How can I live a ecologically sustainable life and not have any bills?

Question

I know it's hard work to "live off the land" and lessen our impact on the world, but I'd like to do so. Some ways I know already, like using solar panels as my sole source of electricity, and growing all my own food. But what about things like heating water (I guess I could do that over a fire) and getting running water (from a nearby stream is convenient, but not all that practical)? What about refrigeration and going to the bathroom? Anyone know these things?

Yes, I know I put the question up three times. It was an accident and I deleted two of them, so no lecturing please.

Answer 1

work hard and pay off all of your current debts, move to an island and live there.in the castaway movie,tom hanks managed to survive just fine without a computer and internet connection.people in the city are too spoiled by technology, me included lol sure, it's fast and convenient but it causes some people to take the simple pleasures of life for granted.living naturally in nature like that mancub, mowgli did in the jungle book isn't easy but gradual adaptation is all it takes.i'm still in the process of paying off my bills and such things but soon i'll become a spear throwing jungle woman:-D

Answer 2

You will have to learn from the ways of our ancestors. For water, have a well drilled and install a hand pump, or drink from the local stream (I would have it tested to make sure it safe). To get hot water, get a black tank that is as flat as can be and long (it will catch the sun better) and put it in the sun. Attach this tank to a tree or a pole and drill a hole in the bottom and attach a valve so that you can open and close it. Gravity will give you running water, and the sun will heat it (although probably not in the winter). You can attach a hose from your well to fill the tank as needed with a hand pump.
For food, plant your own garden. Keep in mind that the food will not grow in the winter, and that you will get a lot more than you need all at once; you will have to preserve the food until you need it. To do this, you will have to dry or home can it. You should also raise your own livestock, such as chickens, pigs, cows etc. An added bonus with the chickens is that they give you a constant supply of food, as they are always laying the incredible edible egg. Cows are also a good investment, as long as they are bred for milking they will give you milk everyday. Because the milk will not be pasteurized, it will have to be drunk immediately or else it will spoil. You can even make your own cheese from this milk. If you do not eat meat, you will not need refrigeration. However, what you can do for refrigeration is dig a hole as deep as you can into the ground and make a box that will be buried, except for a trapdoor to get into there. The ground will act as insulation, but you can also add your own commercial insulation. In the winter, chop large blocks of ice from a nearby pond and fill the box with this ice. Then cover the ice with hay or something similar to keep it from melting. Keep your food in there; because it is under the ground and is well insulated, it should stay cold all summer long, as long as you don't enter it too much.
As far as waste, if you own a large plot of land I would say be just like the animals--go wherever you want! Nature will decompose of the waste the same way it decomposes the waste from all of the other animals. If you do not want to degrade yourself like this, then simply have a septic tank with an outhouse attached to it. Of course, you will have to have the tank pumped every few years, but there is no way getting around it.
As far as not having any bills, you are probably out of luck. If you own land, you will have to pay property taxes. If you work, you will have to pay income taxes, and so on. However, if you can live in a small shack that you are able to build yourself then you will not have a mortgage payment. If you use a bike as your main source of transportation, you will not have to make car payments or pay for the insurance. If you pay for everything with cash and not credit cards you will not have a credit card bill. If you decide that you don't need a phone, then you will not have a phone bill. If you install an electric generator powered by the running water from a nearby stream you will not have to pay an electric bill (although you will probably not have enough money to buy the generator with cash, so you will in effect make yourself a bill). However, by following these steps you will become self sufficient and be almost bill free.

Answer 3

You might be able to do it, but it would be very much a full-time job, and one that you may not really love doing. Unfortunately, we discovered long ago that subsistence farmers can indeed subsist, but without trade and money, that's about all they do.

There's no particular reason to believe that by living independently you'd be doing the environment much of a favor, either. Professional sewage treatment is better than using septic tanks, and those solar cells contributed plenty of greenhouse gases to the earth when they were manufactured.

