Environmentally friendly living

Ever wondered what it’s like to go off-grid? We meet a couple who turned on their own electricity supply, tuned in to a simpler way of life and dropped out of the rat race

Shoes, handbags, being a virtuous friend: these are probably the main things you associate with Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis. Yet it’s her eco-friendly credentials that she has been trumpeting on American chat shows.
“I’m off the grid,” she burbled happily to David Letterman. “I have a ladder that I climb up to check my solar panels. They cover the whole roof in LA, where there’s a lot of sun. And you can go and look at your electrical meter, and it’s spinning backwards. It’s very exciting — I have batteries to store the power.”
Living off grid — creating your own power rather than being connected to the national grid — is having something of a Hollywood moment. Stars as diverse as Daryl Hannah and Cate Blanchett are going energy-sufficient and living the good life Noughties-style, with solar panels and wind turbines. Even that famed gas-guzzler George W Bush is getting in on the act.
Of course, this is great for the super-rich in sun-drenched California. It’s not quite so idyllic in the wilds of the Yorkshire Dales. Two years ago, Louis della-Porta and his fiancée, Annette Robinson, swapped their home in a gated community outside Warwick for life off grid in the north of England.
“We’ve learnt to adopt an older, more natural rhythm,” della-Porta says. “We spend hours a week maintaining our power supply, checking storage batteries, making sure the wind turbine is okay and monitoring water levels. Everything has double or triple backup. The cooking and the heating are powered by a solid-fuel Rayburn. And there is a separate bottle-gas cooker, which we use more in the summer, when the Rayburn is off.” Suddenly, that film-star lustre is fading.
With the climate getting more chaotic and nonrenewable resources running out, living off grid seems the logical next step. It isn't just about saving money (in the long run, of course, as set-up costs are vast), but about reducing one’s carbon footprint to a mere baby step. It’s bizarre, then, that it wasn’t for either financial or ecological reasons that the couple decided to live off grid. “We were looking for something different, but we weren’t sure what or how,” says della-Porta, a product designer. “London attitudes had taken a grip on our lives: it was self, self, self. We lived disjointedly — home, work, exercise, socialise, all in different compartments — and we were rushing around from one to the other. But for what? We wanted a simpler way of life.”
It was a battle at first. Robinson runs a jewellery website (luvitjewellery.co.uk ) and della-Porta’s design business meant his clients wanted to swap sketches on a daily basis. When they moved into the house, however, BT wanted to charge them more than £100,000 to install a phone line, so they took it in turns to drive 10 miles each way to the nearest internet-enabled library.
Their “office” was a flat rock 100yd from the house, where they were able to get a mobile-phone signal.
Eventually, they built a receiving station that connects to the internet from a £20-per-month community service in a village five miles away, but it is only recently that they have rigged up a reliable power source. Over the past two years, they have seen two wind turbines blown away by gales and have bought a bank of forklift-truck batteries to store energy from the solar panels and the water generator that they dip in the nearby stream. Without Cate Blanchett’s budget, the couple have had to become practical in other ways, too. “Trying to get anybody to do anything up here was next to impossible,” Robinson recalls. “After the first round of everything breaking down, we learnt that paying people £100 just to come and look at things wasn’t really on. It was better to do it ourselves, including fixing the oil-fired boiler and replacing the hot-water cylinder when it burst just before Christmas.”
All of which sounds rather a lot of hard work. Do the couple really think it’s worth it? “Our friends are seeing that we haven’t turned into strange hillbillies, and are also realising that it’s possible to escape the rat race without having to give up on modern life,” della-Porta says. “In fact, apart from the installation and maintenance of the energy supplies, our lives have really changed very little, so nobody seems to think we are out-and-out nuts. Everyone should give it a try, but people are fearful to move out of their comfort zones and grasp the challenge of living in new ways.”
Nick Rosen is the editor of www.off-grid.net . His book, How to Live Off-Grid, is published by Bantam (£7.99)
Fancy green living?
Cloud Nine The modular houses made by this Cornish-based firm are so well insulated that the company predicts heating bills of as little as £26 a year for one of its two-bedroom units. From £88,000; cloudnine-living.com
Moylan Eco-friendly doesn’t have to mean countryside. This building firm has just obtained planning permission for Xantium, in Manchester, the UK’s first zero-carbon housing development. Each flat has a large terrace and energy-efficient appliances — and, thanks to new government regulations for green housing, there is no stamp duty to pay. From £150,000; properties due for completion in 2010, but available off-plan; moylan.co.uk
Eviee If you don’t want to go down the Kevin McCloud route and start from scratch with a grand design, there are smaller things you can change. This website sells everything from doors made of sustainably sourced wood to insulating carpet-tile backing made of recycled carpet tiles. eviee.co.uk