Way Off-Grid at Paddock

Other than living in a converted school bus for half a year, my first experience living off grid was at a remote homestead that went by the name of Paddock. It was an old ranch headquarters that mostly operated as a dude ranch. The first building there was a one-room log cabin that was built about 1920. In the late 40’s or early 50’s a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom were added on. This was our house.

The Paddocks owned an ice-cream company. They would bring drug store owners up to their mountain ranch to entertain them and hopefully get them to buy ice cream and supplies. In those days, drug stores were the largest wholesale buyers of ice cream. The ranch managers lived in the old cabin. At the west end of the property was another, larger, cabin. This was where the ranch owners lived when they visited.

The ranch was sold, in the 70's I think, to a wealthy guy who liked to buy ranches. He has several. In order to prevent the unoccupied property from deteriorating he rented it out to my friend, Jack. The total rent was $250/month. My share was half that. What an awesome deal! It is a beautiful spot in the pines at a 6000 foot elevation with a spring and a series of meadows.

We lived in this picturesque cabin

We were way off-grid there. The dirt road to the place was 25 miles long and often not in good condition. It was a 50 mile drive to town. The 32-acre property was completely surrounded by national forest. The nearest neighbor was a ranch about three miles away.  We had no electricity or phone. Cell phones didn’t work there either. The mail was delivered three times a week but only in good weather. There was a propane refrigerator and cook stove. That was the extent of our modern conveniences. Lighting was provided by oil lamps and candles. Eventually we scored a 10-watt solar panel so we could listen to the radio during the day. That was our big move into the modern world.

There was a wood burning cook stove that also served to heat the kitchen and the bedrooms. We closed off the living room in the winter and used it as a walk-in cooler so we didn’t even need the refrigerator during the cold months. We would set a couple one-gallon plastic bottles filled with water out on the front porch each night and, in the morning, they were frozen solid. We used these in a series of ice chests that we kept in the living room. In the summer, the living room was the coolest place in the house.

solar water heater

Living this way inspired us to speculate and experiment with ultra-low-tech ideas for making our lives comfortable. We spent many a candle-lit evening discussing the finer points of passive solar design and how to design functional energy systems that were simple, cheap, and durable. We did not have the luxury of consulting the internet. We had an old set of Encyclopedia Britannica from the 60’s if we wanted to research anything. Jack spearheaded this experimentation and built a solar water heater on the roof and a clever solar heat box on the wall of his bedroom. These were made using mostly free materials and they worked well, and were very simple to understand and build. He wrote a book recently about the devices that he experimented with. It is called Magic Machines in a Magic House and is available at Amazon.com

The old pump motor

Our water was from a hand-dug well that was only twelve feet deep. We used an ancient Wisconsin single cylinder gas motor that was connected to a Jacuzzi pump and used this to fill a concrete and stone cistern up on a hill behind the house. We would run the pump every month or so to fill the cistern and the water would gravity feed to the house. The pump motor was so old that it was difficult to get started. We had to take it apart and clean the magneto several times. One time we just couldn’t get it started. Jack called the manufacturer to see if he could get parts. When he told them the model and serial number of the motor, they were amazed it was still in service and wanted to know if it was for sale. They wanted it for their museum! They were not able to help us fix it but we managed to get it going again without their help.

 

The stone cistern stored our water

We diverted the kitchen sink drain to deliver water to the garden. The bathroom sink drained out into the yard. Our septic system was questionable. We couldn’t figure it out. We had no idea where the flush toilet drained to. There were no clean-outs. For all we knew it just went into a big hole in the ground and we didn’t know where that hole was. Wherever it all went, eventually it filled up and the toilet would no longer work. We removed it and replaced it with a simple composting toilet consisting of a five-gallon bucket under a plywood bench with a hole in it. A toilet seat was mounted over the hole. It was just like an outhouse only it was in our indoor bathroom.

It was a simple system. We would put a couple of coffee cans full of dirt from the yard and a can full of cedar sawdust in the bottom of a five-gallon plastic bucket and put it under a toilet seat bench. Each time we used it we would dump a can of dirt and saw dust on top. When the bucket was about ¾ full we took it out to the yard.

One of our scenic toilet spots

We had a line of maybe ten five-gallon plastic buckets in service to the toilet. It took at least a couple of months to go through the whole line. We would put the newly filled bucket at the end of the line. The bucket at the front of the line was now old enough, and the contents sufficiently decomposed, that we could dump it in the garden, rinse it out and then put that bucket under the toilet seat. It was an efficient cycle. 

In the winter, the line of buckets was kept in a greenhouse so they would be warm enough for the bacteria to turn the poop into soil. In the summer the line was under a big tree. We had to make sure to water the buckets to keep the contents moist. The system was so effective that we built a couple more toilet benches and put them outdoors in scenic places. I would often use the scenic toilets. I could sit and watch elk in the meadow while taking care of business.

 

We tried various clothes washing techniques. The best one was to just put the clothes in a plastic 5-gallon bucket with a lid along with water and soap and roll it around the yard for a while before rinsing, wringing, and line drying. It wasn’t as effective as a washing machine but it wasn’t much work either.

This one-room cabin was used as a guest room

We did several small construction projects while I lived there. Since we had no electricity, power tools were useless. We had to cut the lumber with hand saws. We used hand crank drills. It’s hard to imagine how tough people must have been a hundred years ago to be able to build entire houses without power tools.

I moved to town near the end of 1997 but the place is still functioning pretty much the same these days. There are a few more solar panels and the old gas-powered well pump motor has been replaced by a solar powered electric pump. The composting toilet bucket system is still functioning well and oil lamps are still the preferred lighting method.

Our current off-grid situation is luxuriously modern compared to my time at Paddock. Here we have solar panels, a washing machine, flush toilets, satellite internet, and a nice wood stove. Still, I have fond memories of what an adventure it was.

The west cabin.