauce. - Tomato.

Stewed tomatoes.

This year we have a crop failure of potatoes

because we had a flood.

So there's not many potatoes in here but we have a lot

of canned goods in here.

Strawberry jam, raspberry jam,

Saskatoon jam and a lot of fruit.

Saskatoons, raspberries, strawberries and then I do

of course buy a few peaches and things too,

but other than that we should probably take some fruit

into the house anyways to have for lunch maybe.

That's hot water for my sauce for my dinner.

Oh so there's, there's a pot of hot water in there.

Yeah and this is going to boil some pasta as well.

Usually I can say I have three hot meals a day,

but today because it was

so cloudy this morning I only had two.

I had lunch and dinner.

So, they just, they reflect the sun into this insulated box.

It's just, it's, that's how much power the sun has.

It's incredible.

It's so easy to get it up to 300.

Today when it was cloudy they were about 150 and if I was

to really, like in the middle of the day,

and if I was really focused on focusing

on these I could get it up to 350 or 400.

Organizing and planning is really important.

And so if I'm going to have something frozen

at night I take it out in the morning.

We don't really, she doesn't really it meat.

So we don't, that's one thing that we don't.

And I think that like if you make a...

If I make something for him that's

like frozen meat, the I cook it frozen.

For two people and one person doesn't eat meat I'm not going

to make a turkey.

Yeah.

If he wants turkey he can have it at the neighbours.

So what we do is instead of growing our own meat now we,

every two years we fly in a side of beef and we fly

in a whole pig frozen and then we still do our own cutting,

wrapping.

We make our own sausages.

We smoke and cure our own bacons and hams.

So this is kind of the bows of the beast.

We can keep potatoes even

through the winter if weren't here.

That's the wine that we make and we thought that if you guys are

into a little bit of wine we could have some wine for dinner.

Don't you get bored?

No.

No, not at all, never.

So how do you not get bored?

My biggest hobby is woodworking

and I woodwork the old fashioned way with hand tools.

The wintertime it's more indoor stuff.

For me it might be sewing, quilting, knitting, spinning,

weaving, any, I love doing any of that stuff.

The one next to the vent, the higher one is the TV satellite

and then the one that's close

to the porch is the internet satellite system.

When we built the house that was one

of the first things we put in was the TV.

I think we've only met one, two, three people

that didn't have the internet in their homes.

On the other hand we've only met a handful of people

that have a TV, satellite or cable subscription.

I wonder why you decided to have TV when you're so remote.

For that, for the entertainment value.

We're not big on the soaps and stuff like that.

Well we don't watch them at all.

But the educational TV is something that we do enjoy.

So we watch a couple, three hours a day.

I mean...

When you're alone in this place in the middle

of the winter and it's minus 30 outside, you're going no place.

You're staying at home watching TV or you're reading.

I read a lot.

I don't watch TV unless it's Saturday night

and the hockey game's on.

And at the same time I'm grinding flour

on an exercise bike.

So it's my compromise with the devil.

I'm consuming our energy

in a sense frivolously using the energy,

but at the same time I'm saying well if I'm going to be

so darn frivolous then I better grind some grain.

Actually that's what Nan told me.

Quite honestly there's nothing

on television worth watching.

And I just got so that I wasn't even using it.

One day I stopped and I said, "Gee that thing hasn't been

on for at least a year."

Why am I even bothering to dust it and so I threw it out.

Television is always pushing okay.

I use the internet for emails

and for looking things up alright.

And I go there and I, if I want the news I'll go to El Gezera

or BBC or someplace like that, not Fox News or someplace

like that and read the news and then I turn it off.

The computer's kind of like a crescent wrench for me.

Alright, it's a tool.

I run the Lotus Centre in St. Johns and that's a yoga

and meditation Centre, lots of spiritual activities.

And when I met Ian I'd been always looking for a place

to do a retreat and Ian's been sort of, he has this land

out here and he's wondering what he's going to do with it.

So the two of us got together and brainstormed this vision.

We have the meditation hut

and that has two accommodations in there.

And we also have the new bunk house that we're building

so that will accommodate 12 people.

So we'll have someone coming for the day, someone coming

for the weekend, sometimes people say for a week or two.

Sometimes we you know have a work exchange where people come

out and work and they stay for accommodation, food.

Miranda brought more of the people aspect to it right.

I'm bringing more of the nature and the building

because my training was in science.

When I lived in India it was a lifestyle.

It was a spiritual lifestyle so it wasn't really a business.

When I came back to the west, Canada it was like looking

around I'd think everything's a business.

Everything's in terms of making a living and how to design it

so that a dollar comes out at the end of it.

I had to get my head around it.

For several years I had to get my head around it.

But I came with the desire to create community.

The freedom of you know waking up in the morning

and you don't have to be somewhere else, okay.

You know and you still got a lot on your plate maybe

that you want to touch down on that day.

But you know you're not going to company B

and putting in your day, right.

You're just waking up and you can choose what you want to do.

So you're going to work on...

The only thing is we didn't really have to get a job

because we had money from the sale of our other stuff.

