Also expensive and hot.
Unlike your mom.
Just use LEDs so it’ll only be expensive.
I estimate that it is about 100 bulbs in the picture. An overage households LED is probably about 5W. So 500W. Less than half of a typical microwave. LEDs are amazing!
Hmm. Microwave LEDs. On a bunch of drones. The drones fly into a sphere shape around you, then microwave your brain.
🥵
Our little house in the forest started out fully off-grid for the first year. As a result of that our ceiling lighting is actually 4 strands of solar garden lights wrapped around the rafters.
It isn’t as bright as this aisle. But it is 100 individual leds strung up semi-randomly and has a similar feel.
I want to hear more about this off-grid house in the forest.
Well then. Settle in. This story gets longer every time I type it.
Historically - my work has moved my wife and I around 2-3 times per year. Not just to different cities, but countries and even continents. At last tally we had lived in 8 cities in 3 countries across 2 continents, in ten years…
Then we got ‘stuck’ in Switzerland for 11 months due to covid lockdowns, on what was meant to be a three week trip, and I told myself I would never move again.
So when we got back to Canada I started looking in earnest for some cheap land to buy and just settle in. As it turned out, cheap land didn’t really exist anywhere with civilization, so we bought 6 acres of forest in the province of Quebec with a creek dividing it in half at the far end of a logging road 5km from any services.
When I say any services… I mean it. Our piece of land didn’t even have a driveway. So we started clearing small trees (we have a rule that any tree over 6-8inches in diameter earned their place, and we have to work around them) and got our travel trailer settled in.
We built some DIY solar to keep the lights on and phones/laptop charged. And I drove to the closest town each morning to check in with work and commit any changes I had made the night before and attend any meetings that couldn’t be converted into an email.
We then carved a few paths to get water from the creek, and dug an outhouse.
Over time we went from hauling buckets up from the creek and boiling them on the propane stove to do dishes and showered using bags hanging from a tree behind the trailer - to eventually having a gas pump and some garden hoses that we could fill the trailer’s tanks with.
Once we had the basics of cooking, heat, and waste taken care of I focused on building up the solar system to allow us to have actual internet service from Xplorenet satellite internet so that I could work from home instead of driving to town every day.
Then the work really started… Clearing land and building a small amish style shed (12ft X 28ft with a 4 ft screened in porch) and getting it insulated. We got the insulation done, and the woodstove installed just in time for the first big snow and moved into the tiny house from the trailer.
We then dug and installed our own septic system and built a 10x12 addition to act as a bathroom and put in an old clawfoot tub that we bought from an old guy on the side of the highway. I then set up a 12v PEX-based water system and propane camping water heater to service the bathtub and a kitchen sink.
It is primitive, and involves some prep every time we need hot water. But it is getting improved all the time.
At this point the hoses from the creek would freeze rapidly, so we replaced the system with two 1000litre IBC totes that live up against the house so we could fill them both up and put the hoses away instead of having to pump water daily.
After about 16 months of this weird 1880s lifestyle with internet access the power company finally agreed to come hook us up. And then life changed massively again.
We could now run our desktop computers, put immersion heaters in our water tanks, and generally spend less time worrying about things freezing or waiting for the sun to charge enough battery to run the vacuum cleaner.
I’m forgetting about 99% of the details here. I suppose at this point I should be turning this into a blog or a post somewhere… But that will have to wait for a time when daily life isn’t so much physical effort. I can barely afford the time to shitpost and leave snarky comments that I do now :p
This coming Spring will be time for a water well and starting the housing for a few chickens, ducks, and a goat or three.
Some Photo Evidence
Early Days:
House Firewood Storage and Bathroom Built:
“Front” of the house actually faces the forest not the driveway. Backwards… Like me!
Winter beauty - Why I put up with the cold!
Summer Solace - Why I put up with the heat and bugs…
And last but not least - The lights that brought me to this thread. Ignore the vapour barrier ceiling and unfinished walls. I’m working on it!
Holy shit, this is so cool!
It sounds like a ton of work, but it also sounds like living the dream to me… quiet, peaceful, around nature. Thanks for sharing!
It is all of those things, for sure.
The chipmunks who will climb onto my lap to eat and the blue jays who scream every morning if I don’t bring them their breakfast, are the perfect balance for dealing with human problems at work.
Maybe you should take up painting too.
Chipmunk tax! This is my best chippie friend. Her name is Apple. Apple loves peanuts, and I love apple!
Also - My wife is a wet-on-wet oil painter, so bob ross really fits :)
Hi Apple!!
Thank you for sharing. You should either have a copy pasta or link to a previous write up and just add to it over time.
Idk if lemmy allows one to post to yourself.
Good idea. Thanks.
Do you ever have unexpected human visitors?
Very rarely. There are a few other people building cabins on the same logging road now. But not many that come out more than a few weekends per year.
