Customer Reviews

The Independent Home: Living Well with Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water (Real Goods Independent Living Book)

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I found this book very disappointing. I was looking for more of a "How-To" book which would provide answers and ideas for a mountain cabin. Instead I found it to contain warm hearted informtion in the form of short stories. At a minimum this books title should be modified to "The Independant Home - Good Hearted American Stories of Living Well with Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water.

As an editor and writer, to me this book is awful. The title is misleading: it provides no idea that this is simply a collection of feel-good stories from people who have succeeded in living independently. For the person wanting to start to live independently, this is NOT the book. Except by accidental gleanings from the stories, there is no comparison of technologies, no systematic analysis of how to go about it. The incomplete and inadequate descriptions of technologies are poorly placed and you wonder why they were placed where they were at all; the applied information could be culled into ten pages or less. There is also a nauseating rash of redneck chest-thumping about why America is so great and why it is losing the "race" to go green, presented in the very way that provides an implicit answer: America is great because it is full of greedy, competitive, small-minded, insular, arrogant people built to exploit the country's natural resources - the very ones that (most of) these people - including me - would like to get away from. This is off-set by some (again, accidental) very brief and quiet mention of the usefulness of non-American technologies. I expected more from this book, especially given the reviews it has received already. Much like the authors approach to his own building, the book may be euphemistically called `organic'; otherwise, it may be called just wasteful, inefficient, and poorly focused.

I was looking for a book on technical data for energy independent sytems, how they hooked up to your house, how it interacted with the existing power company system etc. This book has more opinion in it than information. I only read the first three chapters so far but the construction of all the chapters seem to be the same. It starts out with someone's story where they put down the power companies and insert a lot of "save the Earth" jargon. Most of the chapters consist of this type of rhetoric and at the very end of the chapter there is some useful information about a certain system, PV,wind, etc. I was also disappointed to find out that this book was copyrighted in 1993. The field of PV has taken leaps and bounds since this book was published. There is some useful information in this book but in my opinion, it could have been condensed into a short concise booklet of about 45 pages.

When I ordered this book I thought it was a collection of stories gathered from people who have moved off the grid with some techniques and practices thrown in. Instead what I've found is that it preaches to the choir.

The emphasis is on explaining how we waste energy through our daily on-the-grid lives and what doing so costs in "real" terms of "dead dinosaurs" turned crude oil deposits. If I'm buying this book then it's assumed I already have some concern for the environment and my energy usage, that I already want to "get off the oil" addiction my nation has. Why propound it over and over and over in this book. Why preach environmentalism in a book bought by environmentalists? Why not give them the info they need and the courage to do it through depicting others who've done it already?

There are some stories of how others have gotten off the grid but they are short and don't really go into any of the problems one may encounter or how they can be overcome.

A disappointing book that so easily could have been much much better.

This book is a motivational book for people considering building an off-grid home. It includes arguments for living independently of the grid or other utility systems, stories and interviews with people who've established independent homesteads, and some general information about design considerations (siting the home for maximum efficiency, ways to generate power, and maintenance issues). Although there are a few tables and graphs, this is definitely not a how-to book; it includes very little detailed information about setting up independent power systems. Instead, the book focuses much more on why people choose to live off grid and how they get along without grid power. The book is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of people and their houses or diagrams of equipment and how it works. End material includes a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

Unfortunately, many of the interviews with homeowners are rather disjointed. It seems that Potts was striving to convey what people told him as accurately as possible, and so he relied on direct quotes where it would have made more sense to fill out the statements with the details needed to explain what the people really meant or intended to say rather than the exact words they used. For the interviews, Potts chose people in the regions he knew best, namely Northern California, Vermont, Hawaii (Maui), and communities in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. No mention is made of independent homes outside of these regions, and very little is mentioned of independent living in other countries. Potts has a tendency to stray off topic and he occasionally includes some information that, while interesting, isn't really about building an independent homestead, such as chapter five, a simplified accounting of our environmental impact on the planet (ecological footprinting), in which everything we do or use is translated into trees. (The details of the accounting system aren't very well thought out, since, for example, Potts equates the impact of 1 mile driven to 10 miles flown, when cars actually get better passenger mileage than airplanes.)

The strongest feature of this book is the encouragement it provides that living independently can be done, and done comfortably today. Many of the people interviewed in this book live relatively ordinary lives, complete with electric lights and refrigerators. Some have vacuum cleaners, and some even have freezers. Significantly, all of them are living in remote areas, where they take responsibility for supplying not only their power, but also their water. Because they realize the limits of their water supply, they use composting toilets, and since they don't have sewage to deal with, their drains have nothing but gray water, which is reused elsewhere around the farm. Most grow some or all of their own food, and consequently generate very little garbage. Many even apply the goal of independence to educating their children, and home school their kids. Overall, the information contained in the book is quite exciting and encouraging, but after reading the book cover-to-cover, I'm no wiser about the details of how I could begin to implement some of these ideas in my own home.

Because of my total infatuation with the first book (I'm assuming, first) I would get the next without question. Occasionally, this is a mistake, but I don't think it will be a disappointment. Please quote anything from me regarding how great I think this work is. I find the book an escape on the line of the old, big Sears catalogs that we called the "wish book" when I was a kid. An often somewhat dry subject spiced with real people living the "life." I have read and re-read it many times. I hope for for a sequel that dipicts the continuing state of the art and the folks he interviewd 5 years later. A style with the technical interspersed with the personalities is very refreshing. It's like learning while reading People Magazine. I felt myself wanting to read more about the people and their feelings. Where Potts injected his opinions, this made me want to read more of what he thought about the life styles and conditions he visited. His opinions about the building departments and reglatory agencies were right on! I wanted to go storm the local building Department with his book in hand as ammunition.