We also made the home as energy efficient as possible. For example, the large roof overhang on the front porch shades the house from direct sunlight in the summertime while allowing the low-angle winter sun to warm the house. We built our home to look like a traditional country farmhouse from the early 1900s, and added some passive solar features to reduce the heating and cooling load. Here’s how we run our rural Ontario home using an absolute minimum of fossil fuel energy. We put our plan into action, and have been enjoying off the grid living ever since. The solution was obvious: Don’t connect to the grid and instead plan to run our house entirely with renewable energy. There was only one downside: It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to connect the property to the nearest electric lines.
A lot at the back of her family’s farm fit the bill (and the wallet). Lorraine wanted to move closer to her family, preferably to a piece of land large enough to offer some privacy and plenty of room to support her “addiction” to animals. Twenty years ago, when my wife, Lorraine, and I decided to move off the grid, our motivation was simple.
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