Tag Archives: Off Grid

How do we…take showers

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We are a family of 5 (while our godson is living with us) living in an off-grid camping trailer while we build our house. 

And we ripped the shower and toilet out of the trailer long before we ever started living in it.

So, how do we de-stinkify ourselves when the need arises? (And believe me, living all together in 280 square feet, the need arises quite frequently!)

However, in reality, we all take fewer full showers than most people do. Being that we have to haul in our own water, we try to conserve as much as possible. The girls and I only wash our hair once a week, and the water always gets turned off while soaping up. And in between those several full showers a week are the “rinse offs”. This is where we basically only wash off the truly stinky parts. You know, those areas you’d hit with a quick sponge bath.

When we lived here two years ago for those few idyllic months, we mainly took sponge baths and went to my mom’s house when a full shower was needed.

But we knew that couldn’t last for too long, so when we moved back to the homestead this summer, we knew we needed something more permanent. And yes, there’s always Pajii’s trailer, but we don’t want to constantly be using his water and power or crowding his space every time we need to clean up. Not to mention how tiny those trailer showers are!

So Hubby built us a shower room constructed from 2×4’s and plywood.

This 4×4 mini-shed makes a very spacious and wonderful shower. We use a 20 amp hour, 12 volt battery connected to an RV water pump which sits on top of one of our 50 gallon barrels of water. 


A 100 watt solar panel is hooked to the battery to keep it topped up. The pump brings water through a propane powered instant hot water heater.


Right now, we only have the ability to turn the water on and off while inside the shower, not adjust the temperature. So showering can be quite the adventure depending on how warm the ambient air is as well as how warm the water inside the barrel has gotten. If you’re taking a shower mid-afternoon on a warm day, you’d better turn that puppy waaaay down before you get in there. 😀 We have plans to rig it up so we can adjust the temperature from inside. But we’ve had a few, more pressing projects.

And speaking of the inside…


The reason we have a shower curtain in there is so we can hang our clothes and towel on the hooks and close the curtain around them so they don’t get wet. 

There is no floor built into the shower. Rather, we placed pavers on the ground inside so the water can drain easily. 


So far, the whole system has worked almost seamlessly. Once the temps drop, we will need to do something to keep things from freezing, but for now, and probably at least another month or so, we’ll be fine.

And hopefully we’ll have the well in by then and can move our whole base of operations down to the house pad (we’re still camped out on the upper pad about a quarter mile away from where the house is going to go.)

Oh, and the latest news on the well is that the drilling company has a broken rig, putting them further behind schedule and they’ll contact is when they can get us back on the schedule. *Sigh*

But it will happen when it happens. There’s nothing we can do about it, so why stress over it? God has his reasons. In the mean time, we’re keeping busy.

So anyway, now you know how we get clean here on the homestead.

How do we…wash clothes

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After a busy day of taking the portable septic tank to be dumped, filling up 4 barrels of water, and doing 4 loads of laundry, I got to thinking that you all might be interested in how we do some basic things here on the homestead. Such as wash laundry. And take showers. And use the toilet.

We live in a camping trailer, yes, but that trailer doesn’t have running water and is not hooked up to septic. In fact, it no longer even has a bathroom. 

The former bathroom

And even when it did, we never used it. Would you if you had to move the entire outdoor living area just to take your trailer out to dump the septic tank and take on fresh water every week or so?

Yeah, us neither. 

So, we have an outhouse of sorts, an enclosed outdoor shower, and we even have laundry capabilities, right here on the homestead. 

Over the next several days, I’m going to be doing some posts on how we do these mundane, yet necessary tasks.

And since today has mostly been about doing laundry, we’ll start with that.

So, how do we wash laundry? Well, I suppose we could take our laundry to the laundromat. Probably most people would do that and most people probably think that’s what we do. But we’re not most people. I don’t want to spend several hours each week sitting in a laundromat (the nearest of which is all the way in town). 

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Disclaimer: Pagee takes his laundry to said laundromat. So obviosly he has time for that. 😉

Not too long ago, we acquired a washing machine for free. It now sits beside our shed, with two 55 gallon barrels of water next to it. 

The first time I used it, I had to manually fill it with 5 gallon totes. That thing uses upwards of 15 gallons of water for the wash and rinse cycles – each! That’s 25-30 gallons of water per load! And it’s not that old of a washer. No wonder everyone is going to HE washers!

Anyway, we have to run the generator to run the washer, so it’s a noisy process. But I don’t have to leave the homestead to do laundry. Which means other stuff gets done while the laundry is washing. And that’s a big deal, folks!

So here’s what our set up looks like. 

(The tent in the background belongs to some friends who are visiting. 🙂 )

We use the generator (sitting behind the water barrels) to run the washer. The water pump we took out of our trailer is hooked up to a battery. 

This type of pump is nice because when there is full pressure in the line, it stops pumping. When the pressure drops (ie when you open a faucet, or the washing machine opens it’s valve) the pump automatically kicks on. Pretty sweet.

Anyway, when we get ready to wash, we make sure the barrel has enough water, hook up the pump to the battery, turn on the genny, plug in the washer, and then use as normal. 

As shown above, the wash water is diverted by a hose and goes to a couple trees. It looks redneck, but it works. 

