Your eyes haven’t betrayed you, IT IS snowing in Baja! We housesitting off-grid in the mountains of Baja California, Mexico and we received 6″ of snow in a 24 hour period. In this episode we walk you through some of the systems and planning that we use to be comfortable during a white out!
We have settled in to the off-grid lifestyle at a housesitting assignment in the remote mountain wilderness of the Sierra de San Pedro Mountains in Baja California, Mexico. We have spent 6 weeks living in a completely off-grid house 70 kilometers from civilization and have experienced record snowstorms, temperatures below freezing, as well as mechanical malfunctions and so much more in our short time here. After this article you should have a better idea if off-grid living is for you or if you should avoid moving to a cabin in the woods.
You Are High Maintenance
You might say, “I am not high-maintenance”, but how many showers have you had this week? Was your water really hot? Did each shower last longer than 5-10 minutes? If you take a shower every day, want your shower to be the same temp as the sun, and want to scald your flesh for 20 minutes or more, you are likely not ready to live on limited water in an off-grid home. That is not to say that you can’t enjoy a hot bath on occasion, but you have to plan ahead and insure that your bath isn’t going to deplete your drinking water supply for next week.
Are you accustomed to modern HVAC and are used to having your living space at a comfortable 72.5 degrees? Unless you are using a very sophisticated solar setup, modern heat and air is an unrealistic comfort. Learning to be comfortable in an off-grid home is often a matter of planning ahead (see below) and layering up or down. If you are cold in the winter, grab a jacket or sweatshirt. Hot in the summer? Run down to the stream for a quick dip to lower your body temperature. Small adjustments like these are a major part of living off the grid.
Driving in 3 Weeks Worth of Groceries
You Can’t Plan Ahead
The Boy Scouts of America motto has never been more relevant to us as it has while living off-grid. Being prepared for anything is vitally important when living away from the security of society in an off-grid home. You must make the most of your trips to town and make sure you are bringing back enough fuel, food, and supplies for anything that might happen before the next trip to town.
We have developed a schedule of resupplying every 2-3 weeks. We could easily resupply once a month, but we really enjoy fresh produce and seeing the sights of Baja. On our last resupply trip we topped off fuel, visited the hardware store, fish market, electronics store, Walmart and two grocery stores in a matter of 24 hours. Lists and discipline go a long way when shopping for a month’s worth of groceries and the process was a real adjustment for us compared to keeping 4-5 days of food in our bus and literally camping in grocery store parking lots on occasion.
You Need Instant Gratification
If you need to exist in a world where you must have fast food, fast internet, and fast traffic, off-grid living might not be for you. Although this isn’t the case in all off-grid applications, in our case we are 70KM’s from a town (a small town at that) and over 2 hour’s drive from the nearest market. The closest McDonalds is over 200 kilometers away, a 4 hour drive!
Your average work on an off-grid property will likely not be instantaneously rewarding either. Consider a garden, you will need to wait through an entire season of hard work and dedication before you ever see a reward from your labor. However, once you enjoy the spoils of fresh produce the work will be some of the most rewarding you have ever done. Parts for repairs are hard to come by in a timely manner, fuel is a long drive away and wood piles don’t cut down, split and stack themselves. At the ranch we are on, mail is delivered to Ensenada for pickup, near the closest Big Mac which you will remember is 4 hours of driving at minimum. Amazon 2-day shipping doesn’t apply here.
If you think there is a chance that you are going to have an urge at 2AM for a cheeseburger, hopefully you read there first point about being prepared and you have some ground beef in the freezer and cheese in the fridge and not have to rely on the minimum wage employee to greet you at a drive-thru window with your sustenance.
You Aren’t Mechanically Inclined and Won’t Learn
Do you often break something in your house and immediately call a repair man or relative for help? Do you refuse to learn new skills and techniques to fix things yourself? If so, off-grid living might not be for you! Off-grid homes are built on systems, often times redundant systems so that if one fails, you aren’t out of water, electricity or heat. So what do you do if the nearest plumber is at least 2 hours away and you have a toilet that is running or a water filter that is clogged? You learn how to fix it yourself. Most things in life, on or off grid can be fixed with common sense and hard work. The same is true when living off the grid.
