5 Years Living Off Grid Building A Sustainable Smallholding

hi everyone so my name is chris harbour about six years ago i bought a piece of agricultural land 18.5 acres to be exact with the intention of turning it into a sustainable off-grid small holding i built this house which i've now been living in for five years and i thought it'd be nice to just show all of the different things that i've built in the last five years and how far we've come from uh just a field where i was staying in a tent to having a house workshop greenhouse garden and varying other things it has been a huge improvement in my life generally my well-being is far greater than ever was before mental health my physical health and my abilities have increased massively since i built even this house here so i thought i'd give a general overview and tour of all those things so let's get going so this is the house from outside it's the first thing i built it's kind of it's mostly round with like a square porch on the front for taking your shoes off and stuff it has a round wood timber frame and a reciprocal round wood roof it has cord wood walls that sit on a gravel bag foundation and some stone and obviously a turf roof the wood was all mostly free i didn't pay much for it just some of the round wood poles that the frame were made of everything else was off cuts and the binder between the logs is just clay standard straw which is known as cobb so the entire building cost approximately three thousand pounds to make so it's incredibly cheap and which was needed because at the time i didn't have any money at all so it was built very much to that cost of how much i had which was basically nothing i was using the money that i was getting from filming it at the time um to buy the things i needed like say it was only around 3000 pounds and it's built on like a log foundation that sits on top of the ground on some tyres and gravel bags and um it's all everything i did i did by hand well basically just with the chainsaw and hand tools and it took me around about a year to build and it was um i was working at the time and going backwards and forwards from london at the time so that's where i came from that's why it took so long but it's actually about six months work mostly alone and i've been living it now for five years and it's excellent um it's never been built it's designed to be a permanent house that's gonna be here forever it's gonna rot at some point it's not a house for a lifetime but it i built it with the intention of it lasting around 30 years so all of the wood is durable naturally durable and has a long life in it without treatment and stuff but i do still maintain and treat it i'll show you around so as i walk up to the house this is what i see so the house is raised up off the floor and it has the reciprocal spiraled roof with a window in the middle we have a small kitchen and wood stove log burner and the right hand side and uh hot water which is heated by the wood stove i have my desk at the back which i do my editing from and generally running my work around the side mostly dots area she has a harp and a spinning wheel and where she keeps her clothes and things we have like this mezzanine floor up here where we sleep and behind me is the porch area where we take off our shoes and stuff so and we also have a bath in the side on the left hand side there and uh it's an open bath so it's quite communal but that's okay because it's only me and dot and that is the area the square area on the front where we take off our shoes the house is completely off grid it's powered by solar and hydro and we don't use any gas or anything like that we cook on the wood stove and use the electric cooker for when we have plenty of solar power or hydroelectric power and it's a very very lovely very cozy place to be and we shall be living in here for at least another five years yet until i build another house so that's the house the next thing i built was a shed to house all of the power situation because when i built this i just had some batteries in the corner and a small inverter so the next thing i built was a shed um to put all that stuff in and to keep everything away from the house because in here we have normal 240 volt power as if it's just a normal house there's no 24 volt or anything like that in here we just have normal plugs we switch things on as you would normally in a house and all of the batteries and 24 volt stuff and solar and everything is out in the shed which i'll show you now so the next thing i built is this small shed again it's a round wood frame and built for basically almost nothing it's built from ash wood that we cut down from the trees that are directly behind it and i've got the cladding for very cheap hardly anything at all and i built this to put my tools in and to house all of the power and everything it's where all the solar and the hydro electric comes into where all the batteries are so it's a rounded frame cladded it's a bit messy in here because it's been used as a storage a lot now and uh i'm building a new workshop at the moment to put all the stuff in but i've built all my um metalwork projects from in here and it served me very well and it's also housed all of our internet and all of our power which i'll show you now so this is my power setup it's in a constant state of evolving and changing and it's going to get upgraded soon to lithium batteries but it's the main source of power dot sorcery the main storage is a large forklift battery which is secondhand and uh in need of sorting out really because it's losing capacity i've got hydroelectric that comes in here i have my hydroelectric control so i can change my nozzles and that's all connected to the internet i have uh breakers and stuff for the roundhouse and a breaker for the workshop that i'll show you later two solar charge controllers from two strings of solar panels all my stuff was second hand and and bought just here and there off ebay and stuff so nothing matches and i just use what i've got and so that's why there's two controllers yeah it's it's actually not that complicated we just have two kilowatts of solar and the hydroelectric system which runs uh for about seven months of the year and produces around 10 kilowatt hours of energy per day in the winter that's our main source of power in the winter and the solar is our main source of power in the summer and it all comes into here and then is diverted off down the hill to the roundhouse and up the hill to the new workshop i will show you the hydroelectric system now because it's quite cool so this is where the hydroelectric power starts this is the intake the small down as you can see there's not a lot of water there now but uh come winter this is uh raging torrent sometimes and you know a vast amount of water flows over here average every day the water comes into