Farm Update: We're going Off Grid

We only pay one bill up on our mountain and that's for electric. We pay a truck to haul up water for us and go ourselves to get our propane cylinders filled for cooking so for the most part, this house is fairly off grid. The power bills here in Mexico are done on a scale, with those who use the most to pay the most and subsidize everyone else. But every so often someone like us gets put in that pay scale, even though we use less electricity than most people we know.

We aren't using more power but our bill was more than doubled what we've ever paid for it. That's inspired John to get active on getting us off grid, and hopefully with some financial help from friends we will do so within the next two months or so. These photos are of the beginnings. Those cylinders are 18650 lithium cells which we've been collecting and recycling to reuse to make our own at home power wall. We'll have solar panels to power it all and our current needs will be covered at the least, only needing upgrades for extra things like more kiln time and the like.

By collecting broken laptop batteries and breaking them open, you can get a lot of free cells just by testing them. When laptop batteries fail, it's generally only a few cells in the pack which can contain up to 9 cells that has gone bad. So we save the rest and plan to build battery packs with them, for the house and the electric car we're still planning on converting.

So stay tuned, as we're going to share all of our adventures with this process on here. Considering the high bills and spotty service lately (power outages as a whole aren't normal here in the city, save for small barrios like mine) having an off grid alternative seems more and more appealing every day. It'll be cool to say we're off grid again, although we'll still have all the nice things like plumbing and a nice stove.