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Comment by blah_why_not | Hacker News Reader

You can buy enough Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries to power an A/C unit for about $5k.

Throw together a control system for solar panels, plus the solar panels to feed the batteries for under $1k

And toss a canvas tent over it.

Looking at $7-10k total, for your entire comfy off grid tent living system. Potentially includes a decent size Yurt at that price.

Some system designs are available here: https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/ Kudos to Will Prowse for freely sharing his content.

...meanwhile, the most basic Jupe setup is $25k, not including tax: https://www.jupe.com/build

Yowza. As a formerly homeless person, I often wonder "Who has that kind of money?"

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Having done the off-grid thing, shelter and power are easy - sanitation and plumbing is where it all turns into an almighty pain in the ass - and having neither sanitation nor plumbing this isn’t a “complete” solution unless part of your camping plan is “having violent diarrhoea in the bushes”.

You’d actually be amazed at what you can ram into less than a cubic meter. I’m working on a horse box conversion at the moment, and am using a cisternless toilet and a detachable worm tank to have a mobile toilet - drinking water and shower/basin water is trivial with cartridge filters, a pump, and RO. Shower is outdoor, heated, rainfall. Basin is for washing dishes and food, also outdoor. Total cost under €1,000 for a full sanitary suite. Grey water just goes on the ground, or into a tub for further use if desired, black water is stored for discharge - although the volume ends up very low due to the worm tank and waste separation.

Very solvable problems that they seem to have entirely ignored.

Sewage is easy. Just go in the middle of nowhere, dig a hole and off you go. Heck in an emergency any place on the ground will do. Where do you think animals in the wild shit?

And yes I've had to do violent diarrhea in the middle of nowhere. TP is all you need.

TP and clean water - both to drink, and wash with.

Sewage is easy when population size is small.

When you have a lot of people in an area, you start running out of places to dig a hole and shit in it pretty quickly. You'll be surprised how often you'll start digging and find someone else's shit, which I can't imagine you'd be excited about.

As a currently homeless, disabled person living in a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan, yes, I wonder who has that kind of money. And you know what else I see all over the deserts and national parks I now call home? Starlink. Everyone has StarlinK. That is expensive enough, but the rigs they sit on top of are huge and money as well.

I am all good with my situation, but I know many people who have it worse than me with not even a car to live in, so when I see opulence like this for the novelty of it I wonder where human compassion has gone.

And to make like these things are doing anything for the environment is just green washing. I have solar power that cost me $700 in total that powers everything I need. My sleeping bag is my heater and my reflective tarps are my AC. I am sure my carbon foot print in minuscule compare to anyone who could afford a Jupe.

Plenty of people have that kind of money, and most of them are dumb & lazy enough to buy a product like this.

As someone who spent 5 years in a similar situation to you, what I am about to say isn't malicious; it is reality from my experience and is the key to solving the issue for yourself.

They do not care about you and never will.

I am leaving this country that I served in a war for because they do not care and they never will. I am homeless and I have money; plenty to live like people do here. I don't because it is disgusting. I don't because I am not funding people's lifestyle where they buy nonsense like this while people rot and starve.

So I am going somewhere else where people haven't lost touch with reality like they have here. I would recommend any sane people do the same ASAP because no one here is going to change. It is the better option than being angry all the time and living in their dystopia.

> So I am going somewhere else where people haven't lost touch with reality like they have here.

What kind of place is that? I've been to many places around the world and around North America and they're all functionally similar, if zooming out.

Reduce your standard of living significantly and you will find a whole new world opens up to you. Build on top of that world.

Sorry, that's a non-answer. Where have people not "lost touch with reality"?

What part of the world would take English-speaking Americans?

Is it so crazy to expect Americans to learn the language of the country they move to?

Some of us are first-generation immigrants to the US who already speak two languages. You're right, though: it's arrogant to expect another country to adapt to USAmericans. I wish this country took better care of its people.

> They do not care about you and never will.

I agree and I know. Thank you fro an honesty many more people need to hear.