But that quickly ran out.

You know what I mean.

And over a period of time we build everything,

we buy everything.

So we really didn't have any bills you know so but we got

to the point where you know we knew we were going to have

to do something for income.

And we always thought the whole time well

when that comes why don't we see if we can sell what we love,

which is our lifestyle you know what I mean.

And so that's what I kind of did and you know you can see a lot

of things that she does.

She has a website and she does shows and she sells crafts

and art and stuff like that.

On Friday I should be getting my very first old age

pension check.

So I don't know how much they've cut my Canada pension,

Quebec pension, pardon me.

I don't know what I'm getting yet.

It might turn out to be so little

that I can't afford to stay here.

Nan retired in 70, 1976, worked part-time on occasion,

was always very supportive of me when I needed help,

which is daily and the kids, the three kids.

Nan had time to pretty well go full-time at this as I tried

to keep my job and pitch in here.

Do you think that a couple

who both work full-time could live off the grid?

Off the grid yes, but not quite like we do.

If you're going to go the extra step then it takes a

rare family.

You need two partners who are raring to go.

That's the key.

You do need a second person.

Yeah.

And a supportive family.

Yeah.

I think, do you think it's easier for men than for women

to deal with some of these things?

Yeah.

You think so?

You know maybe women need to pee more often.

The women's community I found to be very strong,

which is I think pretty different compared

to many golf islands.

The ones I'm familiar with are

and certainly there's strong women there.

But I found a lot of patriarchy like overts really

in your face patriarchy there as well.

So this place has that as well,

but not to the same degree I think

and the women are very much more prominent

in the community I think.

Our youngest daughter was going

into grade nine when we moved out.

And she had a bit of a challenge because we were leaving a place

that was ideal for a teenager.

It didn't take her very long to adapt.

And she soon felt proud to bring her friends out there

and show them what we did that was different.

It took her a bit longer to figure

out that she couldn't change her jeans every day

and stuff like that.

So a lot of people who do this still want to live

like they're in the city or in the country

with a big power supply.

So they want to live off grid, but they don't want anything

to change in terms of their lifestyle.

So that's what's different about us

without taking ourselves too seriously.

Here we live in North America and you just walk

into a home that's been built for us.

We really wanted to experience what it was

like to actually do it all yourself.

And I'd always had a dream as a little girl to live

on Old McDonald had a farm.

That was my dream.

I wanted very, very much to work with the horses and part

of that was logging with them.

We bought two horses that were made to pull logs out of woods.

Neither one of us had any experience in building,

in logging with horses.

I had ridden all my life but I'd never been behind a horse

and driven a horse with a cart.

We have 150 acres so the idea was A we would never have to cut

down a live tree, because there was enough you know dead fall

out there and that's what we did.

We did that for the first three or four years.

The biggest issue that we are dealing with right now

because we couldn't financially keep it going

as an ecotourism establishment we are now left

with the burden of the fallout.

We just didn't have the numbers of people

that you needed during the tourist season to be able

to maintain that, that type of lifestyle.

Because it's only two months of the year.

You've got July and August and you can't make the money.

You just can't do it.

So either you have to have money to live off the grid,

to own outright your property and have no mortgage.

So, we just, we couldn't do it.

We just couldn't do it.

So enter working off the farm.

Judy's working off the farm as a cook.

I'm working off the farm right now

as a security guard at a hospital.

That changes the whole off grid situation.

We were functioning with the weather before.

You can't function like that now.

No. Now we come home and we want things

and I've got four hours and I have to either sleep or go

to work so we use more power.

Now it becomes a major pain in the ass.

In one sense you have to weigh the ethical

or the ideological side to the practical.

Our other option and this is very ironic is that Jim go

out west to work as a driver for...

Oil [inaudible].

The big part of what's next is we will be on grid.

If Jim were able to go out west,

the first thing we would do would,

it would probably take us 20,000 to get the lines in

and you know get a system going whereby I can have running hot

water and I can have a little propane stove with an oven here.

I have to have some easier option here.

The people I work with just cannot possibly understand how

I've survived this long.

They have spent the last 50 years getting away from this.

So they don't want to go back to this.

Whether you live off the grid or on the grid you still deal

with life and life can be very, very rollercoastery.

We love it here.

I mean who wouldn't?

This is, this is paradise.

It's a little piece of heaven.

We have no issues with neighbours.

We have 150 acres surrounding us.

I can have my horses in my back yard.

I can look out my window.

It's the most complicated life I've ever lived

and that's the truth.

I have never felt more stressed than I feel today.

The thing about it is everybody comes here

with a dream.

And after about four to six months they find

out that the dream doesn't fit.

And the smart ones change the dream

and they're the ones that stay here.

The ones that try to make this place fit their dream usually

don't stick around.

The learning curve for somebody moving out of the city coming

to this place is straight up.

- Alright yeah. - Straight up.

Yeah.

You've got to understand plumbing.

You've got to understand basic wiring.

Every coffee table

in the suburbs has got "Country Life" on it.

Right.

