How to Get Free Power, Free Water and Never Pay a Bill Again (The Appalachian Way)

In the summer of 1961, a man from the electric company drove up this gravel drive and offered my grandfather Elbert a free connection to the grid, because the federal government was paying for it and all he had to do was say yes. Elbert listened to every word, thanked the man sincerely, and told him no. Not because he couldn't afford the bill, but because he had been pulling his own electricity out of the creek behind this house since 1931, heating with methane gas from a digester behind the barn since 1938, and drawing water from a spring on the hillside through a gravity pipe his own father had laid in 1904, and he understood something about the grid that the man from the electric company either did not understand or had been paid not to say out loud. A man who connects to the grid is a man who pays a monthly fee for permission to have light in his own home. Elbert had been doing it for free for thirty years and he had no interest in stopping. This video covers 25 off-grid skills from this Breathitt County homestead that required no permits, no monthly bills, and no outside help for sixty years. The creek-powered electrical system that ran four lights in this house from 1931 to 1974. The gravity-fed spring water system that has been bringing water to this house since 1904 without a single pump or motor. The methane digester that turned animal waste into cooking gas for thirty years. The hand-dug well, the rainwater cistern, the solar food dryer, the hand-forged tools, and the seed saving system that meant this property never owed a seed company for the right to grow food on its own land. Four of these five skills would get you fined up to fifty thousand dollars in most states today. There is no money in a man who makes his own power and draws his own water, so they wrote the rules to make sure you couldn't, and then they sold you a utility contract and called it progress.