In our limited time on the ranch we have replaced toilet fill valves, replaced PVC pipe, rebuilt a water sump pump, and have repaired a few roads and trails to avoid washouts from the seasonal rains. I had never repaired a sump pump before, but by following the owners manual and paying attention, I was able to restore our drinking water supply.
The Solar Panels Aren’t Going to Clean Themselves Off
You Are Afraid of Hard Work
Similarly to above, if you don’t like working hard and don’t want to learn how, off-grid living is likely not for you. Between managing a garden, livestock, firewood supplies, house and property repairs, vehicle repairs and more, the work of an off grid property can seem like an endless endeavor. If you are able to put in the hard work early and often, the work is manageable and satisfying. Similarly to life, if you procrastinate and let up, you are often the one suffering because of it.
We have experienced a colder (and wetter) than normal winter in Baja, and therefore we have needed more firewood than expected. This means that instead of kicking back and binging Stranger Things on Netflix, I have to load up the chainsaw and tractor and bring back wood for the rest of the season. This is not an inconvenience if you plan ahead and work hard early in the season to maintain a large back stock of firewood, but if you let it get out of control, you can be left in a very cold house.
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Join us as we travel from the nearest paved road to the house that we will be house-sitting for the next 4 months. The road into the ranch is roughly 6 kilometers long and takes approximately 40 minutes to drive. In this video, our commute to civilization is sped up 8 times to give you the full experience of traveling into the remote interior of Baja Norte. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRVDfzibhxyN1I-niylEiKg
We are traveling in our 1986 Toyota 4Runner 4×4 with a set of Old Man Emu leaf springs and Bilstein shocks. The ride is rough, but would be much worse without the suspension upgrades. Our tires are Bridgestone All Terrains that have plenty of grip for all of the sand, slick rock, and mud that we experience in Baja. The tires were aired down to roughly 70% of highway pressure for the road and will likely be aired down a bit more the next time we leave the house.
The house electrical system of any conversion or RV is a pretty daunting and scary adventure for a first timer. To get the right system, a user has to know their current needs for electricity and how those needs will change when they are on the road. The best way to figure out how much electricity generation and storage a particular system will need to generate is to invest in a small device called a Kill-a-Watt. This device plugs into a standard 110V home outlet and has a female plug for the appliance that you seek to understand.
By keeping a spreadsheet of all of the appliances that you wish to use on the road, the amount of time you plan to use them and their perspective amps drawn, you can get an idea of how much storage (battery) and generation (solar or generator) you will need.
Our needs were simple and below is a table of the regular appliances that we use with our system:
Appliance
Amps
Whynter 62 Qt Refrigerator
4.5*.25 hours * 20 hours=22.5A
Fantastic Fan
2*8 hours= 16A
Sureflo Water Pump
<1A
LED Puck Lights
<1A
Macbook Air
4.3A*2 hours= 8.6A
Cell/Cam Batteries
1A*2 hours= 2A
Total
~51.1 A
A second consideration when designing an electrical system is knowing how you are going to utilize the system. For example, if you planned to spend the entire Fall in the Pacific Northwest as a camp host in a campground, you wouldn’t want to rely on a solar system that needs 4-8 hours of direct sun per day. Likewise, if you plan to park in Quartzite, AZ for the Winter, it would be silly to not take advantage of all of the direct sunlight.
Solar panels in full shade
We landed somewhere in the middle and knew there would be days that we would be tucked back in the woods and weeks at a time would be spent in the desert. We needed the ability to store some juice for the day or so that we wouldn’t have sunshine, but also be able to use the vehicle alternator to charge the house batteries in a pinch if needed.
Okienomads Solar Electrical System
300 watts pre install
Below is a diagram of our electric system. All components are listed below with links to where we purchased them. If you have any questions about why we chose a particular part over another, e-mail us at okienomads@gmail.com and we will answer in the best way we can.
We wanted as many options for power generation as possible in case our situation changed or if we needed to hunker down somewhere for the winter and wanted to add a generator to the system or utilize shore power (power sources are shaded in yellow). If we needed to add a generator, all we have to do is plug into the shore plug on the side of the bus.
