I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere.
Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.
I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.
Not to mention Slab City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California
Infrastructure-wise, roads come before water or electricity, and so plenty of the United States has a road but no power or water. This can even be standard for those who are near civilization.
Remote is somewhere like Nullarbor, which is 183 miles from Ceduna (population < 6000). It's over 1000km to Adelaide (population 1.3m) or 1600km to Perth (population 1.9m).
My sister lived in Wingellina[1][2], Western Australia which was a 6 hour drive on unpaved, 4WD required track from Alice Springs. That's close to one of the most difficult, isolated places to get to in Australia, but even there isn't a week on Camels. Maybe going further west into the Great Sandy Desert might get close (although you get close to small townships in WA if you go too far).
The Empty Quarter has low population density but is smaller than isolated areas in Australia.
There are probably places in Siberia and Canada that are fairly isolated too.
I agree that there are more isolated islands. The Pitcairn Islands is the most obvious case.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q2wL9KCa9aXht3YS9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingellina,_Western_Australia
But a good example of remote is Nulato, Alaska.
Point is, yes USA is huge (let alone Australia) and skews our sense of distance, but 100 miles is not as trivial distance as we sometimes instinctively feel :-)
I can leave Denver and be DEEP into Wyoming in 2 hours, or it can take 90 minutes to go 60 miles in Rural Virginia (80mph speed limit vs 60 mph speed limit)
If your vehicle breaks down, how screwed are you?
Do you have cell coverage to call for help?
Will anyone be passing by to flag down, any time soon?
How far away is the nearest LEO agency, fire department, ambulance?
How far away is the nearest place for water, food, etc?
I know you didn’t mean Low Earth Orbit agency, but the thought is funny.
If you’re not more than 1000+ km from the nearest satellite, you’re not in a remote area!
Some people just love not having people around, in which case you really want low average weekly population density within say 5-10km (out of easy visibility and hearing).
Some people are concerned about civilization collapse or civil war or... something (ie, the prepper type). In that case you can imagine population dispersing away from (and possibly towards) major population centers over a period of months, and you want true isolation.
Another factor of this living is that once the honeymoon period wears off, there is a dawning on many people that their tolerance for failure has dropped significantly. A break down of a vehicle can become a very big issue very fast when the nearest town is an hour away.
I'm not looking for a forever home. I figure I might live in the middle of nowhere for a decade or so and then who knows. Maybe move closer to town and have a nice place to visit part of the year.
Canada is vast and in some places very rugged. "Remote" and "northern" are not related terms. Just look at BC on google maps. Look at the bit of vancouver island that is south of the US border. That is some very remote terrain, but is no way northern. Then scan up into the BC coast. Just a few hundred miles from downtown Vancouver and not a single road to be found. Or start at Whistler and pan west. Hundred of miles of mountains with nothing more than the occasional logging road.
There are many interpretations and levels of remoteness.
In my case, I want to be away from the sights and sounds and crowds of anything that would be considered urban or suburban. My prime criteria is that I don't want to see another person unless I choose to. I don't want to see a road with cars on it, I don't want to see another house or any other man-made structure that isn't mine. Ideally I don't want to hear anyone else either, but I accept that I may hear things in the distance.
I don't want to be a complete hermit, and I'm not a survivalist looking to be 100% self-sufficient. I want a small-to-midsized town about 30-60 minutes away. Something with a grocery store, gas station, and a post office or other place to receive deliveries. I don't want to be more than an hour away from doctors' offices or a hospital or urgent care. I don't want to be trapped by snow for weeks at a time.
Saying "far from civilization" was a stretch. What I really mean is I don't want to have people all around me. And I don't want to be anywhere near cities and suburban sprawl. I don't want neighbors in any meaningful sense.
Places I'm considering are Maine, Montana, northern Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula Michigan. I would absolutely consider parts of Canada, particularly northern BC. I don't have an easy path to Canadian citizenship, though. Before my Canadian girlfriend passed away last year, we had been planning to look for a secluded lakeside cabin or undeveloped land in BC.
My requirements are dense forest (desert/plains states are right out) and water (lake or canoeable river) on the property itself. I can live with other people using the water, so long as it's not motorboats and a party scene.
It would be boring if we were all like me and clumped together.
I lived in midtown Manhattan and I loved being able to go out at 3am in the middle of the winter and find a fresh produce stand on the corner outside my apartment, get falafel wraps and Ethiopian and Thai and sushi and all the other great food during my lunch break, and have museums and concerts and Broadway shows within walking distance.
