Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating by describing our life as “off grid”.  

I mean, if you think about it, when most people hear someone say they live off grid, they picture a cabin in the wilderness, snowed in for the winter, hours away from the nearest Walmart.  Maybe you’ve got some solar, but for the most part you’re living a primitive lifestyle of self-sufficiency.  How picturesque.

In contrast, Cody and I have fairly easy access to electricity here at The Compound, which means a hot shower and an InstaPot if we just walk next door.  I’ve only been snowed in once, and our nearest market is only 10 minutes down the road.  We get Amazon deliveries and weekly trash service.

However, the yurt is officially unconnected from the electrical grid!  If we want electricity, we have to leave the house to get it, whether that’s recharging our portable battery bank, or using a washing machine.  We also don’t have cell service where we live, which means we have to rely on the wifi signal from next door for all of our internet and telecommunication needs. 

Which is why when we woke up to this morning, it was a couple of hours before we even realized the power was out!  It wasn’t until we tried to go online that we realized the wifi wasn’t connecting, which is usually our first indicator that the neighborhood power might be out.  

Waking Up Without Power

When our phones wouldn’t connect to the wifi after repeated attempts, Cody headed next door and confirmed that yes, in fact, the power had been out since 2am.  We’ve had a major rainstorm in our area the last few days, I’m guessing a limb finally came down on a power line.  But we didn’t notice, because we were warm and toasty with our wood stove, and all of our lights are battery or solar operated, and my morning cup of coffee doesn’t require a machine!  We just went about our morning as usual, totally unaffected by the loss of electricity.

Now of course, we’ll still want to start up the generator at some point to keep the freezers going (but it’s pretty cold out today, so there’s no rush), and it is a little unnerving to be unable to call out in case of emergency.  But other than that, we’ll just haul water from our shallow well, charge up the battery pack off the generator instead of the shop outlets, and take basin baths instead of showering next door.  I can even use my laundry plunger and wringer if I need to do a load of laundry!  

No Power? No Worries!

Overall, we really don’t have to change anything about the way we live to compensate for the local electrical grid being down.  I didn’t wake up to a freezing house, worrying about how I was going to cook breakfast this morning.  I’m not scurrying around trying to find flashlights for everyone.  We don’t have to ration water or worry about how we’re going to flush the toilet.  

Instead, Cody woke up and stoked the fire, we clicked on the battery-powered lights on the Christmas tree, and I put a kettle on the wood stove and fired up the propane grill while he got the girls up and dressed.  I even turned on our solar-powered radio for some Christmas music, just to add a little extra cozy to the atmosphere, which goes quite well with the rain pitter-pattering on the canvas roof.  Just a lovely, normal, wet December morning!

A Reassuring Reminder

It’s days like this that remind me that even though we don’t live hours away from town and do everything exclusively like backwoodsmen, we do in fact still live off grid!  Sure, we enjoy the luxuries of having the grid nearby when it’s available.  But when everyone else in the neighborhood is scrambling around trying to figure out what to do in a power outage, the bulk of our systems either already don’t use electricity or are easily transferred to off grid alternatives without hardly a bump in the road.  And that is a reassuring feeling!

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go enjoy hot puff pancakes for breakfast!