How to Live Off-Grid

Description

The word 'off-grid' refers to places or people without mains water, power or phone line. Off-grid locations can range from private islands to tree-houses; the people living there might be back-packers, international business travellers or hippies; they may move around in buses or yachts, houseboats or 4-wheel drives. All are outside or inbetween the criss-crossing lines of power, water and phone that delineate the civilised world. Some are trying to save the planet, some live that way because it is all they can afford, some just want the freedom. This book is about that physical sense of off-grid. But it is also about taking the off-grid attitude into your local park or your own back garden. It is part travellogue as Nick Rosen, his wife and baby take off in a camper van to visit off-gridders representing every aspect of living off-grid - on land and water, metaphorical and actual, rural and city. And it is also a guide to avoiding the pitfalls and finding the best solutions for going off-grid yourself.

Nick Rosen is an award-winning documentary-maker, journalist and media analyst. He has produced and directed documentaries for ITV, Channel 4 (including Brezhnev's Daughter which won Best International Programme- New York Film and TV Festival 1994, and the widely praised documentary for PBS and C4 about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in New York) and for BBC Radio 4. In 1995 he founded one of the first UK Web-design companies and he wrote the Durlacher Report, a financial study of the Internet which spawned a generation of Internet investors. He's also launched a website on off-griding- www.off-grid.net.

With his book, [Nick Rosen] has caught the Zeitgeist -- Anna Shepard * The Times * This is a timely and highly readable examination of what it really means to live and travel 'off-grid' * Sunday Telegraph * An inspiring, entertaining and irreverent read -- Jillian Bolger * Sunday Tribune *