tynan

I hope to some day have it visitable in the winter, but not expecting it to be ready for that any time soon. The idea is to start with a cool private camp site, and eventually build it into a year-round sustainable retreat.

I'm actually really into learning about forest management. I've been reading a lot about it, and it's fascinating stuff. Based on our usage, it seems that we should be fine, especially since few people will be coming in winter. My bigger concern right now is bringing back birch trees! We have some dead ones, but very few live ones. The whole island is balsamic fir right now, so it smells like Christmas trees.

Thank you! Some of my ancestry is from there, but it's the first time I've visited. I was really struck by how friendly everyone is, and how beautiful the area is. Halifax was a cool city, too.

It's an LLC. We have a lawyer as a member of the group, so he drafted our purchase and sale agreement and our operating agreement. We had to hire a local lawyer, too, to draft an affidavit and to register the deed.

I hope so. If anyone buys an island in Nova Scotia, get in touch!

We're leaving all trees around the edge to prevent erosion, and are clearing very minimally. Will definitely be getting some expert advice before making big decisions, though.

Thanks! I actually have an RV with solar and LED, so I'm very familiar with the awesomeness of running off the grid. I'm not sure we'll get enough solar to make it cost efficient, but we're still looking into it.

I haven't done enough research into desalination-- I had no idea that shutting it down for a while is a problem. Why is that?

We may also do rainwater recovery + filtration for drinking/cooking, and salt for showering. Worst case we have to bring water over every time and shower in salt.

Planning on doing propane or wood to heat water, propane for refrigeration and cooking.

Thanks for subscribing! We'll be going out in the spring to do some more work and will definitely keep people updated on progress.

Thank you! I was hoping to build a treehouse, but a hurricane wiped out most of the big trees in 2003. Now it's all 6-20' tall Balsam Firs, which are too small to make treehouses in. Maybe in 20 years...

I should have mentioned this in the original post-- we actually have HSPA+ and LTE coverage! Super lucky, as this is the only utility that we couldn't easily do ourselves.

I'm already over 30, as are many members of the group. I was extremely selective on who I invited, and they're all people I trust completely. There will be issues in the future, but we've come up with rules to deal with them.

Also, as noted below, none of us are planning on living there full time-- just visiting over the summer, hopefully all at the same time.

We didn't transfer the money until seeing it. As the commenter below said, it hit our metrics, so we figured that barring an infestation of wild tigers or something, it was worth buying. So we went up, camped for a night to check it out, and wired the money the next morning.

Yes, next summer we'll have a drone to survey everything. This trip was just to inspect before purchasing and explore a little bit.

The mainland neighbor we met was pretty confident no one would ever go to the island without permission. He's lived there his whole life, works as a fisherman in the bay, and has never seen anyone else on it. Even so-- we'll put up signs and not mind too much if people use our fire pit when we're not there.

I like the idea of the water flow survey... would be awesome if we could get fresh water without desalinating.

Ahh, I misunderstood.

We're actually pretty close to the shore on one side, in cell phone coverage, and have the phone number of our closest neighbor. There's definitely danger there, and we're big on safety, but it's not as remote as it probably seems.

Thanks for the advice and thoughts!

It's an LLC. We have bylaws to deal with people wanting out, but we intentionally make it very difficult (island llc gets 1st right of refusal, every member gets a right of refusal after that, and we must approve of any buyer). The idea is that it's an investment in utility, not in dollars. One bad person on the island could ruin everyone's experience, so we guard against that.

We're going to be building next year, so we still have lots of research to do. It appears that anything permanent like a cabin would require a permit, but that yurts / heavy duty tents / sheds / etc wouldn't.

A neighbor on the mainland has offered us dock space and gave us a couple rides this trip. We also bought an Intex Excursion 5 off Amazon which was serviceable but really difficult to navigate in wind. We'll buy a real boat next year.

HN is throttling my posts, so it may take a while to answer everything. I appreciate all the comments and questions.

I would have never guessed that it would, either. I was pretty shocked to see it here when I loaded up HN on my phone.

When I was inviting friends to be a part of this, there was a big divide... half of them LOVED the idea and felt like an island was something special (as I do), and others just saw it as some difficult-to-access land. I've had a tough time articulating exactly why an island seems special to me.

I'm curious about this, too. We've done a little research, and it seems like building non-permanent things like sheds and yurts will be fine, but docks, septic, permanent buildings that cost over $5k will need permits.

Then again, there are some pretty janky home-made docks in the bay that seem to have been there for a while.

We're actually pretty close to a hospital. Five minutes to shore by boat and maybe 20 minutes to a hospital. Didn't see any scary spiders, but will keep an eye out next time I'm up there!

We have and plan on complying with all laws. Taxes are very low, almost negligible when distributed amongst the 10 owners.

The point isn't to escape jurisdiction, just to have a cool private summer came / work retreat place.

Thanks!

At first it will be a summer-only thing, but we hope over 5-10 years to make it sustainable all year round. We want to use it mainly as a place to work together and get away from cities.

Next summer we will be putting up a 30' yurt, a huge battery bank, and a generator. Water is the hardest, so we'll probably have to catch rain and use a desalinator.

Oh-- we have awesome LTE and 4G coverage there, too!

5 figures, not 6....

It's in Nova scotia, so the deed is registered there and we pay taxes there.

Hey guys-- this is my post. I'm flattered this made it to HN! Will be answering questions in comments for a couple hours if any come up.

For someone who knows nothing much about Arduinos, what are a few examples of projects this would be good for?

I must be getting old... no one's ever said I look old before!

Thanks for the link!

I believe this issue is fixed now... feel free to give it a try and let me know if you're still having issues.

Thanks to everyone for the detailed info-- really helped me a lot.

For those interested, here's what happened:

When someone goes to a SETT blog, the first thing we do is fire off an ajax call to see if we can set a 3rd party cookie. If we can't, we bounce to a page on sett.com that sets a cookie and then redirects back. In some cases, like Safari with default settings, this allows us to use a 3rd party cookie.

To prevent infinite looping in cases where 3rd party cookies can't be accessed, we add a query string to the URL, telling SETT to skip the cookie check.

However, the old way we were doing it was just appending ?_ to the URL, rather than parsing it out and taking into consideration the query string of the URL.

This URL was submitted with a trailing ?, which made the query string ??_, which didn't properly skip the cookie check. Thus... infinite refreshes.

Thanks a lot for the info, everyone. I can't replicate this even with all the same addons installed, but I'm working on it...

Thanks for the info and sorry for the bad reading experience... looking into it now.

I created the blogging platform he's using... the redirect is supposed to happen once to set a cookie from the platform, but apparently isn't working. Would you mind telling me what browser/version/os you use so that I can replicate and fix this?

Hey, I created the blogging platform he's running on. Would you mind giving me some details on the scrolling problem you're having? Do arrows, mouse wheel, and scroll bar all not work?

Hey, I'm the creator of the blogging platform he's running on and am trying to replicate this. Do you have cookies or js off or any other notable change from stock?