Off Grid Living is a LIE

how's it going everybody my name is Dave Whipple and you're watching Bush radical I see it time and time again you watch off-grid content on television or on YouTube and people have brand new trucks and they have giant homesteads way out in the mountains they're they're moving materials with helicopters man you name it I've seen the craziest stuff so what are you supposed to actually believe in this video I want to show you guys what it was like for us when we were younger to get started living off grid why we did it what our thoughts were and what it actually looks like in real life stay tuned foreign Brooke and I got married in the fall of 1998. the following spring we went to Sitka Alaska where we got a job as caretakers and Stargate and Campground we both worked in town but we lived in the campground we took showers at the harbor we did our laundry at the laundromat in town and we got our water from an Artesian well at the campsite for a bathroom we had the forest service outhouses when we left Sitka we ended up going to the Aleutian Islands for seven and a half months to be caretakers of this Homestead this place is called The Stonewall place it's named after a giant rock outcropping that's right in that area now this Homestead had electrical power but it was generated from hydroelectric power there was a small Creek up the side of the mountain with a dam in it and that dam was piped in a four inch PVC pipe down to a small generation house on the beach where there was a water wheel so the pressurized water from the gravity would spin this water wheel and it would charge up the batteries the place also had an inverter so you actually had power but it was limited to how much water came down the side of the Hill we had to watch the inverter we had to top off the batteries we had to keep an eye on maintaining the system for seven and a half months and when the water got really low when it was really cold we ran out of electricity completely believe it or not this Homestead was heated with wood we would go out and find drift logs that came from who knows where around the world and we would hook onto these drift logs pull them back to the homestead with a boat and then cut them up split them and stack them so it's very windy and the wood dried out fairly quick now the wood stove in this house wasn't really used to heat the house it had a water jacket around it and it was plumbed into a 500 gallon tank of water you'd burn that stove hot for five hours and it would heat up that 500 gallon tank and for about a week it would keep the house pretty decent we did have a flush toilet because the entire water system of this house came off that Creek it was all pressurized because of gravity pretty interesting off-grid setup we learned a lot that winter about off-grid systems in the spring of 2000 we ended up back in Fairbanks where we rented a small off-grid cabin then in the spring of 2001 we bought this two acre piece of property north of Fairbanks Alaska this is the first piece of raw land Brook and I ever bought you could see that somebody had already tried to do something with it they'd had a pen maybe a horse or two who knows now this property did have electricity so technically it was not truly off-grid but because of the Frozen soil conditions a conventional septic was out of the question and water in this area is about 200 feet deep and you're not guaranteed good water so we were going to build a dry cabin which means you haul your water you have a five gallon bucket under your sink when it fills up after washing dishes you take the five gallon bucket outside and empty it we also had a small Vault we started with a 55 gallon drum which was for our Outhouse you couldn't really have just a pit type of an outhouse in this soil conditions because the ground was Frozen as soon as you dig a hole in the ground it thaws out and then just turns into a mud bog definitely not what you want for an outhouse now this cabin was 12 foot by 12 foot it was built from all the logs that were already on the property and even though this cabin wasn't 100 off grid it was partially off grid we also heated with wood which is the only thing that makes sense in this type of an environment you have a lot of fuel readily available all you need to do is cut it stick it in the stove and burn it now this property was about 10 miles outside of Fairbanks so it was a short drive to get into town now you can't do this 10 miles outside in most cities because it's completely unconventional but in Fairbanks you know nobody batted an eye dry cabins just like this were pretty much the norm anywhere that there was questionable land by the time we were done with this cabin we had about three thousand dollars into the build All the lumber in this cabin was rough cut so it was all bought at a discount from a local Mill the roofing the metal on the roof the wood stove all those things we had to buy now Fairbanks Alaska has a waste management system where there's a sites called transfer sites it's a parking lot with dumpsters all the way around the parking lot the windows in this cabin all came from the dump or the transfer site so did the sink so did the countertop whatever we could find for building materials that was useful usable and free where we picked it up and Incorporated it into this cabin we lived here for two and a half years until our daughter was born in the spring of 2003. when I say two and a half years the three of us lived in this cabin until Christmas of that year and the time between our daughter's birth and moving out of this cabin we spent all that time building our second cabin the two and a half years we spent in this cabin were fantastic it was a very free way of living and extremely affordable but once it was more than just Brooke and myself we needed a bigger place so in the summer of 2003 we started building our second