We also have cameras at the end of our quite long driveway. So we get notifications before they actually make it onto the land.
this is incredibly inspiring and is a life goal of mine. change is scary but I want to make this change sometime. nice work!
It is always getting harder and more expensive, but I truly believe that almost anyone who is physically capable of holding down a job could probably pull this off.
We got extremely lucky and got our land for relatively cheap at the beginning of the sale from a subdivision of a bunch of forestry land.
But it is not uncommon to find it even cheaper if you can look around in some of these tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
We were on the other side of the country so we couldn’t really negotiate as we needed a place to land the trailer when we got here.
Other than that, we’re basically dedicating most of my salary to doing improvements every payday as we can afford it. I do make quite a good salary but nothing extravagant.
It’s much easier to not spend money when you have to drive 15 minutes to get a pop or some gas… So a lot of the total budget can go into improvements. And I am a pretty cheap bastard so a lot of it is cobbled together
But it will keep improving until eventually It feels like a real house. Or so I keep promising my wife… ;)
That’s a cool story. Thanks for sharing it!
Thanks for reading :)
I walked into that aisle recently and got such a warm feeling of comfort and nostalgia I almost started crying. I can’t even explain why. I love it so much.
I think it is because when you see it for the first time as a kid, it leaves such an impact that whenever you see it again, you feel nostalgic. I personally feel the same when I go through the carpet section and seing all the rolls of carpets hanging on the walls.
Or as some of us on the spectrum call it: the overstimulation aisle!
I respect your preference but live in fear of it. I have to walk briskly down that aisle, I’m pretty sure I would actually have a mental breakdown if my house was that bright, lol.
We went the other way. Replaced every bulb we could find with a lower wattage equivalent. Lit the living room with those flicker flame bulbs so it’s like being in a fire-lit cave at night. Replaced some more lights with dimmable salt lamps. Hung up Christmas lights in other places. There is virtually never a time after sunset when a room in my house is fully lit.
It’s marvelous.
Worst aisle for a hangover
I hate that aisle it’s so overstimulating but honestly so is the rest of the store.
I like the wood aisle. It smells good.
Lighting stores > this aisle.
I used to stock that aisle overnight, I knew the shift was over when I got blinded after ten hours in the dark.
I always thought it would would be nice to put an array of leds behind a diffusing panel in each of my walls/ceilings. With as much control as reasonable over color/brightness and if it wouldn’t be insanely expensive with individual or at least regional control over them. Basically instead of drywall, panels that can be individually removed for maintenance.
But I don’t know what property of dry wall I would need them to mimic, would it be better to mount those panels in front of and still have dry wall rather than replace it?
I’m sure it would be pretty expensive, though not sure exactly how expensive. But it would make for some pretty nice options for ambience or mood lighting. And you can always turn the wall ones off or leave them super dim if you just want the room to look mostly normal. But you could program it to have like clouds rolling by over a green field, super diffuse of course, like you had your eyes unfocused. Or just pick a new wall color every day.
I guess you’d need acrylic or glass panels, but that wouldn’t feel or act like a regular wall. I think your biggest problem would be power consumption. You’ll probably be surprised how much power those LEDs can consume, especially on high brightness
Well, I suppose it’s about distribution and power levels. I mean currently my whole house is lit by LED, just in traditional sockets. But they aren’t expensive. And LEDs are more power efficient at lower power than their max. So having 10’000 leds that are rated for 0.5 watt each, running at 10% of that, wouldn’t be that expensive to run. About 500 watts plus the inefficiency of the system as a whole. But would be a similar or greater total amount of light as my current bulbs.
The initial upfront cost will certainly be the main cost issue. And yeah, acrylic panels is what I was thinking for diffusing. I don’t need it to feel like a wall, but I would need to know if drywall has some immutable property I would need to replicate, or at least make sure is still something that acrylic would take care of.
Edit: it looks like drywall is primarily used due to it’s flame resistance. So I would probably want to keep it. Acrylic is technically tough to ignite, but once it does ignite, it burns vigorously. So that is probably the main problem. Even keeping drywall behind it, acrylic covering every wall could be a very bad idea in the case of a fire hot enough to get it started.
Edit 2: Frosted tempered glass would be fine in that regard, but significantly more expensive. Ah wells, my VR house will have to have it instead. Much cheaper to do in VR, lol.
Sure but why not be weird if it makes you happy?
Because you have to pay the weird tax
That’s the best section to calm down in, there’s buttons you’re not only allowed to press but encouraged to mess with, there’s calming lights and you can put on a small light show.
It’s a pretty classic liminal space.
Yeah, but it would also be kind of awesome.
I knew someone whose ceilings were really high and they didn’t like changing the bulbs. So when the bulb died they just replaced them with lamps and let their house slowly fill up with lamps. Probably a similar vibe.
Darkness fears the light.