I lived in the Cayman Islands and had a roommate, could walk to the beach and to my favorite bars, my house was the primary hangout spot for all my friends. I was socializing daily there, and it was a small community where I knew just about everyone everywhere I went.
I'm old now. I don't drink anymore. I have no interest in parties. Even when I live in or near a city, I don't take advantage of much of anything it has to offer. I'm sick of the noise and filth and crowds, the crime and homelessness, the lack of privacy that comes with urban living. All my friends are older, have kids, live in the suburbs and are scattered all over the country. The eight months of the year that I'm not on the road in my RV, I'm living in a cookie-cutter suburban house and have no local friends at all. I exchange pleasantries with the neighbors.
My entire social life is online now, and when I can, I'm traveling. I want maximum peace and quiet. I'll go visit friends and family every couple months if I want to socialize. If/when I do settle down at my far-from-civilization objective, I may very well start feeling lonely and seek out social clubs or social hobbies. But I'll be glad to have my seclusion to return to.
Lots of remote forested areas in Georgia and Alabama, but I can also understand opposition to the heat.
I would give a lot consideration to TN and NC mountains.
I still plan to spend much of the year traveling in an RV even after I settle somewhere. I'd be happy to spend the winter holed up in a cabin with a wood stove though.
Coming back to NJ, a neighbor mentioned that they are still fighting the civil war in the south, which the media seems to also resonate well.
Just a based view from a NJ resident
Warmer humid climates, it’s common to only get (at most) a few months of ‘no bugs’.
Chiggers, ticks, noseeums, mosquitos, black flies, etc.
Also, warmer humid environment mosquitos are usually tiny, sneaky, and disease carrying.
Cold area mosquitos tend to be huge, obnoxious, and less disease carrying. Easier to kill, but will bite through thick sweatshirts, type thing. (Yes really!)
Or go southwest US and only have the occasional horsefly to worry about.
I'd rather have people I trust a bit around me than privacy, in general. For sure people there help each other out when help is needed. It just feels to be a more resilient, robust to errors kind of society than me and my stuff out there.
Now I'm living in San Jose, but I've passed the 8 year mark in my current location and in fact am accumulating connections with the people on the block and nearby. I go to stores where the workers stay year after year, so I am familiar to people. I've started going to classes at a local university. It's still not the connected feel of a small East coast town (Californians do seem to like their fences around the backyard and not to appreciate comments on their personal decisions), but pleasant. If only there was a grocery store I could walk to.
I also recommend finding a town that caters to rich tech people who want to live this remote fantasy, there are quite a few of them. It's so much more enjoyable than the actual remote living towns that no one wants to be in so they're just an aging population of dead enders and people hooked on drugs. Or at least an area with a University nearby so that you can go somewhere with some energy/vibrance and the latest cool trendy food. The realities of dead end small town/no town america can be pretty soul crushing.
Disney style curated small town america catering to the wealthy can be a pretty great place to live and have energy/vibrancy. Plus you'll have a good revolving supply of new people cycling through thinking they want to live the lifestyle (before the realities set in) bringing in the latest trends, starting food places, etc. Just make sure they aren't the 'escaping from California' types blathering about how great it is to be in a 'free' state and be away from commie land. That toxicity can overload a small community quick. You can get away with 'individualists' in a larger community where their actual freeloading on society is subsidized by normal people, but with too big a ratio basic civilian institutions get paralyzed for years until people remember/relearn society requires a social component.
By and large most of BC wasn't economic enough to justify solar as a replacement for grid power, but I haven't checked those numbers in a while. We do have relatively cheap hydro power, so there's not a hugely strong incentive either. There's other reasons that might justify an install however, especially for off-grid folks.
If it's an hour away, does it really qualify as "urgent" care?
Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wrong.
Maybe pick up a personal anti choking device (https://www.amazon.com/anti-choking-device/s?k=anti+choking+...) as well.
Also, I a bought a ramshackle building at auction that I am turning into a community workshop. It will be fun!
Look at a map and see what is furthest from a highway, but technically accessible by some sort of old road or trail. Look at a mineral rights map and find the most remote gold rush era mining claims.
You won’t see people often in these places because your standard 4x4 lacks the fuel range to get there- gasoline engines have very poor range at low speeds. You need something capable but also fuel efficient- usually something with a small diesel engine, which are not very available in the US market. More remote places also tend to have a lot of cumulative water damage to trails so are very technical- requiring a lot of patience (e.g. stacking rocks for hours) and a lot of driving skill.