cabin the idea was a thousand square foot cabin 500 foot on the bottom 500 foot on the upper story and take a look at this Foundation it's concrete pads with little concrete piers on top the idea is if you're building on permafrost you need to be able to adjust the foundation if one area heaves you can take a few shims off the top of the post if it sinks you can add a few now we bought the logs for our second cabin I think at that point in time it was about two dollars and fifty cents a foot you could Bank on it being two or three times that today because this was a while back my brother Ryan came up that summer to help my brother Ryan and I and our friend John Cassidy poured concrete all summer as a three-man crew and whenever we had down time we worked on this cabin and I kept the guys busy when we got to the Second Story you can see we slid the logs up two by fours and then we would stage all of our logs on the Second Story floor now this cabin had the same issues that the first cabin has it was built on permafrost so it needed a foundation that could be adjustable that's why you see all those concrete piers but this place did have electricity just like the first cabin but of course no running water no indoor plumbing so it's technically semi-off grid we lived in that cabin from Christmas of 2003 until August of 2006. by then our son was born we had bought a property in Delta Junction Alaska about a hundred miles south east of Fairbanks and we decided to go down and build a homestead on that property so in August of 2006 we set off on a completely new adventure building a new Homestead in a new place and we sold these two cabins now starting over was not a picnic I'll tell you that we lived in this little tiny camper until we built a garage and then we kitted the garage out his house and lived in the garage until we built a bigger cabin but this area in Delta it did have good water and it wasn't that far down so running water was actually going to be an option for the first time in years this was about the time things went from being filmed to digital and we don't have a ton of pictures of this garage but we lived in this garage until we got our next house built let's talk about that I started this Log Cabin build on our Delta property in the spring of 2008. all the time we were living in the garage we hauled our water and we had an outhouse that we used and that was our complete plumbing and water system we would get water from about two miles down the road in a public well but this cabin was actually going to be a conventional home it was going to have running water electricity and everything now we lived on this property from six years from 2006 to 2012. the shop slash garage cost us about twenty thousand to build and the big house here cost about fifty thousand to build but we had the cash on hand and it was totally doable because we started small with a 12 by 12 cabin back in Fairbanks we built as we could afford it we put money into materials we had a hundred percent equity from day one and that made all the difference that's why we could have a place like this without going into debt in 2012 we sold that property and we bought an old Farmstead in northern Michigan we could pay cash for this because of course we had 100 equity in the previous property now the Old Farm has running water and indoor plumbing so this is kind of the tail end of our first chapter off-grid living but that didn't last very long let me tell you about 2014. in 2014 our friend Neil Lachlan got a television show with the National Geographic Channel Building Law graphs and floating them down the Yukon river Brooke and I had known Neil for 14 years and she had worked on a previous law graph that Neil had built back in 2000 he invited us to come on the show and we were all going to build rafts and float down the Yukon fantastic Adventure we had a marvelous time I can't say enough good stuff about Neil his son Laro the film crew the whole process was fantastic I loved every minute of it but it was right back to off-grid living we did have a generator that we would charge camera batteries with the camera Crews would run that a couple hours every other day to get all their batteries charged up at the end of the raft we had a small portable toilet with a five gallon bucket inside the five gallon bucket were heavy duty emphasis on heavy duty biodegradable bags and that's what we would use for a toilet when the bucket was full we would Beach the raft go up into the woods and bury the contents of the bucket with the bag we would also stop at all the freshwater Creeks to fill up our water supply some of it got filtered some of it didn't it all depended on the Crick and where we were at this is Wild Country so it's it's not likely to be polluted by people but it could always have giardia wonderful off-grid experience the following summer we bought four acres north of Fairbanks Alaska and started another Homestead this Homestead was going to be completely off grid 100 percent no running water no indoor plumbing the idea was we still had a lot of business in Alaska we had a lot of friends in Alaska and we wanted a small Homestead where we could spend four or five months in Alaska in the summer and then the rest of the year in northern Michigan the first year we lived in a wall tent the second year we lived in a wall town where we built the foundation of the cabin now 2016 was a big year for us Brooks started her YouTube channel in March and we also had applied to be on the alone program on the History Channel by that fall we'd been chosen to be finalists in season four and I'm sure that our off-grid background had a lot to do with getting picked Brooke already had a YouTube channel that she was getting off the ground and this 49 days of camera experience kind of got me over the mental hump to get started on my own channel I'd had the thought of doing a