Living off grid (kind of)?? As few bills as possible?

[Cottagelife1]

Ok so I have had a little revelation? We are moving into a small cottage for about a year while we save and build a new house? So I have decided to try to live with as little bills as possible?? Has ANYONE ever done this?? Aibu to think this is possible?Posting here for traffic but there may be a better group??
So we will have no rent/mortgage, no tv or tv license, no water bill, we will need electricity obvs, but we will have a stove and our own wood, and a gas bottle for the hob.

We were thinking chickens , a pig to feed our waste food too (and the compost heap obvs). Am I missing anything?? Any ideas from those who try to be self sufficient??

@Holidayshopping we both work so we still pay all bills necessary. We own the cottage outright so mortgage and Ireland does not have council tax or water rates regardless of mains or having your own well.

@Blobby10 having a well and septic tank works just the same as having mains, it’s no different from inside the house at all.

Thanks for letting me know @Cottagelife1 - very interesting! A part of me still longs for an isolated (but lovely) cottage in the country but I think my practical head means I will stay in surburbia for ever more

If you keep poultry you can usually buy grain in bulk from local farms and mix your own feed. But you need to know how to balance the nutrients, and you need metal storage bins.

Can you extend the cottage rather than building an entire new house? May be much cheaper.

Fjos is correct - if you are not connected to the mains you don't pay for water. But you do have to pay (for materials - and tools and labour, if you can't DIY) if exterior/underground pipes freeze and burst or simply spring a leak, and it's sensible to save up to replace water storage tanks/pumps/pipes every so often. In some regions of Scotland, if more than one house is connected to the same private water supply, then the local authority reserves the right to test the water to make sure that it's safe to drink. This can cost almost £100 per year. A good septic tank may never need emptying, but if it does, a single visit from the tanker can cost £200-£300 or more, depending on location and how urgent the problem is. Mains water is cheaper, on the whole.

Solar panels are great, but they are a long-term investment and can be quite costly to begin with. (I know OP has mains electricity, so this doesn't apply.) Bottled gas is handy in a power-cut but very expensive.

Other things to think of include fencing (not cheap) - to keep out sheep and deer - and strong gates (ditto), maintenance for any private road/pathways, wind-netting/rabbit guards to protect newly-planted bushes and trees, plus the cost of getting woodfuel delivered (and of building a shed or lean-to to store it in the dry; it burns much better and pollutes less if it is well-seasoned). Delivery costs for other things - eg for bulk porridge oats, pulses, nuts - can be very high, and couriers don't call every day.

If you like fresh greenstuff and salads, it can be a problem to ensure a year-round supply unless you have a polytunnel/greenhouse. Plus, ideally, 'daylight' electric lighting, since many leafy plants don't grow well in dark northern winters. On the other hand, absolutely nothing stops kale ... And, even if you fancy a once-a-fortnight trip along icy, single-track hilly roads to the nearest supermarket - ours is almost 60 mile away - that's not always the answer. 'Just in time' supply chains means that many shop-bought salads/fruits/veg etc have a very short shelf-life. They won't last long once you've got them home

As other rural dwellers will know, there is still no mobile phone signal and no broadband in many places. Satellite broadband typically costs around £50 per month fro a small household; it is relatively slow, can be disrupted by bad weather and downloads are almost always strictly limited. Petrol costs much, much more than in towns.

As others have said, it's great living a remote place, but it's not cheap and it's not always easy.

I thought you could feed a pig household scraps if the meat was for personal consumption? A friend looked into it but decided the cost of freezing 60kg or so of meat was prohibitive.

If you want to go totally without TV licence/music costs, join the library - you can get CDs, DVDs as well as books.
Bikes for short journeys.
If growing your own food, grow the stuff you like! Also if you plan on selling any of it, sell the low vol/high price stuff (raspberries, strawberries etc)
Duck eggs always seem to sell well.
Suss out barter possibilities locally - do you have skills you can swap for services you need?
Do you know anyone with a cash and carry card? Can you stock up on essentials like loo roll, washing powder, nappies, wipes?
Public transport - taxsaver tickets save a BOMB if you commute to work. Plus travel in the zone chosen is unlimited on them so you can use them at the weekend too.
There are some surgeries with payment plans - you pay X per month and all visits are covered by that - if you are in and out of the doctor with small children this might be well worth it.
Basically, to live as frugally as possible you may need to spend a good bit at the beginning of the year to buy things in bulk (non perishable consumables, travel costs) but the savings are well worth it.

