I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months in Manhattan | Hacker News Reader

I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months in Manhattan

arstechnica.com

95 pointssamvher67 comments

It’s tempting to pick holes in this in a snipey kinda way. Or highlight it as a bit sanctimonious. But if I’m really being super honest, I think I’m just irritated by it because I’m jealous. This person seems to have the drive and ethical fortitude to put their principles ahead of their lifestyle. And I’m probably embarrassed that it showcases my selfishness at not doing so on a routine basis.

This is a cool idea, but the author stretches their conclusions too far when talking about grid impact, etc.

This becomes obvious when you ask "what if everyone did this"?

These tactics don't allow you to (as the author says) use a 95% reliable grid because if everyone in your building tries to go put solar panels on the roof it fails. If your neighbors aren't paying their heating bills so that you can leech heat through the walls, it fails.

It definitely fails at scale. Not everyone is rich enough that they can live on the mountains off the grid with starlink/hughes as their only non airgapped link to civilization. We all know you can use solar panels and live "without" by using nonperishables and just a few basic electronics and old fashioned entertainment like books and board games. I mean it's been done a thousand times by various bloggers. I camped out for 3 weeks once, with the only modern convenience being a rain barrel shower to shower off every 3 days or so. It was an enlightening experience that I don't really want to repeat.

> If your neighbors aren't paying their heating bills so that you can leech heat through the walls, it fails

On the other hand, living in high density housing is more efficient, there's less external wall area per dwelling. District heating 'should' be more efficient and practical at higher densities.

All things being equal, living in a flat in a city is going to be less energy intensive than living in a detached house in the country/suburbs.

Sure, but again, you're living off of your neighbors if you don't contribute. It's more efficient over all, but you still need X amount of energy to heat all flats to Y°C. You can shut off your heater, your neighbors have to heat a little more because some heat will escape to your flat, and you don't have to pay and still get the heat.

It's the same amount in total, just divided through fewer parties.

No it's not, because you're sharing walls, significantly reducing the surface area exposed to the cold.

I think this thread is arguing at cross purposes. I read the parent commenter to be making a narrow claim: that the author can't really claim to be disconnected from the grid, because they're relying on the connections of other people for basic things like heating. That seems true, even though the experiment is still interesting and valid in its own right.

It's not quite that simple. If everyone was being parsimonious with heat, yes. But I tend to turn my heat down to 50 at night and 65 during the day and if all my neighbors do 60 at night - 70 in the day, then on many days I can't really cool my apartment to 50 just because of their waste heat.

And in colder damper climates I do this intentionally to help inhibit mold growth etc. so am I free riding or are my neighbors causing my apartment to overheat?

I'm sure it gets fuzzy on the edges, but "I don't heat and it's still warm" isn't in that zone.

What I'm talking about is: given you want ~18°c/60°f in rooms on average (20°c/68°f for more comfort), and you have a fixed volume of space inside a building, you're not magically saving energy by turning your heat down, because your neighbors need to turn theirs up to achieve the average temperature because insulation is mostly on the outside, not between flats.

You could counteract that by insulating your rooms towards your neighbors, which would also achieve your goal of not going above 10°c/50°f.

I love how people talk about not using electricity with various groups and how they did it for hundreds of thousands of years.

Completely missing that their own ancestors did the same thing until at most 150 years ago. In fact, i know my father had no electricity for the first part of his life and he lived in Alberta, not exactly the middle of the congo.

Not using electricity is not the exception, its the rule. Until very recently in human history having grid power was impossible.

Indeed, the article credits currently disconnected peoples for useful lessons that helped the author on their experiments.

I've done enough experiments like this to know two things:

1) There are a lot of modern "conveniences" and practices that are actually pretty superfluous and you can do without most of the time.

2) There are a lot of conveniences that actually make your life better, because going without them means you're devoting such a large percentage of your time to solving the problems they solved for you that you're basically just subsisting rather than living.