A fun thing about Baja is that often these super remote fuel stations end up being closed or out of fuel, so you can't realistically do it without having the supplies and fuel for at least 2x what it looks like you should need.
That's basically where I'm getting my "two days" from- the time from one fuel station to the next with about ~8 hours of actual travel per day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894
With more than 14,000 of them, it's not possible to be more than 115 or so miles from one:
And 115 miles? That’s a huge distance.
Not huge enough when you're considering how the McDonald's have driven out little hole-in-the-wall places and that the presence of such a fast food restaurant requires a busy highway, or a reasonably dense population center.
once you're established you can collect rainwater. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/mojave/ says:
> Most areas of the basin floor receive 4 to 6 inches of precipitation per year, although annual precipitation can be greater than 40 inches in the southern and eastern San Bernardino and the San Gabriel Mountains (Lines, 1996). Recharge to the groundwater system from direct infiltration of precipitation is minimal.
in modern units "4 inches" is 100 millimeters, so that's about 3 nanometers per second
each person needs about 6 liters of water per day (burning man recommendation, including hygiene, dishwashing, etc., but not garden irrigation) or 70 microliters per second. 70 microliters divided by 3 nanometers is about 20 square meters, so even in the desert you don't need a large catchment to keep your cistern full. this isn't the atacama
if you want to be far from civilization in america, though, the atacama is pretty good for that. parts of patagonia might be better and do have rain
Go to Wyoming or Montana. You get a 2 or 3 hr drive outside major cities and you might be the only person around for 10+ miles.
Anywhere not colored
For someone it could be defined as minimal human interaction, for others it could be a function of distance from the nearest urban/ suburban center. For most, it would be some combination of these two.
I've backpacked to some very remote places around the world, but it's hard to beat the USA (western half), Canada, Russia (east of Moscow) and Australia (anywhere not on the coast).
And like I say, if you want peace and quiet you don't have to put your life at risk by going out of range of water, power, roads, phone coverage etc.
Ignore me, I'm sure I just don't get it.
I’d like more land still - I grew up on 60 acres - but I still basically have complete privacy.
I can get 200+ acres in Maine for the same price as 5 acres in NJ, and have much higher confidence that nothing is going to be built adjacent to me. Especially if I get land abutting conservation land.
Keep in mind - the dollar is down ~10-15% in that time frame, so in real terms, the previous cost might have been >$6600 in today's dollars vs ~$4000 or a >40% reduction.
The cost of electricity is up ~5.5% compared to last year: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
(I'm speaking about large class A RVs like an apartment with washer/dryer etc...)
But as solar becomes more prevalent, I don't see why they don't design RVs more around solar.
It has only been recently that I've seen "all electric" type RVs. Before that, most RVs were hybrid propane/electric or diesel/electric, for example gas stoves, dual propane/electric refrigerators, dual propane/diesel + electric heating and propane or diesel generators.
A future RV could have huge batteries for driving, and then use those batteries for appliances, air conditioning/heat pump and other on-board power. Then add increased solar by not only rooftop solar, but maybe fold-out solar awnings. (it could also charge via EV chargers, or 220 at a campsite)
An RV like this would be modern, comfortable and let you go anywhere.
Part of the reason solar is still a fringe thing for RVs is due to the costs up till now. Another big reason has been solar panel energy density; there simply wasn't enough room on the roof for the thousands of watts you need to generate for true full-time off-grid living with all the creature comforts (most notably air conditioning). Affordable, compact DC-powered refrigerators are still new (but are becoming standard items). Battery cost used to be prohibitive, and battery weight is still a problem. The 1200Ah I'm targeting (at minimum) is going to weigh a few hundred pounds.
If you want a residential-sized fridge, washer/dryer, and air conditioning that you can use 24/7, you need more like 3200W of solar and 2400Ah of battery. The larger the RV, the more expensive it is to cool. RVs have crap insulation, and most RVs are used in hotter southern areas. True self-sufficient electric and solar with no behavioral/comfort sacrifice still requires a lot of space and costs a lot.
The market is headed toward more solar, but the kind of setup you're talking about (and that I'm building for myself) is still quite expensive. And it's a huge cost for people that don't typically need it; the vast majority of people full-timing in RVs are content to do so at a sardine-packed RV park with full hookups. The market isn't going to bear the cost of massive solar installations as standard equipment.
I'm using Ah because I'm used to talking to people about 12V battery systems, and Ah is the most prominent number when talking about battery capacity (when the voltage is already implied or agreed upon).
You're absolutely right though, and I should have been more clear about it.
Anyway, thanks for explaining it.