Note: if your drain pipe is lower than the water outlet on the machine, like if the hose is just laying on the ground, all that water you’re pumping into the washer will just drain right out of the hose. Don’t ask me how I know this. :-\ 

When we’re not washing, we put the hose and table away. So far, we haven’t had any real rain this summer, so we haven’t had to worry about the washer being out in the wet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

And, of course, our dryer is completely solar powered. 😀

And that’s how we do laundry here on the homestead.

Off grid cold storage

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No, this isn’t one of those posts that tell you how we keep our food cold with no electricity.

We like the convenience of a refrigerator. And fridges run on electricity. Or propane, such as the one in our trailer that crapped out on us several weeks ago.

We looked into buying a new one for the trailer and were staggered by the prices. It just didn’t seem like the best deal to spend that much money on a new fridge for an old trailer, especially since we’ll only be in the trailer until the house is built (ie, less than a year). We also looked into buying used, and while the prices were better, they were still fairly high, and the selection was minimal.

So instead, we decided to beef up our battery bank and solar panels and get an inverter so we can run a regular fridge on electricity. Yes, just as expensive (or moreso) than a brand new fridge. BUT, the solar generator system will be usable for other things on the homestead later down the road, rather than just a fridge to sit in an unused trailer once the house is built.

Hubby’s work happened to have a small fridge sitting around, not being used. So they gave it to us.

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It ain’t pretty, and it’s not terribly efficient, but it works. And even though it’s not very efficient, it’s small, so the power draw is fairly small as well.

So now we have four 100watt solar panels on the roof of our trailer. We have a battery box containing three 100amp hour batteries. We have a 1 kilowatt inverter. And we have a charge controller capable of handling the power coming in from the solar panels.

And if you know what all that means, you know more than I do!

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I’m just so excited to have more fridge space again. And to not have to bug dad every time we want a cheese stick or something. But I’m also thankful that for the last several weeks, we were able to keep our cold foods in his fridge, rather than an ice chest.

But then again, if we were having to buy ice every other day in this heat, maybe The Hubs would have gotten the system put together faster. Hmmmm…

Oh well, it’s done now, Hubs learned a ton about the whole process, and even I learned a little along the way.

And we again have a working fridge. 😀

UPDATE: since our fridge sits outside in the hot air rather than inside in a cool house, Hubby decided it needed more insulation.

Thus our robo-fridge!

Keeps our food cold AND looks…well, I guess it looks..ummm, OK, it looks kinda dumb. But it works! And that’s all that matters. 🙂

Maridy

“I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121

The Heat is On

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Howdy, howdy!

Boy, I’m horrible at keeping you all up-to-date. I keep procrastinating because there’s so many parts to our story I haven’t told yet. But I figure I should just go forward from here, otherwise I’m gonna get further and further behind. 🙂

So summer is officially here and the temperatures are rising. Where I sit right now, under the shade shelter we built, with the breeze blowing across me, it’s not too hot. Inside the trailer? Well, as long as the breeze is blowing through the open windows, it’s bearable. At least Bachan and Pagee have AC in their trailer.

We’ve been having quite the time keeping tarps on the shade shelter frames. The wind has been atrocious.

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But we keep redesigning and rebuilding. And then it’s good till the next wind storm. And by wind storm, I mean literal hurricane force winds. Yeah, anything that’s not tied down – and even some things that are – gets blown off the mountain down into the canyon.

But that’s life up here. You learn to deal with it. You prepare the best you can, and trust God for the rest.

Our schedule is about to heat up, too. Our house plans were turned into the building department this last week! We have just a short month or two to prepare for the work to begin. And then we’re gonna go crazy!

Not that we haven’t been keeping busy.  We finally got our shower all put together.

You may remember that our trailer does not have a working bathroom. So we’ve been washing up with buckets and wash cloths, or going down to Mom’s to take showers.

But now, we can take full on regular showers right here on the homestead! I’ll do a explanatory post on that whole system some time.

And speaking of my mom, she brought a TON of cherries from her trees up to gain some help in pitting them. Her and Princess Girl pitted a large refrigerator drawer full of cherries. Flower Girl helped by being the official taste tester. 🙂

The following day, the girls and I went to Mom’s to help her make jam and a couple cobblers.

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The end result was 27 cups of jam using three different recipes, and two cobblers.

Life hasn’t all been hard work over the last month, though. I’ve had a little bit of time to relax here and there. A couple Sundays ago, I spent nearly the whole afternoon in the hammock.

The girl’s and I had an opportunity to dress in 1860’s clothing and join in a Civil War Days event.

And just the other day, amongst errands, we spontaneously decided to take our fast-food to a park for an impromptu picnic. (I learned that I feel less guilty about eating fast-food if we turn it into a picnic. 😉 )

And amongst all the work of settling into the trailers, getting our house plans turned in to the building department, and the myriad of other things we do every day, Princess Girl and I have been working at our summer job at least a couple days a week.

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One thing I’m learning is that up here on the homestead  everything takes more time. Because we are living completely off grid in an old camping trailer, there are extra steps to nearly every task.

Gonna make breakfast? Gotta gather up of the food and utensils and dishes needed to take out to the outdoor kitchen first.

Gonna go potty? Well, do your business, but know in just a couple of days, you’re gonna have to take care of that bag of poo. (Another post on that is also in the works, just in case you’re wondering. 😉 )

Gotta get something from the shed? You gotta walk all the way over there and back -several times usually – to get what you need.

But it’s a good kind of work and we’re happy to be here. As has been my mantra for the last several months, “the trade off is worth it!”

Maridy

“I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121