Life without Electricity

If one wanted to live in something akin to regular housing with running water but no electricity, some people might need to adapt a bit. I have experience having limited access to modern amenities.

I slept in a tent for a few years and that means my humble abode had no electricity nor running water. I kept my hair short because I was homeless and had limited access to showers, but I have delicate hair that fries easily, so I gave up drying and styling my hair with heated appliances a lot of years ago. 

Here's a hairstyle technique I used when I had longer hair and didn't want to blowdry my hair and this is how my mother curled my hair when I was a child. With a little research and practice, it's possible to come up with something that works for you without heated styling tools.

It's nice to have a fridge to have a variety of juices and milk on hand but it's not essential. You can purchase powdered milk for adding to things like coffee, individual serving bottles of juices, colas, tea bags or coffee that require no refrigeration.

You can make tea without boiling water. This is often done in the Deep South of the US by placing tea bags and water in a container outside in the sun and then it's called sun tea, but sun isn't essential to the process of cold steeped tea. I'm not a big coffee connoisseur, but if instant coffee is not to your liking, cold brew coffee is also possible.

Babybel cheese is covered in wax and is shelf stable so long as the wax is unbroken and grated hard cheese, like Parmesan, doesn't have to be refrigerated. Dried fruits, vegetables and meats, noodles, ghee and clarified butter are all shelf stable.

Some noodles, like ramen, are precooked and only need to be soaked and rehydrated. You could also potentially research camp stoves and the like to have limited access to the ability to cook a little which can open up options for meal prep but you would likely still want all the tips on how to live without cold storage.

Make a list of needs you currently cannot meet without electricity at home and start researching how to handle it some other way. Clothes can be hand washed and hung to dry or taken to a laundromat. Meals can potentially be ordered in or put together from shelf stable items.

If you are hoping to live off grid, years of reading things like solar-themed magazines suggests that step one is start today in figuring out how to reduce your electric consumption. You probably don't actually need six electric clocks but may well have that many. 

Articles about how to go off grid and live on solar electric with battery backup typically start by doing a survey of how much energy you use followed by an exercise in reducing that consumption as one of the easiest ways to make it feasible to live off grid.

Even if you never take the leap, you are probably simplifying your life and lowering your electric bill, so it seems like a no brainer as a cool exercise in sustainable living.

Historically, cellars were a form of cold storage requiring no electricity and Americans depended heavily on shelf stable foods plus some fresh foods acquired that same day from the kitchen garden or daily delivery. Before refrigerators were the norm, milk delivery was common in the US.

Many modern countries still have tiny refrigerators compared to your typical American refrigerator and it doesn't prevent them from cooking for a large family. Our huge modern refrigerators are likely shaped by an expectation that you are eating a lot of stuff like microwave meals which require cold storage but aren't actually particularly good for you.

Moving back towards traditional shelf stable foods as a staple plus smaller quantities of fresh items would likely improve nutrition and quality of life for many people while being more disaster proof. If you have a tiny fridge and a huge pantry, a power outage is not the same level of problem as it is with a huge fridge and tiny pantry.