My first phase DC system, currently in my RV, is a single 12V lead-acid battery, single 100W solar panel, 12VDC->120VAC inverter, a few buck converters for 5V electronics and USB ports, and a bunch of stuff running off 12V (my cell modem/router and my Beelink mini-PC are 12V direct). 12V adapter for Starlink PoE. I'm waffling on getting one or two 280Ah 12V batteries to wire in parallel, or just sticking with my crappy 12V lead-acid battery for the rest of this year and getting multiple 48V LiFePO4 when I do the full solar build-out next year.
You're not supposed to mix-and-match battery brands, manufacturing dates, time in use, etc. because if there's too much of a mismatch, they'll all degrade faster (so I've read). This is what's preventing me from incrementally building up a 12V battery bank by adding another 280Ah every few months. Instead I'm planning to milk what I have as long as possible, pick a voltage, and buy a whole bank of batteries and solar panels all at once.
> The market isn't going to bear the cost of massive solar installations as standard equipment.
so doing some math...
Larger class A RVs seem to cost $300k and up, and retirees seem to happily pay for all conveniences. For "normal" people, who haven't cashed in their retirement, the good thing is that they depreciate like a car instead of appreciating like a house.
if you used all of a 40ft RV roof (40'x8') you could get ~ 5000 watts
If you had fold-out solar awnings, I don't know what you could get... 10k? 15k?
With a large tesla battery pack, you could get 100kwh of batteries.
I remember when tesla first came out with their cars. The batteries seemed unnecessarily large and expensive compared to 24 kwh batteries in other cars. But they survived the test of time/longevity being both practical and not charged and discharged 100% every day.
I think it will happen, I just wonder when.
The cost certainly would the most make sense on gigantic $300k class As, which also conveniently have space for lots of panels and lots of batteries. And indeed you see the most elaborate factory-installed solar setups on those beasts. That's a tiny market, though.
I think you're right about the future. It won't be long before thousands of watts of solar come standard on most RVs. In fact I don't think it will be all that long (decade or two maybe?) before the RV is clad in some kind of solar material. Like every square inch of the surface is generating solar.
i do have one quibble, though, and it's a big one. in the last two years, prices on mainstream solar panels (monocrystalline with warranty) have fallen from €0.25 per peak watt to €0.12 per peak watt; low-cost panels have fallen from €0.17 per peak watt to €0.07 per peak watt.† technically that is 'fallen by 25% or more' because it's fallen by almost 60%. 2400 watts of solar should cost you 290 us dollars plus retail markup, not 1200 dollars. if you're paying 1200 dollars, you're being swindled! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394506 goes into details on how the swindle works
______
† https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
Like all things, the raw material cost is trivial. There are the tariffs you mention (I just skimmed your link, and don't speak German), but there's also economy of scale, packaging, logistics, etc. I'm sure I could get 400W panels for as little as $100/ea if I went to the factory myself and bought hundreds of them. Maybe even cheaper. It's not really fair to compare consumer one-off costs to industrial/commercial-scale installation costs.
Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33nbi7gKcY
is that available in the usa? because the swindle that caymanjim is being subjected to is kind of a usa-only thing
the longer comment of mine i linked explains in more detail how you're getting swindled. in english!
I did the full time RV bit in a class A. Hated it. Too small to live in, too big to travel in. Hate that black tank. Had to leave great camping spots once a week to dump and get more water, or hook up to some sort of developed campgrounds. Sucked. Regret not going for a small schoolie to travel in, large house on 5 acres to live in. That's the new plan, anyway. Best of luck.
what about harvesting water from the air ? I've heard that modern techniques can work in 15% humidity ?
also, trucking in water once a year can augment the supply ? at 10c per gallon, it doesn't seem crazy... https://www.reddit.com/r/TinyHouses/comments/10qj5ey/no_well...
There is plenty of land with reliable water there.
Rainwater for irrigation, maybe. But the reality is, most of AZ gets monsoons a couple months a year, and then essentially zero precipitation. So unless you have land favorable for setting up a dam or something, you’re going to have a hard time living off that kind of setup.
Flagstaff and Phoenix/far south being a bit different.
It's pretty hard to do worse than "the very small amount of water is being sucked dry because there are no regulations around water use." Once the water table compacts, it never comes back...
> Rooftop water collection for water.
It's one of the dries parts of the country. Good fucking luck.
A growing number of people in AZ and NV have to have water trucked in, and that is insanely expensive.
Like right now my mind is trying to imagine a solar powered desiccator and water recollection device that could dehydrate all compost and bodily excretions.
