My Experience
Category : Off Grid Stories
Published by andy on 14-Mar-2018 18:00
G'day readers lol.
In order to keep this fairly short I will write my story in a series of a few hundred articles of no more than 200 pages each.
Just kidding there lol. But I will try to keep to short bite sized chunks.
After spending twelve years in the Air Force I got out in 1984 with my sanity more or less intact and my super, along with a war service loan. With these I bought 30 acres, or around 12 hectares, of land at Little River, Victoria. The block was full of rocks and had no services like power and water.
We lived there for 14 years all told, the first seven without power.
I had to learn a lot of stuff and also learn how to do it for myself regarding power and water. Solar and wind power were out of the question back then because they were so very expensive.
Steve talks about the requirements of the shire in a few of his videos and I here to tell you that they are, at least in my experience, totally inflexible and at times downright stupid.
I'll give you one example. We had to have a split system septic. That means that the grey water is handled in a separate system from the black water side. The sink water went into a small grease trap then into a second larger grease trap along with the other grey water, then into a sullage pit. The sullage pit HAD to be fitted with an automatic electric submersible pump.
Hang on, we had no power! I approached the shire about fitting a petrol powered pump. No, it HAD to be electric. So, when inspection day came I had the inspector wait a minute while I started the petrol powered generator to power the electric pump. He went away perfectly happy. Go figure.
I'll leave it here for now as this is getting a bit long.
Stay tuned for the next installment :)
Written by Andy
In order to keep this fairly short I will write my story in a series of a few hundred articles of no more than 200 pages each.
Just kidding there lol. But I will try to keep to short bite sized chunks.
After spending twelve years in the Air Force I got out in 1984 with my sanity more or less intact and my super, along with a war service loan. With these I bought 30 acres, or around 12 hectares, of land at Little River, Victoria. The block was full of rocks and had no services like power and water.
We lived there for 14 years all told, the first seven without power.
I had to learn a lot of stuff and also learn how to do it for myself regarding power and water. Solar and wind power were out of the question back then because they were so very expensive.
Steve talks about the requirements of the shire in a few of his videos and I here to tell you that they are, at least in my experience, totally inflexible and at times downright stupid.
I'll give you one example. We had to have a split system septic. That means that the grey water is handled in a separate system from the black water side. The sink water went into a small grease trap then into a second larger grease trap along with the other grey water, then into a sullage pit. The sullage pit HAD to be fitted with an automatic electric submersible pump.
Hang on, we had no power! I approached the shire about fitting a petrol powered pump. No, it HAD to be electric. So, when inspection day came I had the inspector wait a minute while I started the petrol powered generator to power the electric pump. He went away perfectly happy. Go figure.
I'll leave it here for now as this is getting a bit long.
Stay tuned for the next installment :)
Written by Andy