this intake and the leaves and stuff are cleaned off of it and excess water when flowing brushes the leaves and self cleans the intake screen the water goes down this pipe and as it moves downhill it gains in pressure the pipe is always full and so as water leaves the bottom more water is replaced at the top so the water is always the pipe is always filled to the brim the water isn't flowing down the pipe you know like a stream the pipe is full and pressurized the whole time this intake is around 18 to 19 meters above where the turbine is and we flow up for around five liters of water per second and it all comes in here it all starts here and it goes off downhill that's where we go now so the now pressurized water has made its way from the intake down about 19 meters and it's now nearly 30 psi of pressure coming down this pipe and it enters into this small building that i built it's a timber frame with the cob walls and oak hand split oak shingle roof which i built with basically hand tools all hand tools i think actually and for very little money because it was uh basically all free again um and the water enters into there and it goes into a manifold and then splits out and powers the turbine let's show you that now so here is the turbine the turbine has it's a turbo turbine an impulse turbo so the water sprays out of jets hits into what look like spoons really and that causes rotation in this permanent magnet alternator on the top it has four nozzles and two are manual at the moment that's usually controlled by a motor this is a spear valve which means it's adjustable there's one manual one at the back which is just manually turned on and off this fixed nozzle there's two that are actuated that i can actuate on my phone or from the shed it produces nearly 500 watts when it's running full flow and 500 watts over the course of a 24 hour period results in approximately the same usage so around 10 kilowatt hours maybe a little bit more sometimes as your average three-bedroom house in the uk and so this for seven months a year produces as much power as your average three-bedroom house uses which i think is quite amazing yeah so that's what powers everything the house the workshop all my big tools and everything for seven months of the year and the solar for the rest of it i'm sure a lot of you would like to see this running i don't actually have enough water at the moment to sustain it but it will turn on with what's in the pipe and so just put the two manual nozzles on there's one that's the smallest one [Music] there's the second one [Music] here on my solar panels there's two lots of four and they go into the powershed and into those separate charge controllers that i showed you earlier they're all secondhand i didn't pay any more than 80 pounds each for any of them there's around two kilowatts of energy here in full sun and uh this is what we use to power everything workshop house the lot for uh the rest of the year that the hydro isn't on um they're just sort of resting on temporary stands and stuff just bits of wood in the ground and i'm hoping this winter to consolidate these onto a nice timber frame stand at some point yeah that's what we use it's uh as simple as that so after all of the things were in place that i needed to live comfortably the house and the power and such i decided to go on this elaborate journey of building my dream workshop it's a two-story workshop woodworking on the bottom floor and metal working on the top floor the top floor is still under construction the lower floor is dug into a hillside excavated so on the front it's open but on the back it's completely underground it has this lovely porch on the front which we sit under and uh store firewood and materials and things so yeah show you around so this is the lower floor the woodworking workshop i come through the small hobbit door come into my woodwork workshop so it's still very much a work in progress i still need to do lots of benches and things like that but it's a working workshop and i use it every day and like i say i'm gradually slowly but surely getting more tools and more equipment and filling it up in here and this is my dream workshop yeah this is where i spend a lot of my time these days um i made the whole greenhouse and everything in here and uh the thing i enjoy most is to be in here on a weekend making something um these big tools that i run big three-phase tools they all run off the very power system i've shown you i do have to be careful about when i use them and i have to keep an eye on how much power i have and stuff but i run all of these big three-phase tools through a converter off of the power system that i've showed you i also have another room on the other side of that wall just there i'll show you that in a minute it's just a partition wall and on the other side of that is an office basically i'll take you there now this workshop has a reciprocal roof as well except it's not self-supporting the roof sits on a central oak tree on the back wall and all of the rafters lay on each other from that point onwards with the main uh window in the middle so walk over to that room now staircase here this is leading up to the building that's still under construction and uh some damage to wall that needs repair then we come into this room which is a office or going to be an office at some point but at the moment it's just uh storage and uh we're hanging all of our produce from the garden in here as well at the moment but this will become an office at some point when i get around to uh finishing it so this is the top floor of my workshop the lower floor is below ground the other side of that wall just there i'll give you a view of it all in a second uh so this is still very much under construction i've only started this this year really although i put in the foundations when i did the lower workshop this workshop is going to be for working on a vehicle in the middle being able to lift it up into this pitched roof space and working on my hydroelectric turbine business which i'm going to be starting transferring all the things i learned from building my own system into hopefully building systems for others so i have the big door big enough to bring a van in and then the central frame in the middle where you have i'm gonna have a big workbench for assembling turbines and things i'm making tools and equipment that i make and then around the perimeter of the walls there will be all of the tools lathe mill stuff like that i suppose i just uh walk around in here just to give you a bit of perspective of size it's quite large more than big enough to work on a van and have lots of tools and equipment in it so we've also established a pretty successful garden we've grown hundreds of kilos of food out of here now for a couple of years and this year i managed to get the greenhouse built