Living in a house without electricity
Both my wife and I grew up in normal modern houses hooked to the grid. All of our married life we’ve been hooked to the grid and in a typical apartment or house. Three houses back, counting the one we are currently in, was a long distance from where we are now. We had a friend that gave us access to a couple of cabins in the woods where we would take the family to go and vacation, it was a home away from home. One of the cabins did not have electricity and the other had a couple outlets and a light wired from a nearby barn, we never turned that on when we stayed the night. We loved it, it was very peaceful and quite. We had one of our children born in one of the cabins, it was a wonderful experience. My wife is a powerful woman.
We don’t have exactly zero electricity in our current house, but pretty close to it. Our house is powered by our bodies, wood fuel, some batteries, and in the summer a little propane for cooking. We are both adamant about not hooking back into the grid, we don’t like it – it makes us dependents to a power company with a perpetual monthly bill. We both really don’t want a “smart home” and love our dumb little house – we’re old school. Overall we both quite enjoy being disconnected from the grid and not having our solar system tapped into the house. We may do a little solar on our next home but that isn’t decided. The main thing I’d like is a pump for our water (right now we hand pump and we’ll keep that as an option either way), a few basic lights, and to be able to power things in the home instead of going to the shop. We have a solar system in our shop right now which is elaborated on more fully in the “DIY Solar System Crash Course” writeup. That system is about 100 feet away from our house in our shop with no wires running into the house. We charge things in there and bring them into the house. Primarily a couple lanterns, power tool batteries, a couple laptops, and some Nintendo DS handheld consoles. We are thinking of getting a single 50-100 AH LiFePO4 battery to bring into the house for winter use. It would be nice to be able to skip walking in the cold to the shop for longer periods and to save our power tool batteries for the power tools. Now and then we go up to my parents’ empty double wide trailer home to do a few odds and ends in the summer (laundry, showers, baths, canning). It’s pretty remarkable how loud that thing is compared to our cob and straw bale home. I’ve started this writeup in the trailer, I’m making some bone broth with their propane stove from two sheep recently butchered while catching up on laundry. And it’s insanely loud. The laundry is shaking around, the dryer is humming, and the refrigerator and A/C kicks on regularly. Now that I’m thinking about it mildly it is very distracting…
I’ll describe a little bit on how we function without electricity for anyone interested.
First of all we are not in a very comfortable climate, it gets very cold and very hot. I’ll start with the house temperature regulation since that’s a biggie for many. The house doesn’t do too bad really all things considered. We have had some days over 110 degrees this summer with a lot of days over 100 in a row and the highest it gets in the main part of the house is about 82. Not super comfy but not terrible, feels pretty great when you first come in from the hot day. We’ve been using a fan that runs on our power tool batteries pointed directly at us when we really want it. I did the math and it costs about $0.20 per day of 24h use on the wear of the battery, that’s if you buy the battery at full price which we’ve never done – not too shabby. In the morning on the hottest days we wake up to about 78 degrees on these hot days which shouldn’t last too long. The house really shines in spring and fall, it stays a very comfortable temperature modulating between about 64 and 74 for the bulk of it – roughly 4 or 5 months of the year. When we get the cold or hot snaps that aren’t very long in duration all our thermal mass from our earthen walls and floor really smooths out the temperature. During those times we can easily start using the wood stove to do quick cooking in the morning and evening for breakfast and dinners. As it starts dipping further we’ll keep the fire going a bit longer and add a cooked lunch on the wood stove and merge into keeping the stove going all day, sometimes choked to not use much wood when not cooking. In winter is when we do most our baking, since the stove is going at a high heat most of the day – it’s pretty nice. We also have a thermal mass rocket stove tied to a bench. It is very lovely, when we had a very small cook stove we had the rocket stove going way more often and now that we have a bigger cook stove (Pioneer Princess) we mostly use it during the coldest times of the year. So that pretty much covers the gist of our heating and cooling. It is a pretty basic, cheap, effective, and a fairly sustainable setup. If we were cut off from all inputs we’d be well enough off. We use about 24 gallons of propane a year right now, which will likely go down once we build our summer kitchen with wood cooking options during the hot weather.
For people who wanted to emulate this but wanted to keep it a little cooler and easier heat I’d recommend a basic solar system and a window A/C unit your system can handle. Our shop system could easily run a lower wattage window unit. On the heating side one could add a direct vent propane space heater or two. We had one in our parents double-wide and we added one to our last house before the trailer and it was helpful. In our current house I’d probably put one upstairs and in our sunroom if we added propane heaters. This house would use very little electricity and propane to moderate the temperature compared to any other house we’ve lived in. Also this house would be more comfy if our kids were older, the doors are left open very regularly and we have no curtains which could be drawn to block direct sun. We could have a screen in the upstairs door to leave it open and cool things down faster at night, and so forth. Younger children complicate some things, but life would be dull without them. So glad we were able to bring all these unique characters into our life.
