Great off-grid bargains?

Dude, you dropped a zero! That's $60K. Good thing, too, or we might already be neighbors!

SVreX wrote:

mtn wrote: Seriously, look at central IL. Great place to live, IMHO. Especially on the Illinois River Valley, it gets really beautiful.

Job market?

Eh... Not good. Not bad either. I'm not really sure, I'm in college in a major that has nearly 100% job placement rate.
State Farm, Caterpillar, Country financial are all headquartered in the area. Komatsu, Caterpillar, and Mitsubishi all have manufacturing plants in the area.

SVreX wrote: I'm a big fan of historic architecture (yes, I'm jealous of you, Pete Gossett). I need to be in reasonable proximately to people who appreciate education. I don't like always being surrounded by people who seem to really love striving to be as uneducated as they can. Perhaps something reasonably close to a small college town, etc.

Peoria has Bradly University, and Frank Loyd Wright designs. Bloomington/Normal has Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan, as well as a few community colleges.

Southern Indiana would be pretty good for that too. A few years ago there was a piece of land for sale literally three block away from my house, and a mile from a wal-mart, 4 other grocery stores, and tons of restaurants. It was mostly woods, but it was 22 acres for $18k. You don't know how bad I wanted to cut a driveway and build a house dead in the center of it, completely invisible to the rest of the world.

Oh yeah, Evansville is a city of about 140k people, two universities, several community colleges, a high school that recently ranked in the top 100 in the country, and it's dirt cheap to live here. You can still find huge plots of land just outside town pretty cheap, or in town like the one I mentioned earlier.

The north west is worth looking at too. Portland OR and Seattle are pretty liberal areas without the 'big city' attitude. Once you're outside of the cities the land/cost of living is fairly low, and you don't have to deal with all of California's craziness.

You have all types of environment from the mild coastal forests to the high deserts.

I'd agree with Dr. Hess, NW Arkansas is full of cool little towns, beautiful backcountry and ton's of fantastic well kempt roads.

I like it here in the Tulsa area, but I'm guessing a metro area approaching 1 million fits your idea as a big town. I don't really see it as that big because, I rarely go to any of the suburbs other than one I live, and if it weren't for where I work, I'd never leave the Downtown/Midtown/Brookside area.

Solar power isn't affordable enough to justify the investment yet. I'd look into doing a solar water heater or clothes line, but describing you finances the 30k initial investment won't be worth it for what you are getting. You are way more likely to be using wood for heat and a generator for power than any solar. The bigger worry is having a good well, putting in a sewer system, staying warm in the cold months, etc.

If you are really interested do check out this magazine it will give you a very good idea of the challanges surrounding homesteading. http://www.countrysidemag.com/

The bad about east-central IL.

There are vast flat areas with nothing much more than corn & beans. This also means that the snow tends to drift in winter - although we usually only have a couple bad snow storms per season. OTOH, there's a great State Park 20mi from here that's a National Scenic Waterway & has some kick-ass mountain bike trails, so it's not all prairie.

Job market isn't great, but things seem to be rebounding. We're an hour from Purdue(my wife works there), the University of IL, Illinois State, and a couple smaller colleges.

benzbaron wrote: Solar power isn't affordable enough to justify the investment yet.

THAT depends entirely on where you live, the approach you take, and the available incentives.

Did I say I wanted Solar??

As a side note, we lived "off the grid" for a week this January. Not by choice, but because "the grid" was un-gridded. I'd have to say that while possible (we didn't starve or freeze to death), the work load required to just do activities of daily living such as STAYING WARM or BATHING is really big.

I just bought me a 7KW Honduh powered generator and a transfer box. Next time, I'm gonna have hot water, lights, refrigerator and a stove. And maybe even the heat pump.

You could survive pretty well without central heat and air around here.

What sort of housing structure are you looking at? I'm considering an earthship. Seems to play well with my packrat tendencies because you build a good deal of it out of garbage.

What about hydro power? Find land with a small, fast moving stream flowing through it and build a mini waterwheel. I'm sure the grassroots type can build one out of a funnel, an impeller, a belt, a few alternators, some scrap iron, and an old power inverter. I have about half of that laying around, and I've not been collecting parts forever. A grassroots wind turbine would be similarly easy for our type of hacks.

Solar will get cheaper. It's somewhat expensive now for photovoltiacs, but there's no reason not to heat your water with solar. A home-built heat collector can be built for a few hundered bucks.

When I get some money ahead, one thing I plan on doing is converting some of my most used CFLs to LEDs. If I can get another 50% savings on a few key fixtures, then I figure I can save another $10 a month or so on my power bill. If I go with a small solar setup and run photovoltiacs and 12V, I could power those lights for free.

I think taking on the off the grid challenge in a place where the grid is all around is much more of a challenge than doing so where the grid doesn't exist.

I'm seeing that I mistakingly used a"buzz" word in my title, which has lots of preconceived notions attached to it. I probably shouldn't have said "off-grid"

We've had DOZENS of threads arguing the pros and cons of this type of construction vs that type of alternative energy. I'm pretty well versed in that stuff.

I'm bargain hunting for real estate. I'm wondering what areas are interesting, have some potential for future growth, and are attractively priced right now.

BTW, Vanilla Sky, yes, I already have a piece of property with a grassroots micro hydro setup, working solar panels in place for a couple of applications, and have been experimenting with wind. But that's not really what I am asking about in this thread.

There's a lot of cheap real estate in Macon/Bibb and surrounding counties (Twiggs); it's a lot like Albany, but without the gnats. I assume you want something farther north.

I often dream of a log cabin in the woods myself.