Bibliographic record
Abstract
Living in the city most people take for granted the convenience of flicking on a light switch or plugging in an appliance. They also expect to be able to call the utility company if there is no heat for the house. Now imagine being responsible for providing all of your survival needs from electricity through waste management. This is off-grid living. The settlers who came here to Canada lived off-grid. Homes were often built of sod, heated with wood-fired stoves, and lit with candles they made themselves. The majority of twenty-first century Canadians would perish in similar living conditions. The Canadian Encyclopaedia in its history of Western and Northwest Canada describes the lives of the pioneer homesteaders who purchased 160 acres of land for $10 and struggled to survive. “Homesteaders and their families were often separated from friends and relatives, and many suffered years of hardship and loneliness. One of the greatest difficulties was the absence of roads and bridges. Most trails were impassable when wet. Medical care was scarce and farm injuries were often crippling or fatal, and many simple ailments caused prolonged hardship. For many settlers the price of homesteading was too high, they cancelled their claims and moved away” (McCracken, 2011). Today, off-grid living is sought out for different reasons. People who decide to live off-grid are often looking for a way to live in harmony with and lessen their impact on the environment. They enjoy a physical challenge, and/or appreciate some solitude. It is possible to lessen reliance on the grid and still live in the city, but it is expensive and more difficult due mainly to regulatory requirements. Since regulations vary widely among municipal jurisdictions the focus of this article is development of an off-grid living facility where municipal services are unavailable. Off-grid living in its simplest form involves finding ways to provide for basic human comforts. “Off-grid also means not using or depending on public utilities, especially the supply of electricity,” (Oxford Dictionary, 2011). For many people who are living this lifestyle it also involves growing food, raising chickens for eggs and meat, goats or cows for milk, and pigs for pork, bacon and ham. Off-grid living also means changing lifestyle to suit the season. Spring is planting season and that is the focus of activity. Summer means long days and a chance to build and do maintenance and time to cut, split and stack next year’s firewood if the primary source of heat is wood-burning stoves. Fall is harvest time with its many hours of work preserving the food. Winter is for cocooning and making plans for the next growing season. If power generation is solar based, it probably means going to bed early and sleeping later to conserve energy. A Personal Choice to Live Sustainably The author and some of his family are in the process of developing a multigenerational home site on ten acres of forested property on the North Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada. This article presents information that a family needs to consider when deciding to live off-grid. It then presents a case study of the decisions, considerations, and expectations that the author’s family encountered when building the home site; including real-world suggestions and solutions based on primary research done by the family members. It also gives some site-specific details of that ongoing work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.316 | 0.111 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".