It's like minimalist living, which I'm actually a very big fan of in theory, but which fails for me because I'm a dude who makes things. I'm drawn to nomadism and having less stuff, but how the hell you gonna build your own table unless you got tools and materials?

The answer, I think, is that there are no answers that are one size fits all. If your job and your hobbies are all digital, you can get away with living out of a backpack and a messenger bag; if they aren't you probably can't.

But, having said that, the experiment is always valuable for anyone, to find out what the least amount of stuff/energy/money you need to live and be happy is. A lot of the crap we spend money and natural resources on is not stuff we need or even particularly want - it's just stuff that somebody wants to sell us, which is why modern life is so fraught with irritation - everybody is trying to get us to buy their crap 24/7 by any means necessary, and it's hard not to fall for it.

My rule is: never buy what you can make, never make what you can remake or upcycle, never remake what you can repair. Of course, I've spent many years learning how to do all kinds of useful things, from building electronics to tables to plumbing to gardening. That's what drives me. Most people lose their shit if their phone battery stops working, but they're tapped into stuff I have no idea about.

Intentionality is the key. Be like the Amish: don't reject technology or convenience or the grid, but make a conscious evaluation of what bits of it work for you and what bits you don't need or want. Maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't need to plug in your oven because you're rich enough or lazy enough to order every meal. It's not a direction I'd go in, personally, but if that's your thing, I guess, do it - just do it by conscious choice, accepting the responsibility of the consequences, rather than by default.

Good article. It reminds me of the more extreme offshoots of the FI community: people or couples living on 10k yearly in US or Western Europe, guys living out of their 1st gen Chevy Volts, and so on.

In most circumstances, it'll never be worth paring back the conveniences of your life, because the time saved by convenience becomes more valuable as your labor/expertise becomes more valuable and your free time gets scarcer. But it seems healthy to remember that barebones living is an option.

If you do this, don't sell your stuff. Whenever I read this or "I'm now minimalistic" articles, they usually include donating or selling things, only to then have the fad (or the article they wanted to write for publicity) go away and re-buy everything. So now you just consumed double what you would've.

But when you donate or sell something it doesn't go into a Disintegrator.

Quite often it does, actually. Depends on where you donate to. Many places sell the donated goods and if them deem it of low market value they'll just throw it away instead of going through a trouble for selling for almost nothing.

I've read that most clothes get tossed (i.e. wrapped into bundles and sent to the Indian subcontinent). But also I'm surprised at some of the broken stuff that makes it onto shelves.

Alright, so you just used power at NYU and basically didn't do anything for five years... this reads almost as hilariously as the founder of Soylent who has an incredible blog post about "buying disposable clothing to save water" while living in an off-grid apt in San Francisco.

More theater than anything else.

https://www.metafilter.com/151777/Soylents-founder-Rob-Rhine...

Please tell me someone has the original archived somewhere. The comments just.... I have to read this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150803225629/http://robrhineha...

I’d like to call out that the author is not living “off the grid”, they’re mooching off other people’s grid access to live and work. As others have called out, this doesn’t scale.

Instead of couchsurfing, should we say they’re gridsurfing?

So people at this winter's warm-up centers are heatsurfing. It's efficient, it's (at least relatively) social.

If you reduce consumption by 80% to mooch off 10% of the remaining 20% using underutilized resources, that's great.

If you had any kind of backup for those numbers, this might be a valid point. But right now, the "reduced consumption" (beyond habit changes and the few dozen kWh their solar panel generates) is 100% transferred onto other entities. Other apartments, college, restaurants, etc.

How did he keep warm in the winter? Even if you depend on the warmth from neighboring apartments, that’s not exactly off the grid.

Yeah, it’s definitely a major hole in the accounting.

Having said that, heat in Manhattan tends to be very efficient because of the density. The majority of the radiators in my apartment (it’s a prewar building with old-school cast iron radiators) are permanently off, and there are a couple we turn on only when the temp dips into the 20s or below. It gets unbearably hot if they are on even just a little bit at other times.