What were you a fan of instead?
A quick google image search shows a very hot Arizona.
As someone who enjoys following a lot of youtube self-builders around the world I get the impression that most channels I follow have to thread their way through some pretty convoluted and not-self-build nor budget-friendly rules :(
Do you know of any other places in the US that have similar easy-to-self-build but are more wooded and temperate?
I do know that there are water condensation machines that could be fed with solar power, but at that point will likely be too expensive for a single family.
The worst part about any long-term RV situation is the tanks. Full hookup is great, but generally only existed at the kind of campgrounds I try to avoid, where everyone is crammed together. I spent most of my time at state park campgrounds, which usually have decently-large sites, but rarely have sewer hookups (even when they do have water and electric). I got a Rhino tote to empty my tanks without moving the trailer. That helped a lot. It's still both tedious and gross, but it's a lot less time and hassle than moving the trailer. That's only really viable if there's a dump station in the campground, though. I've used it while boondocking, putting the tank in the bed of my pickup, but that sucks a million ways.
I'll probably get sick of full-timing pretty quickly. I'm already sick of it this summer. The past two summers, I wasn't working, and it was a lot less stressful.
It's wild, I was able to power an AC brushless motor as well as a corded (technically?) drill. I could have run the drill for an hour at full power.
All around it just improves so fast I'm starting to feel like I do about computers -- the longer I continue to be satisfied with my current setup, the better the next one will be!
I don't mean to straw-man your argument, I was merely thinking that the 'actual' drop must be bigger, considering the inflation in most countries (in some EU countries it approached or hit 10%), so under normal circumstances and/or in the future the drop would/will be at 30%-35% if the same rate continues (prices getting lower - inflation getting lower)
I wanted 2.5 days of power, not including AC, as I'd run the Jenny when needing AC
Solar is (was) coming at a future date with something in the 1200 watt range.
What I found was that we were boondocking roughly 8 nights a year, needing about 2 hours of generator each day to top off the batteries. (FWIW, there's a LOT of power to a gallon of gas) I can charge at home before we leave, exercising the generator is good, because I can rely on it when I need it (where if we right or over-size the solar, you might go a very long time before really needing the generator.
So, I'd like solar (it's quiet), but the $2500 or so to install it probably doesn't have a reasonable ROI. And I really like having AC the few days it's needed away from shorepower.
I had planned to start by putting 4x200W panels on the roof, until I get a large 5th wheel. Now I'm going to put 4-6x 400W on the current trailer for next summer. The price and size of 400W panels dropped enough to make that viable.
I'm generally too lazy to do a writeup/photos of my projects, but I might when I get it installed. There are a lot of writeups out there already though. People are squeezing lots of solar onto vams and small RVs these days.
A lot of people like Will Prowse on YouTube[1]. I've watched a few of his battery test videos and it's influenced what I'll end up buying. I haven't watched any of his solar videos.
I've been lurking in r/SolarDIY[2] as well.
I'm buying a bunch of Victron[3] gear. They have forums, HOWTOs, some videos, plus the various product sheets. They have some circuit diagrams too.
The rest is Google and reading blog posts, DIY articles, price comparisons, etc. There are books, but I haven't read any.
I've got basic electronics chops and tinker with things a bit. I'm by no means an expert.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarDIY/ [3]: https://www.victronenergy.com/
In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels have dropped 25% or more, and solar power per square foot at a good price point has gone up significantly (400W monocrystalline panels can be gotten for $200, in the same form factor as the 200W panels I had been budgeting for). I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the project.
This summer is almost over, so I'm going to wait until spring to start assembling my system in earnest. Anecdotally, this is a game-changer for me. I'm looking toward year-round full-timing starting next summer, because I can now afford the power I need and don't need a larger RV as soon as I thought I would.
I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization in the next few years, and I'm now confident that I can DIY a whole-house solar and battery setup so cheaply that access to mains power won't be a factor in deciding where I settle. Even with seasonal variation in power production, I'll manage just fine, and the system will pay for itself in well under five years. In fact it'll pay for itself instantly if you discount the five-figure cost I would otherwise have had to pay for running a new mains power line far into the woods. And by the time I pick some land to settle on, I'll already have enough solar on my RV that I won't even need to augment the system initially; I'll be able to power a small house in a temperate climate directly off the RV itself, while I build a larger solar array (likely ground-mounted to avoid regulations and insurance complications related to roof-mounted setups).
I know my situation is unusual, but the fact that any of this is possible for well under $10k is a huge change from even a decade ago.