Isn’t living off-the-grid every man’s dream? Be self-sufficient! Pay no more utility bills! Have power during the rolling blackouts and winter storms! It’s all so grandiose, and for most people, so completely out of reach.

But never fear; there is still hope. Even a city dweller can do things that decrease their reliance on the grid. But first, let’s break the issue down into manageable pieces, with help from the experts at Evergreen Mountain Labs and http://www.EvergreenGasLabs.com, and look very briefly at each puzzle piece in turn.

There are basically five items to address in order to live completely grid free. You can implement one, two, or even all five, items, but the secret is to start somewhere.

1. Cooking
2. Heating, Cooling
3. Electricity
4. Food
5. Water, Sewer, Laundry

1. Cooking Needs. It all boils down, no pun intended, to energy usage. Find the cheapest way possible to cook your food. For some people, this means getting a wood stove. For some it means getting a propane camp stove and stocking up on propane. For some, it means getting a solar oven, assuming that you get lots of sun. And for everybody, it means working more with dried goods and fresh fruits and vegetables, and cooking less often, or only cooking one pot of stew or something in the morning, and then nibbling on it all day. Electric stoves aren’t really even an option here; they just plain use too much electricity.
2. Heating/Cooling. For space heating and cooling, you need two or three things. If you can swing a wood stove and firewood, do so. If you can swing a swamp cooler versus an air conditioner, do it. And insulate everything, to the gills. Well-insulated items take less energy to keep them at the proper temperature, than do poorly insulated ones.
3. Electricity. You simply have to have electricity to survive in today’s world. So the trick is to minimize it wherever possible (heating, cooling, cooking, entertainment, etc.) And the first thing to remember is this, CONSERVE electricity however possible with energy efficient everything (including lights). The second thing to remember is NEVER use electricity to heat up anything; it’s wasteful. Find alternatives. As for generating electricity off the grid (including you city dwellers), get at least one 12volt, deep cycle battery, one solar panel you can place in a window to keep it charged (or one of the small, pollution free ones being developed by Evergreen Mountain Labs), and a 300Watt Inverter to power whatever it is you need. If something uses more than 300Watts, you can prolly do without it – with the possible exception of your clothes washer. You can get a small 5KW generator for things like that, but NEVER run them indoors, and then find a way to store or procure fuel for it. A diesel one can even run on biodiesel that you can make yourself or often get for free at a local restaurant.
4. Food is a bit of a trick, but there are still ways that you can raise enough of your own food to survive, even in a city apartment. Forget meat unless you can stomach mouse and rat, and focus on vegetables and fruits. Start with tomatoes grown upside down from hanging pots. They produce like crazy, and will cover many of your daily vitamin needs. The trick is to focus on plants that produce a fruit or vegetable on an ongoing basis, without needing lots of space to do it in.
5. Water and sewer can also be a trick sometimes, but there’s still hope even for the city dweller. Rain water, snow water, and even creek or pond water can all be stored and filtered (or boiled). So start by getting yourself a high quality filter (distillers take power), with a supply of replacement cartridges. As for sewer, get an odor free, indoor composting toilet, and you suddenly have a fertilizer, plant food source as well. Laundry, since it uses so much water, can be an issue. The only thing I can offer there is learn to do it by hand if the need arises, because your washing machine simply takes too much power

By addressing all five areas of grid dependence, and by learning to conserve and live simply, anyone, including city dwellers, can learn to live off the grid and be energy and grid independent.

Some of the products mentioned in this article are or soon will be available at http://www.SurvivalOffTheGrid.com, along with info, ebooks, and more.

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Someone sent me this pretty interesting youtubevideo yesterday, that shows how this guy built a simple magnet motor, something that we have already played with on occassion here at Evergreen Mountain Labs, without ever completely figuring it out. So with both interest and a touch of skepticism, I checked out the link they sent me. And it blew me away. Suddenly, various puzzle pieces of research I had done in the past all clicked into place for me in what I can only describe as an “Eureka Moment” that left me trembling with excitement.

But first, here’s a link to the video on YouTube. Check it out, then come back to read both my scientific explanation and then my layman’s version, of the phenomenon at work (and no, I can’t see where it breaks the laws of conservation of energy).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf1IesrHBh0&NR=1

First, the scientific explanation:

Magnetism actually is not just a static force; it has a dynamic flow element to it as well that is not well documented. You can even create magnetic circuits with it, using iron wire and a magnet, hooking up the wire between the two magnetic poles a complete circuit path. This is an area of future research for us, exploring what kind of circuts might be possible. In particular, I want to know if I can create the magnetic circut equivalent of a transistor. There’s likely some amazing stuff you could do if there is (like magneto-gravitic wormhole physics manipulation?). But I digress…

The electrical equivalent of this motor is found in the “Poynting Flow Vector” motor, something I researched several years ago indirectly with Jean Louis Naudin of France. Basically, he built a motor based on the fact that electron flow has a “wake” force that drags static charges along with it as the electron travels along a wire. It creates a circular magnetic field around the wire, true, AND a dragging “wake” force parralel to the wire called the Poynting Flow Vector. Look it up if you care to, though there’s not much public research available on it yet.

This magnetic motor is built upon the same concept in the magnetic arena, that magnetic current flows from one pole to the other, and creates a wake force as it goes, and that a circle of magnets such as the one on the butter container lid in this video promotes a continuous wake flow in a circle that reacts srongly to the outside magnetic force.

*whew!* Still clear as mud?

The simpler explanation:

If you move the north pole of a magnet perpendiularly closer to the CENTER of a longer magnet, the longer magnet will slide forward, bringing the south pole closer to the perpendicular north pole; this is pretty common knowledge. But by arranging these magnets all in a circle, the magnets continue to slide forward in a never ending loop….

But what about the law of conservation of energy and the second law of Thermodynamics?

First, we have to recognize that while our current classical view of magnetism, gravity, and the universe explains lots of things, it does NOT always explain everything. This might be one such scenario. But by some accounts, aether flow theory does a better job explaining this one than classical physics does. If magnets are indeed aether flow concentrators, in a universe where the aether is in constant flux and flows into and out of all matter on a continuous basis, then the flow of the aether into and around the magnets can be tapped into and harnassed, as simply a subset of a much larger universe where the aether flow is dynamic and never ending. So in this magnet motor case, the energy being tapped into is simply replenished by the larger aether field “sea” around us.

OR…… Framed back in more classical physics terms, magnets might directly tap into the theoretical, resonant zero point energy field of the universe by nature of the resonant and in-phase magnetic domains located within the metal of the magnet, and the work they perform in this motor is accomplished by energy drawn directly off the zero point field itself, always being replenished… (Due to this, I predict that we will see a general cooling effect of the air temperature in the direct vicinity of a functioning, high-power magnetic motor).

The important thing to remember is that the law of conservation of energy applies ONLY to closed energy systems. Magnetic systems are by their very nature (whether they be zero point energy taps or aether flow concentrators – whichever way you want to go with it), open systems, due to their link to the larger universe around them. The law of conservation of energy simply CANNOT be applied to them.

So where do we go from here, and what’s next?

First, I am ordering a parcel full of high power magnets, then building a unit that can power something more substantial than just a simple light bulb. There is serious power embedded in permanent magnets, and I suspect that we can extract serious power from them.

So stay tuned for our research into this field as it comes out! (And yes, building plans will be compiled for people to order, from Evergreen Gas Labs, once I have functional units prototyped…)

Isn’t science cool?!

Tim

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