Living Off the Grid in Thornton

listen:

I don’t know much about solar power, but I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of free electricity. Free anything, really. And this seemed so easy! Just install a panel and run some cord and plug it in – right? - and there you go - a lifetime supply of free power. But as I learned from Mick and Melissa Gretz who’ve been living off the grid since 1999, there’s a bit more work to it than I thought.

Mick: It’s not a hassle-free lifestyle, it does take some effort.
Sean: When Melissa was first describing it, it struck me, if you don’t know much about it, you have kind of a fantasy - you know, like somehow getting off the grid, setting up the thing, you’re like, “Ok now I can relax.”
Mick: There’s a very steep learning curve - and then it’s a lifestyle.

A lifestyle that seemed to depend on certain sacrifices. Sacrifices I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make:

Sean: So does that mean you have no TV?
Mick: No phone lines, no power lines, no any lines.
Sean: Wow, that’s very intense.

No TV! What?! But my inner, or outer I guess, couch potato relaxes when I hear that they do subscribe to Netflix. Another more reasonable worry I had involved the telephone and when they first moved in, there were no nearby cell towers, and they had to improvise:

Melissa: We had a 3-watt bag phone, it was like a big construction worker phone, you know, those bag phones that guys used to carry around…
Sean: So you started out with a construction worker phone? Ok. And does that connect up to the regular world…?

Wow. Nice one. The answer is yes, it does connect up to what I apparently like to call the “regular world”. But for some reason, at the moment, I’m imagining that the 3-watt construction worker bag phone just connected up…to other construction workers.

In the dazzle of my worldliness, Mick takes me down into the basement and shows me the various house-powering systems in place. He talks electricity at me and I nod and mumble as my 3-watt bag brain tries to make sense of the words:

Mick: Each one of these series is a 24 volt series, because the 6, 12, 18, 24, and then in parallel, so each one of them is 375 ampere hours times 4, come up with 1,500 ampere hours.

I’m starting to get a feel for the steep learning curve Mick mentioned earlier. At first I was struck by how much work it was to cut the cord and get away from the world. But now I’m starting to see that living off the grid isn’t really about getting away from anything – it’s about going right into the center of it all. Taking every tool and technology and deriving a kind of strategy for living:

Sean: It seems like you have to think about each thing, like how many lights do you want here?
Mick: That’s the shift from grid to off-grid.
Melissa: And turning it over to like friends - people stay up here - it’s still complicated for some people. To turn the microwave on you gotta go to the switch. Or to even have the stove to light, the switch should go on.

We went to the open-air front porch and looked west over the ragged, snow-capped ridges and peaks.

Melissa: Because of where the house sits you can’t see any of the lights at night, so it’s just pitch black, it’s pretty peaceful, pretty quiet.

Not only are the Gretz’s off the grid, they can’t even see the grid. But this is more a stroke of luck than anything else. A panoramic reminder of the choice they made. Not to live separately or away from, but to draw themselves closer, to take what’s known and what’s available, and put it to its best use.

It may not be easy to be green, but as the Gretz’s life off the grid shows – knowledge definitely – and quite literally - is power.

For NHPR, I’m SH