Oh does the cottage have an open fire? You could convert to a cassette stove (cheaper and less work than a free standing wood burner) - they are much more efficient. But there's still a couple of grand cash outlay - might not be worthwhile if you are going to sell the cottage as soon as your house is built.

Also you could start a blog about the process - and get a little income from the ads on it...although I've no idea how to go about that!

I thought you could feed a pig household scraps if the meat was for personal consumption?

You can't feed a pig anything that's been in a kitchen.

Having the animals won't save money.

and you need metal storage bins.

Get onto Freecycle/Gumtree etc and look for old broken down chest freezers, they're rodent proof. We use a small one to keep our chicken feed in. Someone along the lanes had it sitting out in their front garden, as they were getting rid of it, so they were more than happy to let us take it.

If you have enough chickens, take the eggs into work and sell them to your colleagues, or have an honesty box by your gate. We sold enough to pay for their feed costs each week. They sold well, because we fed our girls good quality feed, and the eggs were better tasting than what you can buy in the supermarket. As we had different breeds, the eggs were different colours too, which gave them a novelty factor, white, chocolate brown, blue, and olive, as well as the "normal" light brown.

I agree with Motoko that really fresh eggs from one's own chickens taste much better than supermarket ones - and they do look very pretty.

You can also freeze surplus eggs (separate the yolks and whites first). For cooked dishes - etc quiches and cakes - frozen eggs work surprisingly well. But probably everyone knows that already .....

@littlewoollypervert we plan on extending the cottage.

I have friends who recycle water for washing clothes and flushing toilets. They get a discount on their water rates as they are reusing water so less goes back to be processed.

They collect rain water for crops.

They have a quantity of original solar panels that give them a neutral electricity bill due to old tariff rates.

They grow food, keep limited livestock and have chickens for eggs.

They have a small wood and season and burn their own (wood burners) saving on heating bills.

They have always tried to be carbon neutral and these steps were put in place decades ago, they must have saved so much on bills.

It might be quite a feat to go off grid completely, but significant bill reduction is very possible.

Although we have mains water here, we don't have mains sewerage, so we don't have to pay that portion of the water rates. However, in order to be exempt, you have to show that rain water coming down your drainpipes, doesn't empty into the public sewer system. (Such as running off your property into the drains in the road outside.)

@Motoko we are in Ireland there are NO household water rates here.

No, I know @Cottagelife1, I was mentioning it because other people had been discussing them.

@Motoko 😂😂👍

I once visited a property for work where the tenant generated his own electricity with a bike hooked up to a battery, water from well in garden, no washing machine/running water, grew all his own vegetables, Was vegetarian so no meat.

He had lived a very interesting and long life, visited many different countries and cultures and in the 60s was a bit of a playboy. Semi famous. Wildlife Photographer. When I think of living off the grid, I always think of him!

The house was rural but it wasn’t that remote. You could walk it in 30mins from a local small town.

Good luck OP! Get that bike out!

Hi OP.

I hate to pee on your parade here and while it sounds lovely and all very Goodlife, I have just seen the building work is to the existing cottage. Having built our house (in Ireland) here is my advice.

Forget your idyllic year with animals and veggies etc. Your land is going to become a building site, all your plantings will possibly have to be dug up. Your chickens will have to move and how good layers will they be around heavy building machinery? Perhaps you have lots of land? This year as a starter - strawberry plants, tomatoes in gro bags, courgettes and cucumbers in same? I'm a plants and flowers rather then veggie gardener. Some trees we wanted to save didn't make it after site levelling and root damage.

