Field notes
Guides and honest answers about buying raw land, living on it, and making the most of your acreage. No jargon, no pressure, just what we would tell a friend.
Articles tagged off grid. 11 articles.
Three tiers, not one, and the cost spread between them is the size of a house. What off-grid actually saves you, which is less than you have read, what the statutes really say about rainwater, and how to test the life before you commit to it.
Otero County is a desert basin and a mountain range wearing one name, and the two are nothing alike. Here is what the water, the septic rule and the roads actually do to your plans.
A street address and a mailing address are two different jobs, and plenty of counties will not assign the first one to bare land at all. What the counties actually charge, what USPS actually allows, and how to have your mail sorted this week.
Rainwater harvesting is not illegal in Colorado and has not been since 2016. Here is the real state-by-state picture, the arithmetic for how much water a roof produces, and the parts that go wrong, including which roofing materials poison the water.
Nobody should buy a water filter before they have a lab report. Private wells are unregulated, about a quarter of sampled wells exceed a health benchmark, and the cause is usually geology rather than pollution. Here is what to test for and what each treatment actually removes.
One average modern wind turbine implies roughly 290 acres of project area, so leasing a small parcel to a developer is not the question. The real one is whether a single small machine beats panels, and the federal cost data has a clear answer.
New Mexico did not legalize Earthships. It passed a two-acre research permit with a hundred thousand dollar surety that waives county ordinances only. On ordinary ground the building is an alternative method needing a sealed design, and the water loop collides with state law at the toilet.
The parcels that work for a cabin and the parcels that do not usually look identical in photographs. Here is what separates them, including why the 200 square foot permit exemption does not do what people think it does.
Most off-grid articles describe a feeling. The thing that actually stops people is a permit: in every state we sell in, occupying a dwelling is gated by an approved means of disposing of sewage. Water, waste, shelter and power, in the order the county cares about.
Two thirds of Apache County cannot be bought by anyone, and the third that can is higher, colder and more gated than the listings suggest. Here is what actually governs a build out here.
Fourteen days of camping, a well permit with a flow meter, and septic before anything else. What owning five acres under Mount Blanca actually involves.
While you are here
Pima County, AZOcotillo, cholla and prickly pear crowd a raised, flat pad across the middle of this acre, the natural spot for a home with a view of the Tucson Mountains. It sits in Diamond Bell Ranch about 33 miles west of Tucson, at 3,297 feet where summers run a little milder. Cell service is strong, and the zoning lets you build when you're ready.
Putnam County, FLArea photosHoot Owl Road is paved and power runs right past the lot, which is more than most of this old Satsuma subdivision can say. It's a quarter acre in St. Johns River country, twelve minutes from Palatka and a short run to Dunn's Creek and Crescent Lake. The lot is mapped wetland and most of it sits in a FEMA flood zone, so it's priced for what it is today.
Hudspeth County, TXArea photosGuadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, sits about a half hour east of this ground, and the salt flats that set off a war in 1877 are closer than that. It's open desert outside Salt Flat, Texas, with no zoning and no HOA, so you can pitch a tent this weekend and build off-grid whenever you get around to it.
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