Solar energy,bad weather days,and the temporalities of slower homes

It’s sunny: we’d better get the kids inside

Energy-self-sufficiency varies on a continuum. While a few off-grid homes have no electricity at all, others have power systems capable of generating over 4 Kilowatts at the most propitious times, a quantity large enough to power a typical grid-connected home. On the low end – indeed, the record-setting low end – of the continuum is Debbie and David’s home. ¹⁵ Capable of generating a miniscule 300 Watts on a bright sunny day – that is, about less than a tenth of what most homes in the western hemisphere consume – having no sources of electricity other than 12 50 Watts photovoltaic panels, and relying on no generator and no propane, Debbie and David could easily qualify for the Olympics in the minimalist off-grid living event.

Jon and I arrive at Debbie and David’s home on a cold but sunny Sunday afternoon. Lying near the top of a gentle, mostly treeless hill, their south-facing home casts its gaze at one of Atlantic Canada’s largest cities. You can’t quite see it, even on a sunny day like this, but the city is close and within commuting distance for Debbie, who owns an organic food store there. The couple have been off-grid in their 125 acre organic farm, 1200 square-foot home, for 20 years now. Philosophies of local, slow, and healthy food, environmental sustainability, and renewable energy run deep in this household.

We sit down to talk at the living room table, nibbling on some munchies and bathing in the warm sun. Soft-spoken, even a touch timid, David and Debbie are well past their younger years but are unafraid of hard physical work. ‘We cut most of our wood ourselves,’ David says, ‘we don’t need to join the gym.’ Passive solar design and two cords of locally-collected wood per year is all they need to reach thermal comfort. ¹⁶ To put it in perspective, three cords of wood per year are about a tenth of what a typical home solely dependent on wood for heating might consume in this area. ‘We just can’t help marvelling at how inefficient people’s homes can be,’ remarks Debbie.

Most of the firewood is burned in a masonry stove (Figure 1) which serves as the hearth of the house, connecting the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room area. As heat rises, the masonry stove ends up warming their upstairs bedroom as well. Masonry stoves are heavy, laborious to assemble, and expensive to buy, but they make up in efficiency by emitting copious amounts of heat and by serving as a cooker as well. In David and Debbie’s home the masonry stove is in fact the sole cooking technology. No propane-fueled range and no microwave oven are available. Propane, after all, is a non-renewable gas, and microwaves are not only gluttons for wattage, but also environmentally unsustainable because of the materials used to build them, Debbie explains. This unique setup, of course, creates the conditions for some slow-cooking in the kitchen, I ponder out loud. ‘It takes about 15 minutes to fire up the stove and get the water boiling for tea,’ Debbie addresses my comment. When the stove is on it also doubles as a hair drier, at least in the winter. Blow driers are a tremendous electricity draw, which their system and their long hair could not handle. ‘In the summer the sun will do the job,’ Debbie says with a peaceful smile.

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Figure 1.

Masonry stove and sunlight.

Debbie and David are busy, but they do not live hurried lives. ‘We rise with the sun and go to bed early at night,’ they tell us. ‘Summer days are longer and busier with farming,’ David finds, ‘when you live off-grid you really change your routines with the movements of the sun; you can’t be in a rush.’ While Debbie can work in town up to five days a week, their home is in a temporal space removed from the rhythms of the city. ¹⁷ The limited electricity available means there is no computer in the home, no internet, no satellite TV. ‘We have four channels and VHS,’ David shows us with a hint of pride in his voice.

Their pint-sized electricity system also means they need to be inventive when it comes to refrigeration. Canadian off-gridders can generally get away from plugging in a freezer and a refrigerator by placing a thickly insulated, top-opening ice box outdoors (during the cold months), or simply in an unheated room in the north side of the house, but Debbie and David have a more uncommon solution: a California cooler (Figure 2). The California cooler was invented and popularized in the Golden State in the early 1900s, before refrigerators became common household items. California coolers are essentially cabinets that bring in cool air from the outside through wall vents. The cabinet door is heavily insulated to keep the cold air in and to prevent the warm indoor air from leaking inside. Temperatures inside the California cooler never reach freezing level, but this does not constitute a problem for Debbie or David, who are both vegetarian and do not need to keep meat frozen.