Obviously I’m benefiting from the heat in other apartments, but anecdotally my neighbors have very similar behavior - it’s not like they’re all running the heat on full blast and I’m free-riding. And we all share the building oil bill in any case - there’s no water heat metering so no major incentive to turn down the radiators, it’s just that excessively hot if we don’t.

Most of the heating demand in Manhattan apartments goes toward showers and baths from what I can gather.

I’d be more impressed if they didn’t use water/sewer/natural gas, this isn’t actually off-grid if you’re still using distributed utilities. We need to dispose of our bodily waste, drink potable water, and keep ourselves warm. Drilling a well and setting up a septic system on a rural property is vastly more expensive than connecting a property to utility electrical power.

Giving up lights and receptacles is the easiest part of being ‘off grid’.

And if everyone does this I think it really encroaches on natural world. Take the 18 million people living in the NYC metro area and give each one enough land to be "off-grid" and I think you're disrupting a large amount of natural space.

It's space that's not being used, why not let people live there?

Who says it’s “not being used”? If not farmland, it’s definitely used by wildlife.

I’m a big proponent of constraints in one’s living situations. I had the pleasure to know my Great Grand Mother up to my early twenties. She was greatly effected by the Great Depression.

For me the dot-com bust of 2000 in CA started a period of underemployment. And at the beginning I was adamant about so many of my expenses (I can’t possibly go without X..). Buy the time I did get back on my feet financially, there was little of anything that I felt I couldn’t live without or find a way to compensate.

The biggest benefit, IMHO, of experimentation like the OP suggests (for those of us who are not professors) is learning this lesson in life.

Something about this just really turns me off. I think it's the comments about indigenous people living without power. Returning to nature ideology seems to always be appealing to city-dwellers. Previous humans didn't overcome nature or become "one with it". Nature killed them carelessly – unaware of their suffering or even their existence. The biggest advantage humans had over nature was our ability to go unnoticed. We didn't thrive; we survived. Would you use the homeless people scrabbling for limited supplies at the food kitchen as your motivation to go off grid?

I'm all for individual action in the face of climate change. I think people who practice having a minimal impact on their surroundings are more likely to take that mindset to their work and affect change in the world as a cohesive unit with a shared understanding. In that sense – well done to the author. I think we should advocate for thriving while having less of an affect on nature.

A friend of mine often quips, "never forget that nature is always trying to kill you."

that’s a little hyperbolic in the other direction though

Not entirely wrong, though.

Survival requires constant work- either by you, or by the community that supports you through things like providing regular fresh water, waste removal, heat, safe food to eat, and so forth.

neither is entirely true because nature is life and death, both are inescapable - it sustains and neglects

Destruction has always been easier/more likely than creation. Death is inescapable, life not so much.

Every seconds, bacteria and viruses enter you body (or try to), with the goal of feasting on your flesh. I don't think it's hyperbolic.

right but our bodies also defend against these, life is also nature

i disagree. theres a sweet spot between being completely divorced from nature, and being completely subject to it.

Cities are divorced from nature, at least too much for my taste, and I don't that's conducive to understanding or respecting nature, which is what we need to start looking after and protecting it.

On the contrary, cities allow people to live efficiently.

If you spread into suburbs and single-family housing, you need more area per person, motorized individual transport (because walking becomes impractical), more spread out roads and utility lines, and so on.

Cities are not divorced from nature, they allow us to preserve it more easily.

This is correct, though paradoxically people who live in cities tend to use more energy in practice, largely due to the larger average wealth in the cities. That said, I (I think like you) believe cities are the solution. We just have to opt out of using our surplus wealth, borne of efficiency, for ecologically destructive purposes.

What if we had an ecologically ~free source of power?

I knock myself out after I switched to hydro.