Lets see… What else is common in the electric home. Laundry! Well we cheat pretty bad on that during the summer. We will eventually be using the electricity from our solar system in our shop for the majority of it. But right now we are transgressors using the unholy grid in a house of desecration – the double wide trailer (haha). We lived in that for over a year, it’s pretty lame but it was better than the apartments we lived in and way better than tents. We were grateful to have had it so close to where we were building a house and still grateful to be able to use it some. It’s sitting there empty and someone might as well utilize it and try to keep it from being a raccoon and bear den. We’ve had to battle rats and mice, not a lot of fun. If one of my siblings moved in we’d likely get the laundry situation down at our homestead going asap. But when there is an easy solution sitting around it’s easy to lower that as a priority. I’ve tested our system out and it works well, our solar system will run the old Maytag wringer-washer we have when the time comes. We hope to get a cistern tied to our shop/barn for laundry and a summer shower and that will solve the problems we’ll have if/when someone takes over the trailer. When the trailer is winterized we do laundry in a trough with spring water. It works well enough. It’s a lot more work though and my wife does most of it. The kids and I help in waves and I think she really appreciates it. We will all love the old Maytag washer once that’s set up in the shop. We do baths in the winter by heating water on our stove and dumping it in the tub. We also have a camp battery powered sprayer for those who want to shower. It can be dropped in a pot of warm water and sprayed out into the tub for showering.
Hmmm, what else did we use a lot of when we had electricity. Oh ya, lighting! So we tried to go with the old oil lamp system in the beginning and we loved it! But the glass covers on the top are very fragile, they keep breaking with kids around. One of our kids even tipped one over and started a fire – he was terrified of oil lamps for about a year after that. It wasn’t a big deal, I just smothered it with a blanket or towel or something… It was such a minor thing in my mind I forgot what was used to put it out. He’s comfortable with them now but we don’t use them often because they just keep breaking. Kids are wild destructive forces of nature, and I love ‘em. So for now we are mostly using rechargeable lanterns and rechargeable light bulbs. We have tried about 6 or so different brands and models of things and only one has stood out as pretty great. Maybe I’ll look it up again and share the link (no link but see the bottom of this post for details). Some have died super quickly and some are still working but have flaws of some sort or another. I’d like to go back to oil when the kids are more matured. The oil lantern light is so soft and comfortable on the eyes. We’ll probably continue with a a couple LED lanterns just for the higher lumens. For making dinner and other things it’s nice to have a burst of brighter light which the oil lamps don’t put out. My wife and I also use our e-Readers quite a bit at night to use the restroom or get a drink and such. Those things are great, we both have the Kobo Clara which lasts for over 2 weeks of night light and reading books. We also just go to bed with the sun. In the winter Mama will read longer into the evening with the kids and sometimes play multiplayer Nintendo DS games with them in bed, and in the summer they are tired and go to sleep quickly. It works out pretty swell, we truly don’t miss all that obnoxious lighting of the typical city and city home.
Welp, that covers the gist of our electricity in life in the home. We grind wheat with a manual grinder. We might get a lower powered electric one and grind wheat in the shop at some point. The mill we are thinking of is on back order. We make toast on the stove top. We don’t refrigerate anything, instead we can, ferment, and eat things fresh from the garden – we also reboil soups and stuff daily to “reset” them which is very easy in winter. We also use a cooler behind the house in the shade which works as a refrigerator for parts of spring and fall, and in the dead of winter our sunroom is a pretty cool temperature. We really have limited power so there are a lot of appliances we don’t have and will never have – and that’s great. We have to think before buying something electricity based because we literally can’t plug anything into the house and in the shop we have limited power (right now we can do about 700-800 watts for long durations). If we bought a 3,000 watt or higher something or other we just couldn’t even run it at all, and we will live fine without it.
So there you have it. A family living in the modern world choosing to ditch electricity in the home for the most part. Maybe not as hardcore as the Amish, but more than the average off-grid type family. it’s not as primitive as it could be, but far from the typical grid tied house. And we love it.
Have a great one!
Additional resources:
The rechargeable LED lantern we like is the 1500 Lumen model from the brand Consciot. It has a good range of brightness level with a warm light setting that we like. It also doubles as a USB charging device (never used this feature so I can't comment on it), the battery in it lasts longer between charges than any other rechargeable light we've tried. It has held up well for two years now with many other brands dying before that over the years. This one is easy to find on many websites to purchase, do a web search for more details. Cost is roughly $40 each in 2026. We bought two from another brand that cost about $20 each at the same time and both of them are broken already. This brand has held up to the rough handling by children so far.