What Could Be

Imagine what life could be like living to the extreme of environmentally reducing your carbon footprint. Yes, many may already rolled their eyes and have picture a bunch of tree huggers that want to save the planet. This is not the case. Every family can benefit from a simpler lifestyle. Everyone's course in life must shift to an alternative living and energy sources and become completely self dependant on your family. I bet everyone reading is now thinking that sounds crazy! Well follow on and listen to how you can be the next to join this conscious shift towards a greener lifestyle. The utilization of recyclable trash, harvesting utilities, and a little vision goes a long way. This is what has brought us to the point of shifting our family lives from wasting to reducing. I will explain a little about how we have come about doing this and what our near future holds.

Water: Southwestern Ohio area water sources are sufficient enough with seasonal rainfall to be able to harvest all our water usage. The average family of 5 uses up to 10,000 gallons of water per month. Our Earthship will be installing a 5000 gallon tank efficient enough to store a month long supply, and possibly longer if we conserve at the maximum level.

Grey Water Recycling; How can you reduce water consumption from 10,000 gallons a month down to 5,000 gallons or less? This is done by taking all your sinks, showers and laundry water and draining it back into a dependent reservoir first filtered and then treated with chlorine. Monitoring is needed to not kill the beneficial bacteria in the septic tank. Once the water runs through a simple filtering system you then pump the water to your toilet systems. This way, you reuse all your water twice before it hits the waste tanks and leach beds. Ultimately achieving reduction by reusing what you already have as much as possible.

Solar Harvesting; We will be installing 6 photovoltaic solar panels that will be charging an off grid expandable battery system.

Wind Harvesting; We will be installing 1 3000 watt 3' wind turbine that will power us for most of the year. This requires a frequently windy area not bolcked by trees or other obstructions. Fortunately we are in one of the windiest parts of the county due to a slightly higher elevation. In Winter time, the turbine will be ideal because of the continuous wind that comes.