Nothing is divorced from nature, we are nature.

With that said, I think people who live in cities tend to feel plants, animals and ecosystems that are not ours less, and therefore we may be quite ignorant to the destruction we are causing.

It's one thing to know in the mind that we are destroying other life forms and it's another to live in that destruction.

Sure, depending on the measuring stick cities are more efficient. But I think most importantly, they likely aren't conducive to creating the sorts of empathy required for us to make decisions that are more in line with preserving other forms of life.

I don't quite know the answer, like many things existential...it's complex, confusing, nuanced and hard to grasp. I hope that we figure it out and I hope that I answer the call within me to join in that figuring out.

I live in the city, my parents live in a suburb/village. But the village is all mowed lawn, it’s surrounded by intense farming.

I see more wild animals than they do. There’s a breeding pair of some bird of prey in the park next door, there’s falcons and skylarks on the Tempelhofer Feld, I regularly see foxes in the greener parts of town. It’s not like in a nature park, but suburbs are a desert compared to what I have.

They're horrible places to live, though. Pollution, noise, light pollution, they're crowded -- it's impossible to get away from others even for a few minutesb-- and the stench is just awful.

Efficient, yes, but quality of life is unacceptably low.

I deal with light pollution using blackout curtains.

About pollution, where I am is not particularly bad, but if it were, I'd use a heat recovery ventilator and filters.

As for noise, it can be a problem. My most trouble has been with cars. Move away from large roads.

But some cities started addressing it as well:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/noise-radar-in...

I don't disagree with you. For what it's worth I was contrasting living in the country v living in the city. I suspect living in the suburbs has much the same problem as living in the city.

Theres a paradox where city living is a more efficient way of living a first world lifestyle, but doing so divorces you from what you're trying to protect.

If you're getting hot water from your building, (presumably) steam heating through your radiator supplied by the building, natural gas to cook with, running water in general from the city, and sewage disposal down your toilet, I don't think you can call this "off grid" as the term is commonly understood.

The article (not HN) headline is more accurate -- "disconnected from the electric grid". To which I guess I would ask, in a place like Manhattan -- why? Installing prohibited solar panels on your building's roof doesn't seem particularly noteworthy, nor is it scalable in an urban area.

I believe city water pressure will take it to the 5th floor and that is gravity driven.

I live on the 2nd floor and never lost water pressure during the two major blackouts NYC suffered in the past 20 years while the higher floors in my building did once the roof tank was emptied.

Yes, the water that comes to your apartment is fed by gravity from a holding tank situated at a higher elevation than you.

But getting the water that high depends mostly on electric pumps. Even if the source is higher than the water towers, there are open cisterns for water treatment between the source and tower. And those pumps and treatment plants have backup generators and priority on gas deliveries for them.

A quick but informative video on how cities would shut down given a total power failure: https://youtu.be/_OpC4fH3mEk

Nope.

With respect to NYC I believe you’re mistaken. 97% of NYC water is gravity fed from three reservoirs.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwater/html/drinking/reservoir.sh...

“The NYC Aqueduct is a pressure tunnel (a gravity feed system) with hydraulic head provided by a 300 m difference in elevation between the watershed headlands in upstate New York and the distribution area (NYC). The head is enough to get water under pressure to the sixth floor of most buildings without pumping.”

https://sites.hofstra.edu/charles-merguerian/a-history-of-th...

The submitted title broke the HN guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." We've reverted to the article title now.

(Submitted title was "Off grid in Manhattan for 8 months", which was more misleading and linkbait. Please don't do that.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Welcome my friends, the future is Amish :) Please try our food next

The silly, pedantic takeaway for many in this thread seems to be "everyone in the city should put solar on their apartment roof and eschew modern life".

It was actually "Life got better when I stopped watching Netflix and ordering takeout."

It's hard for me to see how cooking at home gets better when you need to go to the grocery store daily so your meat and milk won't spoil. As well as not be able to save any money by buying food in volume or saving leftovers.