With glossy photographs of all these gorgeous houses full

of antiques and nic nacs and they have this notion

that that's the way you live in the country.

Well you bloody well don't.

Nobody's got the time to dust that shit.

My grandfather and I were very close.

So I'm the one he told all the stories to.

He left me the island with a promise to do my best

to you know keep it in the family or protect it

and that's the promise that I've kept.

When I used stay here with my grandparents in the 50s,

60s they had a very small grid system.

So every house had I don't know if it was 60 amps, 80 amps tops;

very small electrical services.

So when the neighbour down the street turned

on the toaster your TV went like this.

Like you understood that there was a limited amount of power

and now there's no demand metering on residents.

There's no feedback loop.

You can use any amount of power you want.

You can run all your electric heaters at once.

You're going to get a bill.

Price is a great factor, but in a way it means

that if price is the only control on consumption,

it just means that wealthy people can use a whole bunch

because they can afford to.

So what I find interesting with human behaviour is

that if people can access the power they'll use it.

If they can't, they'll take it to the limit

and go oh, that's the limit.

You should bring a paradigm where I want

to covert my city house to being off the grid

and I want my dishwasher and my dryer

and my washing machine and blah, blah, blah.

Well that's all fine if you've got you know $45,000 to spend

on a power system to run your house renewably.

All that you've proven is that a person

with $45,000 can live off the grid just

like they live on the grid.

That is not really progress in my mind.

Do we want people in the city to be independent with respect

to an electrical generation or do we want them

to take ownership and understanding?

The first thing I would say to someone who wanted

to live off the grid is first turn everything off and live

without electricity for as long as you dare.

And then you will have starting place from which to sort

of truly appreciate what it is to be off grid.

And then from there you could start

by for example buying a small solar panel

and a car battery or something.

And you could say now I'm going to live

on what I can make with this.

I think there's something deeply rooted in what it means

to be human, to have the connection

between being productive and having stuff.

In our society that connection has become tenuous.

You get a paycheck but it's very hard to see what you're doing

in your office actually connects to producing anything.

For me to be in a physical environment where taking care

of stuff, making sure that I have wood for the winter,

making sure that the various systems are working properly,

that I have to take care of them, and as I invest

in those things then my needs are satisfied.

Seeing that connection I think is a,

there's something deeply healthy about that.

Is it doable?

Yeah.

Of course it is.

We can do anything that we set our minds to, anything.

I built my house.

I live off grid.

I do, some people do amazing things.

Lots of people do amazing things,

but are there enough people

who think it's worth it to save the planet?

I'm not so sure.

As soon as you step outside

of this little closed group you notice that there is an ocean

of people who have no clue and who are not interested.

On my bad days I think humans are a parasite

and the earth will get rid of us sooner or later

and it doesn't bother me at all.

It's being found fast and furious by the television

because that's what they want you to do.

They want you to consume and work because the mandate

of our civilization is to start a plan as quick as possible.

I mean it sounds silly but that explains everything you know.

And like that's where it all comes from is the drive

to have it all now regardless of the consequences.

And that's the kind of system and that's the kind of system

that we're operating under.

It's the collective consciousness.

It is civilization, people as a,

humanity as a entity is

like on this trip everything

until there is nothing left and there's nobody that can stop it.

It'll have to stop itself and it will you know.

Things will change you know.

It's not going to be pretty okay.

That's what's got lost in a lot of this and I worry

that those that have lost all the skills of taking care

of themselves and you know having to actually work

in harmony with nature in order to survive, that there's going

to be such a mass of people that don't get it at all.

I had 20 years in the Federal Government

and after a while you just sort of come to understand that all

of this process that we have in our society that's supposed

to make this a better place you know

for environment is not really working

and that you're inside of a system.

And you're in there initially

because you think you can change it.

It was the corporate world that really opened my eyes

to just how, how little the corporations care.

For example our food.

We don't know where out food comes from.

And the only time that the corporations will do anything

in a green sense is if the people push for it.

We need to stop buying energy from utilities,

from fuel companies, from coal companies

at such ridiculously heavily subsidized rates.

If there were real prices for the energy we use,

renewable energy it'd be a screaming bargain

and people would be banging down the doors to buy it.

However, as long as it's cheap

to take a mountain top off some poor chunk of Virginia

or Pennsylvania or North Carolina and profitable

and subsidized by a variety

of business interests we'll hear about clean coal.

We'll see wonderful ads about what a great idea fracking is

until we start paying for poisoning people's wells.

And if we start paying those real costs we'll see a real

change in perception and usage of energy.

We've taken that wonderful concept

of North America pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit

and we adopted it to our hearts as back to the earthers.

And it didn't occur to us that perhaps was colossally selfish.

There's really no reason four families couldn't share

this property.

And in most parts of the world they would.

We live in a place where we have the ability and the soil

and water resources to grow the majority of our food.

Our heat energy comes from trees that grow on our property.

Our electricity falls out of the sky.

We have the luxury of being largely independent

from what's going on economically

or socially in the world.

This in true North American terms is a colossal luxury.

What's wrong with that?

We can't afford to have three billion people being

that luxurious.