Your video, Raised off the Grid: Meet the 17-Year Old Living in the Wild, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I don't know why they didn't go thru the proper red tape to enter America legally. But then again, what does someone living on the streets and off the kindness of strangers in cities off the grid know about proper first world nation entry methodology?

I don't know what it feels like to struggle with illegal immigrantion, but I do know what my favorite cartoon illegal immigrant, Stitch, would say,

"Ohana means family, and family means never saying goodbye."

I consider Mexico part of our Ohana -- and some of those people are struggling to get here to meet their literal ohana. Maybe Amurica means fuck you, and fuck you means goodbye.

Anyway, I'm just an average American citizen that's doing alright in life, not perfect, but I certainly don't blame Mexicans for my problems... Idiots do though. Similar to how idiots take a few bible verses against homosexuality and weigh that sin as greater than all others, these other idiots similarly equate Mexican immigration as a higher, more serious issue than it actually is.

In psychology that's called "compensation", where you pretty much ignore your incompetence and inadequacies, and redirect your efforts into improving something else to put your mind at ease. This wall is compensation for America's actual problems.

Your point is moot though. At any given period of time, everything man does is a product of the civilisation that surrounds him. Nobody lives in a vacuum.

"What has that got to do with this video."
The water supply grid was one of the important "grids" you forgot. It may be trivial in a water rich region of the world, but, for example, living off of the water grid in the middle of Australia is hard work.

" That doesn't mean that he's living some kind of noble 'off the grid life style'".
I'm pretty sure you're the only one who has mentioned this. I think the point of the video is that he's doing something out of the ordinary that he really enjoys. I wouldn't mind living a step up from what he does (access by road). It would be very satisfying.

Do you have an opinion on living like that? Would you do it?

"I don't live on the water supply grid."
Cool! Is it by choice? Do you use the newer poly tanks? What's the annual rainfall you need to stay water positive each year? Do you use filters or a pump? Have you drilled for underground water (we call it "bore water" here in Aus). What region of the world are you in?

My point was that everything he uses on a day to day basis is a product of civilization. Has he given up some aspects of civilization, the internet, cell phones, TV? Sure but people in the middle of cities do the same. Water supply grid? I don't live on the water supply grid. Living off of rainwater isn't easy in some places? What has that got to do with this video. The man lives in a temperate rain forest surrounded by glacier topped mountains. So everything he needs or requires is more difficult to get or to get to. That doesn't mean that he's living some kind of noble "off the grid life style"

"The grid" means connected services, like grid electricity, city water, city sewer, piped in natural gas, wired phone, and wired internet.
Living off the grid means living where these services aren't available (or just not using them). It does not mean living like the Hamish or living as if you lived in the pre-industrial revolution era.

I can't fathom why that annoys you. He didn't claim to be living primitively, that's a different guy (and he's awesome).

Your video, Living Off the Grid in Paradise, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Yes, I don't really smoke anymore but it's a fascinating plant! Most evolved plant on the planet. I worked on a remote, off-the-grid, non-profit cannabis farm in the Santa Cruz mountains last year, was a total blast. I loved feeding the little babies and watching them grow so quickly.

Your video, Off the Grid on a Homemade Island, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I've been pondering this a lot recently. Basically, I am the sole supervisor of a complex money making system - I've watched the Vice President manipulate the money in strange ways to make himself look efficient - another bullet-point on his LinkedIn page. All the while I'm not making anywhere close to what I should and they refuse to give me a raise - even though I single handedly bring in about $100k every week.

So - I just started coming to work super late EVERY DAY. And when I get called out for it, or threatened I just smile and say "definitely" in a real snarky way to anything they say because I know I have their fucking ballsacks in a cage and they can't do fucking shit about it.

So in the meantime, I bought 17 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains, it's completely off the grid, solar, grey water (still get good hotspot reception for sifting). Any day now, I'm just going to walk off the job and royally fuck the slave owner capitalist scum fucks and start living like a true patriot. Can't wait.

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!

Thank you very much for your answers -- here's a couple more questions maybe you can give thoughts on if you have time:

Quick googling says the average US home uses a bit under 12,000 kWh per year. Divide that by 365 and get ~33 kWh per day, divide that by 24 and get ~1.4 kW per hour (rounding up in all instances). Of course, that's going to be higher in the day and lower at night, but one of the points of the batteries is to help smooth out that usage curve and make it transparent to the homeowner / user.

Anyway, questions related to those figures:
*Do those numbers sound ballpark to your experience?