Solar Panels
We were extremely green to solar systems (see what I did there?) when we started and opted to purchase a kit from Renogy Solar as opposed to piecing our system together and potentially missing something or purchasing incongruent parts. This kit included (3) 100-watt panels, a 40A charge controller, and most of the wiring needed to hook up the panels to the controller. We wired our solar panels in a series (see diagram above) to be able to pull solar even if the panels weren’t seeing a full 12 volts. This also allowed us the ability to run longer cable at smaller sizes than if we wired in parallel. Renogy Solar has an excellent page describing the different setups available.
Our panels are mounted directly to the roof using rivets and the Renogy Z-brackets that came with out kit. If we had to do this over again, we would have continued our roof rack to the front of the bus and attached the panels to the rack, less permanently.
Charge Controller
We opted for the Renogy Rover 40A MPPT controller for the option of wiring our panels in series and harvesting solar all day instead of waiting on 12 volts to hit the panels.
Charge Controller
A smaller PMW charge controller would have worked for our needs, but would have limited the amount of solar we can grab and the options for expanding our system later if our bus turns into a more stationary fixture (think tiny cabin).
Batteries
We searched for a cheap and easily expandable battery for our bank and landed on the Duracell GC-2, 6-volt golf cart battery wired in a series to create a 12v battery with 200 amp hours. These batteries are flooded, lead acid batteries that require checking the water levels from time to time. Although AGM gel batteries, common in cars and trucks, are sealed and require less maintenance, they are not made to be discharged heavily over and over like the golf-cart batteries.
Inverter Charger
Like with the rest of our system, we wanted to select an inverter that would grow with our needs. As of right now, the only appliances that we are running is a MacBook Air and the occasional food processor (in direct sunlight). We wanted to have an inverter that would be sufficient if we needed to run a couple of appliances down the road as we transition the bus to a tiny house and less of an adventure mobile.
Inverter/Charger
The AIMS 1500-Watt (2000 peak) Pure Sine Inverter and Charger fit the bill perfectly. The built-in battery charger not only allows us to plug in to shore power, but it also charges our batteries at the same time. The pure-sine wave that our inverter uses is also safe for charging the more sensitive electronics like lithium-ion laptop batteries.
Manual Solenoid
This inexpensive fixture is meant for use in mobile audio applications, but works perfectly for what we needed. The solenoid allows us to utilize the current from the starting batteries to supplement our house battery bank when we park in the trees or on cloudy days. At the flip of switch, our bus alternator churns out enough energy to top off our house batteries. We rarely use this feature, but for the price it is good insurance. Plus, in a pinch, you could jump start you starting batteries from your house batteries if needed.
We have linked the product that we use above, but if you wanted a more advanced fixture, you could opt for the more expensive Automatic Charging Relay (ACR) from Blue Sea Systems. This piece will remove the switch from our setup and automatically send current to your house battery bank.
Miscellaneous Fixtures
On the graphic above there are a few fixtures that make the system work that are mostly replaceable with most other brands and the only thing you should ensure is that your breakers, bus bars, and other electrical components are rated for the amount of current you are sending through them. Below is a list of the components that we used and we have had good luck with them. There are obviously always better components, but these fit our budget and system needs well.
Always disconnect your batteries and/or cover your solar panels before doing any work on your system. Electrical fires are a real possibility when working with these systems and you should have your setup inspected by an electrician before going live. After inspected, remember to keep a fire extinguisher handy. When living in a van, Skoolie or truck you never really know what could happen. Be prepared.
As we always strive for transparency when displaying aspects of our nomadic lifestyle you should know that all of the links included in this article are affiliate links through Amazon.com. For every purchase that you make from one of these links, we receive a small amount and you don’t pay any extra. These links are one way that stay on the road longer, so thank you for your support of our adventures!
You have asked and we have heard your cries! Because we threw the bus together so fast the last couple of weeks of having a house, most people watching never got to see it finished. We have a YouTube video showing you where we live full-time on the road. Check it out!