The big problem is always health care, of course. Those herbal remedies ain't gonna be so great when someone gets sick, and I would worry a bit about that stream you want to drink out of, lest you have an upstream neighbor.

Wanna make the least ecological impact? Get a small apartment in a big building in a big city and use public transit. The earth will never know you're there.

Answer 4

Okay, heating water can be done with fire (not so ecologically sustainable), with geothermal energy (more sustainable, but expensive as all get-out), or solar energy.

How do you heat water with the Sun? There's a detailed book at:

http://www.jc-solarhomes.com/how_to.htm

As far as heating your house, A different part of the same site is good:

http://www.jc-solarhomes.com/

Running water isn't too hard. Either a. Dig a well uphill of any contaminants, or b. Let your roof and gutters give you water every time it rains.

They sell 50-gallon collections tanks for about $70 online. That would be enough for an average person for 2 or 3 days. Just attach 2 of them to your gutters, and you have water. I'd recommend filtering the intake (gutter covers will win half the battle) and boiling it before drinking (just as a precaution... I personally think roofs are pretty dirty).

If your tank is above your head, gravity will carry the water out of the sink, just like any municipal water company.

Refrigeration isn't so easy. Hmm, I have an unproven theory. Heat is just energy. So all you have to do is minimize the amount of heat entering an area, while maximizing dissipation of heat. Something as simple as a shaded tank full of water could provide cooling enough to keep a few spoilables good for a week or so. Although isn't this really about keeping meat, cheese and veggies edible, right?

For a little sweat equity, you can build a rudimentary smoke house... just a fire pit with an enclosure around it. Treated wood is NOT recommended for that purpose, but smoked foods tend to last longer. Dehydration and carbon and whatnot, I'm not smart enough to explain why.

You need help going to the bathroom? Oh, my... Well, the easiest thing to tell you is to dig a deep hole, build an enclosure around it, and when you do your business put a little lime on it to keep down the smell. But that's not gonna fly, long-term.

So, after you've arranged a chamber-pot or personal sewage system, you'll need to do a search for a product that people can use to make pet crap into fertilizer. Use this for your own crap. And save your morning whiz... it's also good fertilizer, dilluted 1:20 in water.

At its most basic, your water system just comes from above, goes through your house (and through you, not to sound disgusting), and then into a storage tank, where you can mix it with your compost.

But I have three unfortunate words for you: Property taxes, buddy. You won't likely escape them. And it's always a good idea to keep some coin-of-the-realm, just in case you wanna splurge on something. So I suggest (and note that I am _not_ a CFP, so my opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it) you purchase either a. rental properties that pay you every month after they pay for themselves, or b. stocks or mutual funds that pay a decent dividend that can buttress your lifestyle. You might also check out Prosper.com, where you can lend to people for good interest rates. I'm currently checking them out, not sure if it works, but it's worth investigating.

Hope that stuff helps.

Answer 5

I know that you have gotten quite a few answers but I have a working solution to the water indoors.

In Bermuda the roofs are painting with a special paint (made from lime juice I believe). Under the houses are like basements that hold the water. The rain water goes down the treated roofs and is collected into the basements. Then they get the water for their taps there.

As far as not chemically altering the water - well they do drop goldfish in there. The fish eat the algae. Of course who really wants to think about the fact that goldfish poop is in your water.

I do know there is a longstanding joke that drinking the fish water increases memory. Ask anyone on the island to tell you a story about when their cousin was 4. It seems they'll remember it in vivid detail.

Answer 6

To you intend to raise crops, forage, or raid your neighbors?

Solar as a sole source of electricity s usually not enough. Consider adding a wind turbine and if you are at an appreciable altitude, remember that thinner air cuts down on power generated, so oversize it.

If you are generating all your own power, use a refrigerator. Build a root cellar for storing crops if you are raising any.

Learn about septic systems and how to construct and maintain them.