behind which i will uh show you shortly yeah this garden is a no-dig type garden with uh inspired by charles dowding and we're planning on once i get these solar panels moved and put in place over there to extend this garden further over and back a bit as well we'd like to double the size of it ideally but this produces most of our vegetables um for the productive months of the year so in our on growing quest to be more self-sufficient provide more of our own food in this environment i really need a greenhouse to get things started early and to prolong the growing season so this year i managed to get this finished it's a timber-framed greenhouse for my own design and it has toughened glass on the outside and it is direct glazed so it allows the wood to expand and contract it's uh six and a half meters by three and a half meters big with the stone foundation it has a spring in the middle which works for earlier part of the year but goes off mid-summer about now well it's off around now this time but it is there in the earliest time of the year when we're getting plants started which is very helpful um and yeah i'll take you for a tour around it so it's a timber frame the main frame at least is a timber frame and it's like a gothic arch sort of type design all mortise and tenoned and pegged and it has a separate frame which holds the glass attached to that purlins i believe they're called and um then the glass is mounted on top of the frame and then glazed with glazing strips all of that extra glazing strips and the extra frame was milled on my homemade bandsaw mill so it also has wooden guttering down the side and very soon we'll be collecting water off the roof as well for use in the garden but i believe it came out very well and again with all my projects didn't cost very much the main cost was the glass and i got that cheap via the um benefits of having a youtube channel and uh total cost of the build is about two thousand pounds so not cheap but uh lot lot cheaper than it would be to buy something like that we also keep chickens and we eat the eggs from them so we have fresh eggs every day hey chickens you better get laying some eggs i want my egg sandwich in the morning so we've also done about a kilometer of fencing and i did that using my homemade post knocker and we have around four acres of pasture land and we recently got ourselves some sheep which are currently over there by the gate i might go and see them in a minute all of the fencing is uh bounded by the two and a half thousand trees that i planted so all the way around the land all the perimeters all uh any spare hedging anything like that is all planted with uh two and a half thousand native broadleaf trees hey sheep so i also built this sawmill behind me from scratch and this is now processed 16 tonnes of timber that was all the external wood for the greenhouse and the top workshop and various other things chicken coop loads of stuff basically 16 tons of it and yeah it works fantastically and it was built again for very cheap a couple of thousand pounds as opposed to the ten to fifteen thousand pounds something like this would cost since starting this project i've probably done about 80 of it on my own but i have had some help from volunteers via my youtube channel and in order to have volunteers they needed a toilet and shower and some facilities so i built this solar shower and compost toilet it was originally heated with some hot water panels but they didn't really work that great they were too complicated and the water only ever got just slightly warm but now it has two 250 watt panels that direct heat the water in the top it's all gravity fed from water spring water and it now works really well you get hot showers on a sunny day of course so yeah it's another thing it's all timber framed mortise and tenon all handmade and all natural all right so just walking back down now from the top where the sawmill and the shower is walking down my track which i also put in it's uh quarried stone from not too far away and there's about a thousand tons of it in the track the track's about 500 meters long and it's bordered by all of the two and a half thousand trees i've planted which is starting to grow really nicely now as you can see right back at the house so a lot of women watching this are probably thinking well where do you go to the toilet it's a popular question from the ladies particularly and it's just a short walk down the path and we get to this timber-framed compost toilet so it's just literally just a toilet seat with a containing area and it's just composted and then it degrades and is no longer an obnoxious substance and it doesn't smell or anything like that it's just a nice toilet in the woods built in the same style of the house again all timber framed and cordwood yeah that's where we use the toilet oh and uh next to the house just not too far from it at all we've got all our firewood so there's a good few cubic meters of wood in there it's quite deep goes all the way back here look so yeah plenty of wood for the winter keep us nice and warm so that is all of the major projects i've done over the last five years of going from a blank field with some woodland to a fully functioning uh small holding that's off-grid and about 50 self-sufficient at this point and with uh very little money as well because i didn't start i didn't start a rich man i'm still not a rich man that's for sure um so yeah i haven't gone into too much detail about each individual project because i've done a build multiple build videos on every one of those projects so if you're interested uh go and watch those videos every detail has been shown in those videos and yeah i hope that gives a good overview of uh five years work it's been hard work but it's been the best thing i've ever done and i certainly don't plan on stopping anytime soon i have lots of things planned and we just want to keep going get more and more self-sufficient and uh keep on building things and live in a sustainable and healthy life so i hope you enjoyed the video and thanks for watching

Channel: Kris Harbour Natural Building

Views: 610,000

Rating: 4.9695101 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: lSt96KFFHxA

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Asangkt358]

What the fuck am I doing with my life.

[u/tpahornet]

Watched this for the last 5 years from his time living in a tent as he built the roundhouse. Awesome series, great guy and excellent mission. Well worth the watch. Congratulations on your progress Kris!

[u/un32134e4]

This guy is the real deal. I watch his videos every week and they really help me get through the week.

[u/CaManAboutaDog]

Great series of videos. Well worth watching.

[u/TheGubiestOfGubs]

That’s be great for everyone if it wasn’t for fucking property taxes. You are FORCED to make money to live.