I would use your time to forward plan, you say your DH is going to be involved, you both work and have 2 children. I managed our build - You have no idea how all consuming this will become. 'Is Mom at the site again?' was my children's call for the year.

We have solar tubes on the roof so water heating taken care of, even on grey bright days.
Rain water harvester - used to flush toilets and to outside taps for garden. All water runoff has to be accommodated on site, so this solved that problem. This can be used to washing machine too with specific particle filters in place.
Biocycle septic tank - better breakdown - drainage less often.
Solar gain from glass - lots of it and south facing
I balked at the amounts spent on insulation at the time - we are now so toasty , it was all worth it.
Heat pump for hot water to underfloor heating.
Plan your garden so that when the diggers are in you can have your orchard prepared, the chicken run located and the raised beds in the right places.
Foundations for a greenhouse laid?
We also have no tv - we are plagued by the tv licence folk by letter and in person and they just dont want to believe us.
Your husband probably has lots of contacts and this may sound a tad extreme but I got 3 quotes for every job, apart from where I was certain of the tradesperson I wanted. I didn't necessarily always go with the cheapest but I did do a lot of bargaining.

If you are living on site (we didn't as we knocked and rebuilt, we were 5 mins away). We spent most weekends keeping the site clean - rawl plugs, cable ties, fag butts, lunch packaging. Obviously if we had used a builder this would have been their job. As a keen gardener I did not want to spend my early years in the garden digging up plastic and builders detritus.

Friends came and helped us load the final skip with the last of the building waste. Watch your skip like a hawk, tradesmen love a nice handy skip to clear out the van/their childrens broken toys!

When the job is done, you can have your happy chickens, veggies and fruit knowing there will be no upheaval, root damage etc.

Hope some of this helps. Good luck.

Oh and if you are putting in a stove - don't chop up all the left over wood from the build and burn it, you will wreck your flue. If it's not treated you can use it as kindling along with seasoned wood.

A polytunnel is worth considering. We use ours for growing tomatoes and other tender crops in the summer and for starting seeds in the colder months. DH built me a hot box which is filled with fresh horse manure. As it breaks down the heat generated acts as a propagator.

@almondfinger thanks for the tips, yeah the site is just over an acre and the cottage is literally in one corner so we plan on putting the veggies and chickens over the complete opposite side if we can. Hopefully they won’t need to go over there 😬

Yes I work (but I teach part time) so here in Ireland that’s 9-3.40 (2 days one week and 3 days the next) my DH can and will do a hell of a lot of work himself. Except blockwork.We have renovated several houses before. I hear you about living in/in a building site.

Insulation is our biggest MUST for this new house,we want it as efficient as possible (not passive though)
That’s funny you say that about the tv licensing ppl- we haven’t had tv for the past 3 years and I’ve not heard a dickybird from them 🤔 I’ll be interested to see if that changes once we move. But to be honest we’re in no real rush once we get to the cottage we will be saving a hell of a lot more for the build.
Thanks.

Do give security consideration from the start:

• Rats will be after the hen feed
• Foxes will be after the hens
• Fuel thieves
• Tool thieves

We dont keep hens so the first two dont concern us but I know are a big issue for the people on our allotment field. Feed needs to be kept in metal bins. Foxes in a hen coop will attack the whole flock.

Thieves are a problem for the whole field. The fuel thieves tend to be kids looking for fuel for their mopeds. To counter this we keep the petrol (used for rotavator and mower) away from the field.

The tool thieves are more organised. Our field was raided last night, sheds broken open and swag loaded onto barrows to be taken to a van. The tool thieves were after lighter machinery (strimmers and the like).

To defend against the tool thieves we dont lock our shed (saves it getting broken open) but chain our machinery to a lump of concrete sunk in the ground for the purpose using a big old motorbike chain and a very sturdy lock.

I know you said you will be on site but organised thieves will watch for when you are away.

See, this is the thing with permaculture. If you make your veggie patch in the furthest away corner of the plot in order to save it from the building site, in the long run it may not be in the most convenient spot. Do have a look at it the principles at the preliminary stages of your project so you can use permaculture to help your planning for the future.