At the end of the day, your produce is either being refrigerating by you or your local store. Not much of an energy difference either way, but it introduces a massive inconvenience.

I would think that centralised refrigeration would be a big win. Maybe there's LCA on this.

At least at all the grocery stores I shop at, meat and cold veggies are on refrigerated shelves out in the open with no doors. While it's winter and the store is being heated.

I can't see any scenario where that's even remotely energy-efficient, compared to a home refrigerator with a door.

This article is a one off, not at all a "If everyone could stand a few days without grid power...". Wanna know why? Here is the primer quote that's all you need to know: " I’m single, so I could act unilaterally, but I had no access to economies of scale.....and I have no children".

Lemme repeat that quote again: "...and I have no children".

As a single experiment is OK, but once you fully become a member of society, this is not possible, not even for a day! Why? Because you end up in jail for child endangerment!! That's why. And if everyone would be single then guess what!! No more humanity in 50 years, because...yeah, you guess it, no children!

I want a story like this from a family with children, then it will be worth of HN front page. This one is "meh" at best.

I strongly oppose the notion that you're not a full member of society without kids. That's an unnecessary attack on a valid lifestyle choice. And even worse, a lot of people don't even get to choose, which you're ignoring entirely.

It also raises question of whether the children are full members of society, and if you lose your membership when your kids reach 18/move out/have their own kids.

Surely potential breeders should be more deserving of membership than those that are no longer capable?

Further, surely rapists are more deserving that abortionees?

My point is if you can choose, then choose the best for your kids. Also humanity exists solely because of reproduction and reproduction means kids. So yeah, you're not fully a member of society until you raise kids, yours or adopted it doesn't matter. The ultimate contribution to humanity is to be a parent.

Our societies are built on specializing on what you're good at. If you're not a good parent, you should let people who are good at it handle that part.

Yes, a (developed) society needs about 2.1 children per woman (or have immigration from other societies) but people not having kids can easily be averaged out by other people having three or four kids.

I would actually argue that in the face of climate change, a society having too many kids and thus a growing population and resource usage is disadvantageous for the society's survival.

I was actually an off grid child. My parents were hippies back in the 60's and part of the "back to the land" movement. They bought a bit of land in the middle of nowhere in Maine, miles from the nearest neighbors, built a log cabin, dug a well, and lived there subsistence farming until the mid 80's. My sister was born in the cabin and we both spent our early childhoods there (my parents did eventually get tired of the lifestyle and we moved to a house with plumbing and electricity). We didn't even have things like solar panels or cellphones or laptops. There were definitely challenges and downsides, but I wouldn't call it "child endangerment".

And in ancient times people were living on the land, they didn't had even your log cabin and so on. Your point is not valid. Because we talk current times. Nowadays you go back to living deliberately, especially when you can afford New York, to a farm without anything modern then you're definitely raising your child without best chances in life. I'd call that child endangerment. Your kid will not have the best education you can definitely provide, and it's starting with a handicap in life. So yeah, your point comparing 60's with today is moot.

> Your point is not valid.

Which point? That we didn't have solar panels, cellphones, etc? Because I'm pretty sure we didn't.

Or that "off grid" living with children isn't necessarily "child endangerment"? We had much fewer amenities than most of the current "off grid" people and yet my childhood was perfectly safe, loving, and I developed into an adult with an Ivy League degree and good career in technology. I turned out better than a lot of kids whose parents had high paying jobs and used money to replace actual affection and time spent with them.

Where do you draw the line on "raising your child without best chances in life"? If you don't buy them the absolute latest iPhone and fashionable clothes so they can be popular in their schools is that child endangerment? If you don't take a second job so you can get them into a more expensive private school, is that child endangerment?

You said that you "want a story like this from a family with children". It seems like what you meant was that you want a story like this from a family with children that supports your own conclusions, not one that might refute them.

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