Ask HN: How to create a self sufficient home? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to create a self sufficient home?

The trend of the day seems to be homestead in a self sufficient way. If you are in a city or the suburbs, how can you make your current living situation somewhat self sufficient. For food, I think food storage could be an option but micro greens might be an avenue worth exploring. I think the big ones are power, water, and natural gas.

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I'd say avoid the term "self sufficient" because thats a lot of work and a low standard of living; I suggest you want to discuss "lowered dependence" and "buffered from supply shocks."

In the suburbs and cities you may not be legally allowed to do things like drill a well, or have your own sewage treatment, nor things like gardening or raising livestock. If you're lucky in that respect or willing to flout the law you still have the neighbors to deal with, not just "will they turn me in" but how different can you be before they turn on you? especially when they're feeling social stressors that you aren't?

If you want to do this for real, get rural.

On the other hand, small gardening and having as much nature as you can in a city is viable and fine and lovely; its just not going to be a winner in terms of feeding you or isolating you from the corner vegetable stand's supply issues. Nothing wrong with container grown salads and pride in them; but you're not shifting much of your food bill tot hat and the time investment will make the economics suck. You have to add in the personal joy of tending the garden to make it pay.

Rural life is the same but with much more "how does this make sense?" that can't be answered without intangibles on the accounting sheet.

I live in the suburbs and am interested in this. I don't think it'd be possible to be fully self sufficient, but what I do personally is have a fairly large garden and some fruit trees planted. I preserve and ferment some of the vegetables for longer term storage. I also have a decently large amount of rice/beans/canned food/sardines. I figured this way I'm decently protected from quite a few emergencies involving limited access to food and will be able to get a decent amount of nutrition from the garden and be able to get the calories and protein from the food I have stored. It actually came in handy last year when we had the winter storm in Texas. I was pretty much snowed in for a week with no electricity but we had plenty to eat and I had no real worries. You can look into urban homesteading though. There is quite a bit you can do with not a lot of space in regards to becoming more self sufficient. If you can't have chickens another animal to look into would be quail. I don't personally raise any but am looking into it. We aren't allowed to have chickens where I live because of the HOA but quail are actually considered pets so it's allowed.

Agreed with H2odragon about moving away from the term "self sufficient". If you really want to go down the road of individual resilience, then their suggestions (and moving rural) are good ones.

Another (and for the majority of folks, probably better) option is to pursue a "neighborhood self sufficiency" model. This gets around a lot of the issues of local government getting in your way, because if you get enough neighborhood buy-in, then there's more you can get away with / make happen. A good place to start is the transition towns movement, which, though it can sometimes be a little new age / hippie for folks tastes, it really is trying to tackle all the things you talked about. Good luck! Whatever you decide, share it back (here, YouTube, whatever). Humans best feature is talking to each other about how to solve problems.

there is no true self-sufficiency, not one that is feasible to achieve.

humans have always had to work together and share skill sets.

even in rural, especially in rural, people work together. im not sure city folks get that, to their own detriment. cities encourage isolation. and paying to solve all your problems.

Joey Hess has some interesting thoughts about this on his website: https://joeyh.name/offgrid/

chickens.

having a garden.

learning how to maintain the systems in your house (plumbing, electrical etc)

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