*You've got 1kWh of lead acid batteries. Ignoring the fact that night usage would tend to be lower than daytime, an "average home" draw of 1.4 kW per hour would give you about 40 minutes of off-the-grid power (without help from the solar). That would probably require lifestyle changes to deal with; it seems like an average home couldn't get through a night without fully draining the batteries. True?

A 10 kWh pack like shown in the video would give 7+ hours, not accounting for lower drain at night. Seems like an average US house might well be able to go a whole night with that kind of battery without any lifestyle adjustments (assuming solar can handle 100% of the load during daytime PLUS charge up the batteries).

* Could your existing solar cells handle daytime load and charging of 1 or 2 of these 10 kWh packs so that you could be comfortably 100% off-grid?

* How much area do your solar cells cover?


I'm been very impressed with Tesla as a car company, even though I've never driven or even seen one in person (only a very few super-rich people have imported Teslas to Thailand). I thought that electric cars were going to be impractical toys for really out-there tree huggers, but everything I read about the Model S and other Tesla cars tells me that they are the real deal, actually superior to internal combustion for MOST use cases.

Hopefully without sounding too much like Howard Hughes, I believe that baseline practicality will let economy of scale take over and make Tesla and other electrics the way of the future. And this makes me likewise optimistic that Musk can similarly revolutionize the future of energy in general. Pretty exciting stuff!

I read somewhere that he sent an email to his coworkers the night before he died explaining that he believed himself to be under surveillance, that they should seek legal council if approached by any suits and that he'd be going off the grid for a bit chasing a big story. And then he dies at 4am in the morning in a crash nobody is saying anything about. it certainly reads like a scene from a hollywood thriller and I'm sure thats the narrative the news media would love to repeat.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if he was being watched given his history and all this NSA business. Maybe as little as a year ago I would have scoffed at the idea of him being killed...now I'm not so sure. I'd normally say the simplest explanation was probably the right one, but given the details of the crash that have been made public I've no idea what that might be. So no speculation from me, apart from to say that I think something stinks here.

Oh, and I'd love to know what that story he was working on was.

Not here, I consider his flight-time to have enhanced his ability to see through bullshit when it rears it's head-His lifestyle of off-the-grid, self-reliance no doubt aided in him leaping to righteous action-Hero of Fresno, the mayor should give him the key to the city....shower!

Three months worth of kerosene (or six weeks in the second generation version) is an astronomical investment for a culture who's barely able to meet it's day to day needs. For example, it's almost totally unheard of for an individual to buy a week's worth of any type of food (even rice). How much less likely are they to buy a non-essential tool like a flashlight? No wonder the creators speak of "villages" buying these... But that assumes these cultures have villages with their own purchasing power - do the villages collect taxes and have officials which then spend the public money pool? Maybe it will help the developing countries, but it seems a little naive.

Nevertheless, it's a good PR angle for them to get more funding. Practically, I'd love to see those things sold on Amazon or something for ~$20. They look like really good units for off-the-grid homes.

First, the sex thing is biblical based. It's part of the GOD package. you either buy into it or you don't. Republicans seem to buy into this more than Democrats.


As a parent of little ones I personally wish like .com, org, .gov, .net there was a .porn in which you could select and filter out sites by extension. I believe the internet community just passed such rules. The next step would to make sure porn sites use the .porn extension. The choice still would be the user. One could argue that the government should not dictate this but since these new .com extension will come in affect, browsers will inherently make this filter option possible.

So the issue would become "forcing" porn sites to re list their sites to the new .porn extension. Only governments could pass laws and fines that could "force" the hand of porn sites. As much as I would like this to occur I don't believe government should.


Only when you have kids do you see things differently. You really notice how inappropriate TV shows and commercials are.

One could argue that the lack of civility in society is from lack of morality. The TV is full of inappropriate situations. One could argue that TV is the real teacher of of society morals.

I am all for not letting little ones grow up too quickly. But unless you live off the grid they will be influenced more from TV, Web, and social media. Parents are out gunned by the media empire.

So your question for an response is hard. I feel Government should not interfere with business.

Business on the other hand should conduct themselves in a morally positive fashion.
Adult TV themed shows should be aired late at night after little ones should be in bed.

Porn sites should adopt the .porn extension and browsers should have user selectable filters.

Parents also should involve themselves and promote morally positive themes from media by emailing, calling etc tv\ cable providers and you local government representatives.

We are all in this together. We either all morally rise or fall together.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

I love how republicans hate big government intrusion into peoples lives... right up until sex is involved. Now, tell me @bobknight33, @quantumushroom, @Winstonfield_Pennypacker, @lantern53 and
@Chaucer do you really want a piece of government installed software on your computer that monitors your web activity?
Can't wait to see this....