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Figure 2.

Debbie and the California cooler.

Wendy is equally mindful of the electricity draw of her appliances – domestic lighting draws very limited power compared to appliances ¹⁸ – so she has placed the refrigerator away from the kitchen, far from the woodstove and other sources of heat, and her freezer out in the garage. She owns no TV set, no toaster, no microwave oven, no coffee machine, no bread-maker. Her kitchen counter is barer than an air strip cleared for landing. She tends to ‘live in the dark a lot,’ she admits with a smile. ‘Actually,’ she adds politely, ‘would it be ok if we switched off that light?’ Because we’re video-recording today we embarrassedly need to beg for her indulgence. The lighting, after all, is already quite dim in her snug, cabin-style home out in the country. It’s a caliginous, foggy, damp day and the light and warmth begotten by the Franklin stove is dearly welcomed.

Unlike David and Debbie’s, Wendy’s solar system, at 1.5 Kw, is rather typical of an off-grid home. But just like her fellow New Brunswicker off-gridders she is strongly motivated by environmental values and principles of conservation. Modern life as we know it ‘is not sustainable,’ she answers when I ask her why her home is energy self-sufficient. ‘I just don’t think it’s necessarily good that you can turn on a switch and have everything at your fingers. And I like the quiet and peacefulness of it,’ she adds. Her home is in fact a retreat from the busyness of her ‘crazy life.’ Wendy works as the executive director of a non-for-profit council and regularly logs 60 and 80-hour weeks, sometimes more. It is precisely those temporal demands on her life that have taught her the importance of slowing down whenever and however possible. So, most of those hours are nowadays spent in the safe haven of her home, where she can simultaneously be attending a phone conference and pickling vegetables grown in her garden. Wendy has now been living alone at her house since 2004, though she had been ‘camping’ there for nine years prior to that. Moving in permanently felt like an escape. ‘I could hardly function anymore in the city,’ she explains, especially when she had to travel and sleep in hotels, ‘I couldn’t sleep in hotels, there is just too much light.’

Despite her work demands and the fact that her internet-connected computer is plugged in virtually all the time, her life rhythms are undoubtedly peculiar. While it can be a challenge to do everything she wishes to do, she still makes time for gardening and for walking along the beautiful river that coasts her property. The sun imposes a definite sense of structure on her personal time too. ‘Every day I get up and check what the weather is going to do, and decide what I am going to do accordingly, if it’s possible.’ I am hungry for an example. ‘Well, if it’s a sunny day and my batteries are charged up then I’ll do laundry. Otherwise all that power goes to waste, and I hate that. But I’d never do my laundry on a day like today.’ Our field notes are awash with similar examples. Dark days are not the most propitious for vacuum-cleaning, firing up power tools, or making a quick toast, if you live off-grid. Some power-self-sufficient households are especially pugnacious about getting the most out of a bright day: the kids may even be told it’s time to stop playing outside and get their chance to finally play with their Wii!

When you live off-grid, especially in a northern country like Canada, different seasons tend to make different demands and to open distinct opportunities. ‘Winters are hard and you have to be really careful,’ Wendy finds. ‘The days are so short and you have to be mindful of how you use your power.’ So, for example, ‘if there are things that require light to be done then I’ll do them in the daytime rather than at night when I would have to turn the lights on.’ Atlantic Canada receives a lot of snow from November to April and during those times sunlight can be blocked by snowfall accumulating on solar panels and solar hot water collectors. Removing the shadowing white stuff is as simple as brushing it off, but it requires attention and physical presence. Needless to say off-gridders generally find it difficult to leave their homes for tropical winter getaways.

Wendy, like most off-gridders, has a gasoline-powered electricity generator. For environmentally-minded, self-sufficiency-aspiring, personal challenge-motivated types, however, the ‘gennie’ represents a last resort. Running a generator is a bit like getting a push on the steepest hill of a bicycle race: though the little help is badly needed, it is something to be bashful about. Turning on the generator carelessly ‘would defeat the purpose’ remarks Wendy. ‘I hate every time I turn it on because I know what it’s really doing to the atmosphere.’ Making sunlight’s power last, then, becomes a trial in minimizing personal needs and especially wants, and in mastering the ‘little things’ that allow for reductions in domestic power consumption. Challenging dominant ideas of efficiency is a good start. ‘It’s a fallacy,’ Wendy observes, ‘that all these little pluggable gadgets can save time and energy.’ Saving time and energy is more about being organized, being skilled, and doing with less. ‘Simpler is more efficient.’

