And the other side of it is I was using natural energy sources. I wanted renewable energy sources and I didn't want coal fired. So this was a conscious thought for me with my philosophy of living lightly on the land, to choose solar and to choose wind as a backup. My philosophy is to use the natural energy as much as possible and so solar was my first choice, and then wind as a backup was the second choice. I think that the two power together quite well and I'm not using fossil fuels. The other reason for going off grid though was because I have a connection to the grid half a kilometre up the hill, or half a kilometre down the hill. And both were going to be quite expensive for me to hook into. And as we're on decomposed granite here, and it's very difficult to dig through inexpensively, so the cost was a factor with that. But I also don't have the ongoing costs of being hooked into the grid. And although I can't feed back into the grid, I've felt that the cost of going totally off-grid was balanced by not feeding back into the grid.
What are the environmental and financial advantages of going off-grid in rural areas?
Video Transcript