channel for a couple years at this point but I was intimidated by camera work I shouldn't have been it's quite easy the next summer back in Fairbanks we started putting up logs and now you see it's video every log that went into this Log Cabin came off this property everyone was cut by hand everyone was milled by hand every log was carried from where the tree fell and was milled to where it ended up in the wall it took a long time I wouldn't really recommend this unless you have nothing but time during the days and the week I was doing concrete work in Fairbanks which was about a 25 minute drive and in the evenings and weekends I would work on this cabin because we had two kids in school I would generally come up at the end of April about a month earlier than Brooke and the kids and get to work and then when the kids in Brook left in the fall for school I would generally stay on about an extra month and get as much done on this place as I could while finishing up the concrete season in town now Brooke started doing YouTube in 2016 and I started doing YouTube in 2017. so you see we've switched from photographs to video by this point this was the first real project I took on after starting the YouTube channel now this property is on a steep Hillside and the ground has fairly good drainage so just a standard old school Outhouse is what we chose to go with here we also get enough Sunshine that solar is definitely an option so that was part of the plan from the beginning we hauled our water from a public well that's on our way to town so we never made any special trips for water we would generally just get water on our way in or our way out whenever we went to the store or into work it was quite convenient as convenient as hauling water can be all the dimensional Lumber in this project was rough cut and it came from local Mills in the area I will say this though as much as I like to use rough cut just because it's a full two inches by a full whatever and it's Stronger by Nature it is getting more expensive at least in this part of the world it used to be you could save quite a lot of money by using rough cut Lumber in this area but it doesn't really seem to be the case anymore it is stronger so I do like that but there's really no savings nowadays Now by now you're probably seeing a pattern Brooke and I have always built building Equity into a property we've always bought materials and did the work ourselves we hire nothing out if we can help it and that helps us to build value in the property ownership right from day one we never take out a loan for anything if we don't know how to do a certain aspect of the construction process we learn how to do it that's one piece of advice that I think is the most important that's the key if you're interested in off-grid living if that idea appeals to you ask yourself this simple question are you willing to learn do you love to learn if you're open to trying and learning all the skills that you need for building for for the plumbing that is involved even in an off-grid house for electrical hooking up gas lines working on your own stuff if you're willing to learn and get your hands dirty and not have to hire stuff done then I think it's a fantastic way to get ahead in life especially for young people to get a really good start and have ownership from day one when Brooke and I built our first cabin in 2001 we basically had three options we could apply for a loan and buy a house and have a 30-year mortgage we could rent a house which even a dry cabin at that time was about 500 bucks a month or we could buy a cheap piece of land and we can build and from day one we would have ownership of that property we would have ownership of that house our very first piece of property we bought from Robert Fox at Fox Realty in Fairbanks Alaska we paid sixty five hundred dollars for two acres of permafrost land we put one thousand dollars down in the rest of it we owed to Robert fox in a note we paid that note off that summer we put every dime we could afford into paying it off and we've never borrowed another dollar for housing since then foreign [Music] this property took us years to finish years because we built as we went we were building in a way that was very time consuming and very physical but very cheap and we were only there part of the year to start with once we had the cabin done we really needed to focus in on the other systems that you need no matter where you live whether you're on grid or whether you're off grid we got this bathtub from the dump and built this small shower House cost about eight hundred dollars to build this little building speaking of shower houses that just brings me back to the point there are systems that everybody needs no matter where you live you need a way to get cleaned up you need a little bit of power to run anything that you happen to have that's electric you can take care of that in a lot of ways solar panels and batteries you can have a small generator at this place we tend to use the generator more than anything else the reason is we don't need much for lighting being that this is Alaska and we're just here in the summer it's daylight most of the time so lighting is not our first concern but it can get really hot in interior Alaska in the summertime so a place to take a shower is is pretty important now I got this piece of linoleum from the dump so that's a good way to cut costs whenever you can I found it a couple years ago and it's been sitting in the yard just waiting for something to be installed in but I had it when I needed it and I didn't pay anything for it do I know how to install vinyl well not really I just figured it out as I went like everything else which just brings me back to that piece of advice the best piece of advice you could get just be ready to try anything be ready to give it a shot most things are easier than you think they are but the