Just know that while they do not care, plenty of others do. Don't lose your faith in humanity or life, just don't expect people that "have plenty" to suddenly gain a conscience. What we lack in materialism we gain in spirit. They do not hold the keys to our happiness, we do. We need nothing from such a heartless and rotting collective of people. Make community with people that do see you and how you live, and authentically care and connect. Build from that foundation and it will have significantly better outcomes.

We do not need to and cannot change what they've built. But what is built is rife with cracks and canyons, and they do not have the legs to carry themselves into those depths.

Why not build a new city here?

>I am leaving this country that I served in a war...

Thanks for your service. I served as well and made the jump to a new country as well. My mental health has improved greatly. I hope you find some sanity as well.

The big clue that this is all a pretensious hustle is calling a TENT an "off grid shelter".

Critical Ignoring, engaged.

Not to mention: where are you going to put it? People who can't afford a house also often can't afford land, and you can't generally finance a land purchase with a mortgage, either (especially if you're dropping something like a Jupe there instead of planning to build a stick-built house).

Land in the US is _cheap_. You can easily buy a hectare of land in the middle of nowhere for $10k. If you want something more interesting, with your own water source and maybe some trees, you're looking for $20k for a 0.5 hectare lot.

Getting to it and making a living between it and elsewhere is the problem. (Most American's aren't office workers.)

Also, much of the land isn't exactly ideal due to hazards.[0]

Furthermore, being 10+ miles from a serious hospital is a threat to life.

0. https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map

I assume that if you're talking about living "off-grid", then you're prepared to either work remotely, have another residence, or another source of income.

Pretty much all of the US is a potential hazard zone. You have earthquake danger on the West coast, tornadoes on the Great Plains, floods and hurricanes on the East coast, and so on. You deal with that by buying insurance.

> Furthermore, being 10+ miles from a serious hospital is a threat to life.

Again, you can buy air ambulance insurance. It's pretty popular in Alaska, and is fairly cheap (around $100 a year for the family of 4).

I am planning to build an off-the grid house, and it's surprisingly doable.

It's not that it's a "hazard zone", it's that cheap land is bottom of the barrel.

I looked at a lot of these properties. The land is poorly graded, the drainage and soil quality is poor (Will fail a perc test), roads are terrible and wash out, and rural communities often lack basic services. I'm not talking entertainment, I mean your nearest grocery store is a Chevron Gas Station 30 miles away.

A lot more engineering and planning goes into making land livable than simply plopping a house on it and calling it a day.

Nope. You can buy perfectly good land suitable for habitation for about the same money. I have bought a 100 acre lot with a freaking stream, lake, and a small forest for about $180k. There's even a gravel road to the nearest highway, and it's just 40 minutes away from a fairly large settlement and 2 hours away from a major city.

This is just insane that people keep buying overpriced condos for $2 million apiece in cities, when they can have their own private park.

Methinks the kind of financial 'sophistication' which systemically leads to $2 million dollar luxury apartments does not foster the type of person who wants to deal with paying a manager to manage the staff to maintain a personal estate. Yes, I'm kidding, as they certainly wouldn't do these things themselves. Something something about the 'Apollonian' and the 'Mercurial'.

Most of Appalachia is fine and has no risk of natural disasters.

.... Except for rain, flooding, tornadoes, the remnants of hurricanes, landslides, snow...

There is not a place on earth that has no risk of natural disasters.

I guess? Most of these things are not really major issues for Appalachia. Anyone who has lived there will tell you that. It’s an order of magnitude lower than Florida or California or Tornado Alley.

Can you commonly live on unzoned land in the US?

(honest question)

I think the point is more that there are swathes of land that are so remote that nobody could tel if you are living on it in the first place.

Mostly yes, but what you can put on the land will vary by state/county. It's easy enough to call up a county office ahead of time and tell them what you plan to do. They are usually happy and accommodating to take in new property taxes. Taxes are not too bad if not building a permanent structure. Some counties have rules about things like mobile homes, water tanks, septic requirements and some of them have ways to get around the rules. Some places have next to no rules and are happy to get more people spending money at the local businesses. There isn't really a generic answer to your question. That's how much it varies by location.

