A Chat With A Real Off Gridder - Down Under

Link Knight from youtube drove two whole days to come and visit me in Coffs Harbour Australia to share some of his own projects and experiments in off grid living.

His youtube channel is Link Knight

Link and I had a good weekend talking about various off grid topics. Some of the things discussed are solar panels and solar power consumption, water collection and energy savings.

Link lives on an off grid solar powered homestead in Australia. He has two separate solar power systems. One is for his fridge and another powers his laptop and lights.

Some parts of Australia subsidize rain water collection and even give you a free rain water tank if you need one. In many cases when you plan a home the rain water collection system must be included in the plans in order to even be approved at all.

Link has a couple options for a nice hot shower. One is with a hot water on demand system which he is not really impressed with. The other shower is a 12 volt camping system which is found in Australian outdoor shops and has a submersible water pump, hose and a shower. You provide a bucket full of hot water and have a nice, not shower literally anywhere.

This camp shower system is of interest to me for my RV. I am thinking that I may be able to connect the hot water line into the RV hot water lines and have hot water heated by the wood stove being pumped into the RV lines.

With this method I could either use the hot water on demand system or use the wood stove to heat up water for showering.

Link and I had a great weekend discussing off grid living and comparing our two very different systems.

Link only has 240 watts of solar panels and 200 AH of batteries but gets alone just fine. But he is in Australia and has a lot more sunlight per day than I ever do.

This is a real world system showing that with a little bit of money you can also be off the grid on a budget. His whole system only cost him 2400 to 3000 at full retail price.

This proves again that you can be fully off the grid on a budget.

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