idea that you have to hire a professional to do all pretty much anything you know that's going to keeps a lot of people from trying this kind of a lifestyle I would also say that a lot of the content on YouTube the off-grid living content is very confusing you see stuff like this where somebody's catching rain water off the roof of a shed but then you also see a place that has forty thousand dollars worth of solar panels or they have a brand new fifty thousand dollar tractor or they're going to move building material with a helicopter I saw that one time on television who the heck has a helicopter that's so unrealistic I don't even know how to relate to that that's one of the reasons I decided to make this video off-grid living what I understand it to be what it's been through my life before YouTube almost before the internet has very little to do with a lot of the content that I see on YouTube I think there is a Hollywood version of off-grid living and then there is a an actual version of off-grid living and I don't know that the two of them have a whole lot in common Brooke and I started down this path 20 years ago and it was the best option for us at the time because it was a way that two young people could have a roof over their head for next to nothing so long as they were willing to sweat and work and learn and that made sense to us but nowadays you know there is a hipster version of off-grid living too that is completely a fantasy land in my opinion let's be honest here too so many people have jumped on the off-grid bandwagon because it's popular on YouTube YouTube is an income stream and a lot of people have decided to do off-grid content because they find it inspiring they like the idea but there's also a financial element there too there's there is an opportunity to make money on YouTube with off-grid content and of course I think it's pretty easy for people to tell the difference between an authentic experience and some hipster version of off-grid living for me YouTube has really been a blessing because it allows me to do what I've always done and share it with the world I personally feel much more at home with an outhouse and a wood stove in a little cabin than I would a furnace and a nice bathroom in a beautiful expensive home especially when you have a a mortgage on it for Brook and I the income from YouTube has allowed us to buy some property that is much more remote which is what we both would prefer not being tied to a certain area to make a living but that's certainly not the way we started we started way before YouTube we had hard jobs physical jobs in town we would come home and haul water from the well take showers at the truck stop that was the reality of things way back in the day how we got started and why we got started living off grid it made a lot of sense back then it was a way to get ahead so if you feel overwhelmed by some of the stuff you see on off-grid content people with a lot of money people who have massive solar panel systems people who have a lot of acreage in beautiful places they're running livestock they have brand new vehicles and you think what in the world is real how do these people pay their bills how do they afford groceries how can they have all this stuff if what they are is really remote well the chances are they're not really remote the chances are it's not what it looks like there are people out there that are probably making all their money off really popular YouTube content and that's why I wanted to make this video I wanted to make this video for people who don't understand what they're seeing portrayed on YouTube in the off-grid space the truth is for me I got out of school and I started right into Building Trades I started doing concrete for six dollars an hour and I learned a lot about carpentry in that trade and after Brooke and I got married and we decided we wanted to have a house you know it was just a decision to to build one rather than to to buy one and it was a decision to to do it really affordably so we didn't end up in debt and in Fairbanks Alaska where we were at the time the cabin thing was it was quite the norm dry cabins were the example that you looked at and it's like well we could do that so if you've ever wondered how we got here what our journey looked like what we were actually doing 20 years ago and how we ended up on YouTube well I hope that you've enjoyed this video and got some insight as to what the truth is when it comes to the off-grid content you see on YouTube we've always been building cabins and it's nice to have a cabin in a remote place it just so happens it's also something a lot of people want to watch so it's a fantastic fit in my opinion for Brooke and I on the other hand there's quite a lot of YouTube content out there that needs to be taken with a grain of salt so keep your eyes open don't believe everything that you see if you find a channel you really like ask them to tell you how they got there thank you guys so much for watching my name is Dave Whipple and you've been watching Bush radical and be radically see you soon [Music]

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 2,372,274

Keywords: off grid, off grid cabin, cabin in the woods

Id: R1MNE6RUdgg

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Tk-86-]

Ol crusty crone can't even compete with this guy.

[u/marcberm]

Yeah, I watched this earlier and thought all about our little friend here too. 😂

[u/RockyMtnAnonymo]

I've never heard of this guy. THIS is the content I'm looking for. Thanks for posting it!

[u/Electricalguro]

He’s a cool guy

[u/Any_Fox]

Dave and Brooke are a way more realistic representation of off gird/simple living than a bulk of the other YouTube channels. Sure, it's not flashy with 100k tractors and trucks but their content is far more accurate.

[u/Hop-Dizzle-Drizzle]

I like that Dave Hhhwipple guy. He's a radical fella, he is.