Build a cistern to hold water and spend all summer heating it with the solar panels, which will heat it even in the winter. Use solar heating for your shower, too. Done properly, you can get the water uncomfortably warm.

But first, go look at an Amish farm and see how they do things without electricity.

Answer 7

The "not have any bills" part seems like a problem, although you can certainly minimize them. A concern:
Medical care. Your options are:
1) Choose not to receive professional medical care.
This is not a big deal with a cold, really distressing with a broken bone, and lethal in some other cases. Pioneers' lives were shorter and more sickly than ours. Cavemen never lived long enough to need reading glasses.
2) Choose to receive professional medical care and attempt to pay in chickens, canned beets, and firewood. Most medical billing offices are not that open minded, but you never know.
3) Choose to receive medical care at least for true emergencies (like when your axe misses the firewood and slices an artery) and not pay your bills. That's not "socially sustainable".

Most of us like paved roads, at least having them available for the squirting artery trip to the hospital. I'm happy that police are at least theoretically available to protect me and my stuff if needed. Hey, someone might covet your tricked-out solar collector. These services are available courtesy of tax payers. This is another example of how if you're in the U.S. of A, it's pretty hard to entirely remove yourself from the goods & services grid.

An ecologically sustainable lifestyle is really cool. I'm interested. It needs to be socially sustainable too and that's where the bills come in. If there's something or some service someone has & you want, there will be "a bill" whether it's in canned beets or dollars.

Answer 8

It is amazing how little you actually need. In my country, Paraguay, people often live in houses which really don't have a lot of the things houses in the western world have - and once you're into the techniques of handling that, that is not a problem anymore.
The easiest way to go fully sustainable is to simply sever all our civilizational "nice to haves".
Go to bed when it's dark, put on more clothing when it gets cold, bathe in rivers and streams, eat your own, organically grown veggies in the raw (doesn't get any healthier than that), and walk everywhere.
I know you asked for a technological solution, but consider that the manufacturing of solar panels and battery banks may well equal the damage and cost caused by continuing to live conventionally.
Experimenting with that kind of lifestyle though would not only make your bills slimmer - it would change your entire outlook on life, and the experience of it. To make it happen, all you need to do is shut everything off which costs money.

Answer 9

Buy your land in NH where there are no property taxes. Heating would be best with a wood stove. You can cook with it too. Passive Solar heating you can have through good windows. Solar heating planes can be on the roof. For elec. you would need a windmill, to make it. For pumping the water you can use a hand pump, by your sink; or hope the windmill makes enough elec. for you. I know an area, not in NH; but elec. wires do not go to their homes and at least one has a computer from elec from the wind mill. You may have to take up a lot of gardening and canning; if you want to go all the way.

Answer 10

Your dream is unrealistic. You have missed the point. Unless you become a bum and a beggar, you WILL HAVE BILLS.
If you cook over a fire, you will use up the trees and pollute the air. If you pee in the stream, the water that you want to drink will be polluted. If you live off the land and plow it up to grow your own food, the soil may erode and silt up the streams. If you fertilize your crop, it may be a better crop but the fertilizer may run off into the streams. Before we had refrigeration, people dried and salted their food so it would keep. And you want HOT WATER & ELECTRICITY? What kind of pioneer are you anyway?
Living an ecologically sustainable existence doesn't mean that you live free. In fact it might cost just as much but instead of paying ConEd for electric power, you pay someone else to design & manufacture solar panels. It costs money to be politically correct.

Answer 11

Grow your own food, build your own house and run it off either wind power and solar power, get water from a cistern or spring, and make your own clothes. That about covers the ecologically sustainable part.

The next part is a bit harder and that is the "self-substaining economic part. Unfortunately, unless you live somewhere "off the radar screen", you will need to pay taxes and for that you will need some form of property for which the taxes are low or non-existant (maybe found in Alaska). None of this is impossible but it will take a LOT of determination and self-discipline on your part. Oh and by the way, learning to shoot a rifle will figure heavily in your future plans for survival.