About

Alternative energy sources or equipment can be expensive. Alternative energy equipment costs can grow almost exponentially when adding any appliance that uses heating elements of any kind, such as a common toaster, to a hot water tank.

For me, living in the north, unless it is very near the Pacific coast where you could possibly get more moderate temperatures is simply out of the question, for living off grid. From a practical, financial standpoint, living in areas that are cold is not tenable.

Living off the grid to me is a mindset. Living off the grid to me, means freedom. Freedom from higher and higher utility bills. As long as you have increasing utility bills and other living expenses that keep growing, you are not too free. You have to work more and you have to generate more and more wages or earnings to just keep your head above water. You have to earn more just to get the same utility services previously provided. You can become stuck on that treadmill.

With that in mind, trading all that for expensive alternative energy sources doesn't really solve any problems. If you choose solar energy, the initial costs for the equipment can be a lot. Solar panels, charge controllers and inverters cost a pretty penny. Batteries that have life spans will need to be eventually replaced in these systems. The benefits of these systems however, is they can be separate from the electrical grid and you may not experience outages and you are your own personal electric company. After the initial equipment costs, you pay no monthly electric bill.

These types of alternate energy systems can become much more expensive if you are dealing with much colder weather, however. I do not particularly want to be a slave to those costs any more that the utilities I escaped. In colder climates people could go back to the old days of cutting wood and using wood stoves. Cutting and chopping wood for colder climate areas is labor intensive. If you think that working 9-5 is tough, well, using firewood is going to be ten times harder.