With such a focus on the bed and the two first fields of the form being financing and bulk order, The target is probably an airbnb glamping resort ...

https://www.jupe.com/partner

The second point on this page is "Ready to rent in hours". So I think you're right.

You assume it's for day to day living. This is for rich people who want to make more money via airbnb.

Indeed, very true. I am fortunate to have been able to teach myself web development from cafes & libraries while sleeping in a tent (cumulatively, for about 1.5 years).

Now in my mid-30's I have about $60k to my name. It'll whittle down to $50k in about 6 months ($2k/mo burn rate for rent + expenses). I have faith that I will land consulting clients or a full time job by then, and can continue saving up to $100k - $150k to buy with as much cash as possible (I hate debt).

I am looking into buying cheap property, simply to camp on it & store my stuff in a shipping container.

Looking forward to falling asleep to the sounds of bugs & nature, and waking up to birds visiting my tent and chirping at me. And at long last, I won't get kicked off private/public property.

> Yowza. As a formerly homeless person, I often wonder "Who has that kind of money?"

They're called shelters, but the bottom half of the page is all pictures of people using them for camping.

Although not homeless per se, I lived in a 80's VW Westfalia along the curbs of Silicon Valley for 9 years without A/C. It had a solar panel and I didn't have to buy anything except to keep fragile West German engineering going. The problem is most Americans aren't willing or able to exchange space and comforts, voluntarily or involuntarily, for alternative approaches. Compounding this is most Americans don't have any savings at all and are living paycheck-to-paycheck. If they had funds then they would have an opportunity to use their imagination and lives differently, but too many are on the debt, expenses, and insufficient wages treadmills that may seem all but impossible to escape.

California in the 80s without A/C is not the climate most people live in. Where I live, if your home doesn't have A/C or some kind of cooling system, you can die inside your home in the summer.

Yeah, it's just a tent. Some random widlife looking for food or simply erosion will take it out.

And the 25k price is "shore power," the off grid package is another $2800!

Yes and how do you poop?

That's the easier part: a hole in the ground, possibly with a "thunder box" open air wooden box to sit on with a toilet seat, or an "outhouse" enclosure.

Water to wash with can be the harder part. Though having a dryish cabin, there's some convenient USB chargeable pumps that fit on a 5gal jug and little submersible USB chargeable pumps that get you a poorly pressurized shower nowadays from a big pot (which can be warmed on a woodstove, or sous vide thingy).

Great for the $28k-for-shelter and $20k-for-off-grid-land crowd, not so great for their hypothesized emergency relief scenario.

Compost toilets are the easy part.

A septic tank. This problem has been solved for literally thousands of years.

So I guess plan another $10,000-$20,000 for that.

Well, have fun shitting in a bag then. Perhaps you can also shower out a garbage bag too.

Not that I am rooting for this product, but... "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

What do you do when you are done glamping? Do they come pack it up?

This seems to be "optimized" for remote sites, where frankly you shouldn't leave anything worth $25k if you want it to be in one piece when you get back. 100% it will be occupied by animals or crackheads in a week.

This kind of thing is for rich people who want to LARP as cyberpunk homeless people for a while.

The government has that kind of money, because they can just take yours. Also trust fund kids (and they lack the awareness of growing up reasonable that would let them figure out this is stupid, so they must be the primary market here).

Disagree with your uncharitable description of how taxes work, but agree that they seem to primarily be aiming at either rich kids going camping, or at governments who need to shelter a lot of people fast due to natural disasters.

You know what's missing, though? Any sort of toilet facility. The pretty picture of emergency relief in an urban center doesn't show any hygiene facilities at all.

It's not an uncharitable description of how taxes work, it's an accurate description of how stuff like this gets funded by government. somebody in government somewhere will fail to do any of the cost containment/search for alternatives you or I would do if we were spending our own money and they will put in an order for this, which will increase the deficit, which will eventually increase taxes. They don't have anywhere near as strong an incentive to contain costs/search for alternatives that we do because it's not their money or their problem (until they manage things so poorly that they cause a currency crisis).

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