[Music] it started with a freedom 35 plan wasn't about getting rich it was about needing less money it was about holding our own land of being debt-free now we spend way less time working way more time doing whatever we want we lived off-grid before and loved it we knew that it was the best way to live cheap and be surrounded by forests rivers and mountains back in 2011 we bought a beautiful forest and 40 acre piece of land in northern British Columbia and the land is a lot of fun it also provides us with all
of our electricity heat water and most of our food I'm just about ready to plant carrots and my straw bale Gardens I love straw bale gardening it's so easy you just sprinkle a little dirt on top and plant your seeds in no weeding awesome to keep our house debt-free we built it small and simple we place the cedar post directly into the ground like a pole barn so there's no need for excavation or a concrete foundation we use locally milled Timbers and log rafters that we cut ourselves the whole house was wrapped with plywood and
then foam insulation with a couple giant south-facing windows it has board-and-batten siding and a living roof the whole thing cost less than 25 grand this is our little off-grid house we built come check it out smallest about 900 square feet and so with seven of us we're making the best of the small space here's our entryway so this is our living room and our kitchen and our dining room and our school room we've got some really nice big south-facing windows so in the wintertime and spring and fall get lots of Sun in here and in
the summertime the Sun is high enough that it doesn't get too hot in here here's our main wood stove it's a blaze king catalytic stove it's super efficient and it's right in the center of the house this is how we heat up water or a lot of things either dishes or showers or we can put a kettle on here to make some tea so here's our giant multi-purpose table it's for eating and preparing food but also for homeschooling and whatever else here is a girl's room it's about 7 feet by 7 feet which is perfect
to build in two single beds listen for the older girls master bedroom nothing too fancy here last room in this mansion is the little girl's room so this thing's 16 feet long and about seven feet wide in here and so we got a queen-size bed we got two like little they're kind of like mini single beds we first started collecting rainwater off our woodshed roof and now off our shop roof we have 900 gallons of water storage underneath the shop floor where it stays cold the whole system cost $1,000 compared to about $20,000 for a
while the house isn't plumbed so we collect the water from the shop and carry it to the house and buckets and because we don't have running water we don't generate a lot of waste water the kitchen sink and the shower empty into a shallow drainage field in the backyard the Berkey is awesome this thing is a passive water water filter so you can pour whatever water you want in the top here and it's just got ceramic filters in there's they're like 0.1 thousandths of a micron or something like that so it'll get rid of any
suspended solids but also a lot of bacteria and all that bad stuff so pour it in here and hours later this thing slowly fills up for showers we can heat up a bucket like this on the wood stove over the wood cook stove and this is like the only running water in the house it's kind of running there's a pump here come on a switch and it'll pump the water up to that tank up there and the tank comes out through a nozzle in the shower so it's kind of like a one-time-use situation you fill
it up you drain it all and you fill it up again next time so the bathroom is pretty standard composting toilet bucket style very very simple it's a regular toilet seat it looks all pretty normal except in there instead of water there's just a pile of sawdust and after every time you use it you put in more saunas electricity is no problem at all we started off with a single solar panel and a simple RV system this feeds the house with 12 volts for LED lighting phone chargers and a music player after a couple years
we invested in a two and a half kilowatt system that allows us to run a deep freeze fridge washing machine and pretty well anything else we want the system has an excess of power most of the year only during prolonged snowy or cloudy periods in the winter do we have to run a backup generator the Genny runs less than 40 hours a year under here is our little 12-volt system to power the house underneath the bread basket we got the batteries and we have an AC charger so if we ever have to run a generator
we can charge batteries to this guy this is our solar charger which is running all the time blinking green means it's charging right now just some various breakers and this guys the battery monitor a nine percent charge this is and it's 99% charged or better eight months out of the year in the wintertime it can get a little sketchy we've got these two new lithium ion batteries their lithium ferrous phosphate and they are replacing this whole huge bank of lead acid batteries we've been running on these for a few years now we just got these
ones bolted into the wall we cut over to those we've been using them for a couple months and now we've found a new home for these batteries this is a super old cook stove little fire box in here and it quickly gets up to temperature for the oven and a warming shelf up here the cook stove is awesome for cooking and baking the girls and I have mastered the cook stove and along with some cast-iron pots and pans we can make anything including pies cakes dots now this roses sink this is a trick sink see
what you can do here that you can't do in a normal house is you can turn on the tap and nothing will happen it's very special anyways it's just a sink so we got to pour water in there from from a bucket but the drain does work and we have a grain water system out behind the house so roses kitchen is a bit small for the amount of people she feeds but she does a great job her mixer is pretty nice to have and really because it only runs a couple minutes a day and it's
really only couple hundred watts it doesn't really there's no issue with it in the solar system same thing with the blender that's no problem the toaster however is a seasonal appliance in the wintertime it's off limits it's just too much power okay fridge it's a normal fridge and this is the reason why we have the big solar system in the shop so that we can run the fridge and the deep freeze living off-grid for us includes a few different types of chores we carry water to the house we empty compost buckets we collect firewood but
our biggest challenge here is just maintaining our Road in the winter we often get 5 to 6 feet of snow and we clear about eight kilometers to the nearest maintained Road home schooling is both a requirement and our preference on here the kids only take about two to three hours a day to complete the regular studies we want to make sure that they can transition to university but at the same time our main goal is to ensure that they learn in everything they do we don't want to focus on pure academics we want them to
learn to be great people with broad and varied life experiences the girls love to ride horses and they're always riding horses or otherwise spending time with them and Sarah oldest keeps peace there's always something to do around here we love to go down to the river to fish or to swim we like to go for walks either hunting or gathering or just exploring we love it out here and we can't go back greedless this is too good [Music]