‘Microwaves are boring!’

Sometimes ethnographic knowledge lies in the unsaid and the undone: in the happenings that could’ve taken place but didn’t, in what could’ve been otherwise.

It’s in the middle of a Saturday morning when we knock on Marc’s door. He welcomes us inside and offers us food. He’s making brunch and he’s delighted to share his breakfast burritos. Though grateful, we are sorry to decline – the airport Holiday Inn Express has just treated us to stale cornflakes and rubbery pancakes. Marc’s edge-of-the-city home is within easy reach of the airport hotel strip, in fact he commutes to his downtown business daily. But I digress. Marc is making himself breakfast – this is the point I could fail to notice and to highlight. As time becomes more compressed, as dual-earning couples are busier at work, as appliances promise to make food for us faster, as people spend less time cooking and eating at home, Marc – a man, to boot – is cooking. And not just for himself either. Within minutes of our ingress his wife Vera shows up. Then comes Sumira, their older daughter, 15. Finally Jamuna, 12, their second daughter walks downstairs too. Each fixes up something to eat. Each nibbles on what everyone else has readied. And each makes the time to sit down to chat, in our preferred language, with us: two strangers from the other end of the country whose research agenda, presumably, should rank much lower in the weekend’s order of priorities. It could all have gone very differently.

Again, sometimes ethnographic knowledge lies in the absences, the silences, the what-if’s of quotidian existence. Being off-grid in the countryside, in remote spaces, in the world’s second largest nation – where electrification still has to reach the majority of the territory within its sovereign boundaries – seems even somewhat normal. But in the city? Marc tells us they have been off-grid for two years, but the dream has inspired them longer. He is intrigued by the physics of electricity, enchanted by the power of the sun. Vera grew up in Germany with the knowledge that solar power can and does work. A celestial glass sculpture of the fiery star – carved directly within the kitchen wall of their cob ¹⁹ house – seems to bask in recognition of their trust and admiration (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Domestic sun.

The sculpture lies where a TV screen or a microwave might otherwise be. Atop where a dishwasher might lay. So, where is the TV then? Nowhere in the house. And the dishwasher? Sitting in front of us, eating his breakfast burrito. And the microwave? ‘Microwaves are boring,’ quips Jamuna. And no blow driers either – despite the abundance of long, straight hair in the household. The girls are more interested in the family horse, neighing for their attention outside.

Again there is the presence of what could have been. There could have been a sedan and an SUV outside. Instead there is an equine friend, two not-so-top-of-the-line compact cars, and an electric bike. ‘It’s about making choices,’ explains Marc, ‘our money has gone toward the lifestyle we prefer. Sure it wasn’t cheap to buy a 4 Kilowatt solar system, but it was the same money that many people prefer to spend on a pick-up truck.’ Marc and Vera could have bought the truck instead. They could have driven it to Starbuck’s to eat breakfast today. And they could use the spare wattage to power up a microwave, an electric toaster, or anything else. But instead they’re perfectly happy with their hair and their old fashion stovetop toaster. ‘We live in abundance,’ declares Marc as he finishes off the last bite, ‘if you want to promote energy conservation you shouldn’t scare people into having to make sacrifices. You want to show them that what is already available is more than enough to enjoy life.’ Off-gridders are, for the most part, ostentatiously inventive. Running out of power is a calculated risk, and as a result also somewhat of an opportunity for creative play. The game – though it’s less of a structure of rules than a take-no-prisoner dare – is to challenge oneself to reduce electricity consumption and to generate renewable power in all kinds of vernacular, offbeat ways. Over two years’ time Paul and I have laid our bugged-out eyes on solar dehydrators, composting toilets and solar shower bags (which eliminate the need for pumping water), manual blenders, electricity-generating stationary bicycles, manual clothes-washing wringers, and much more – some of it captured on this short video. ²⁰ Lighting technologies are also subject to this exercise in thriftiness and re-jigging: from LED interior lighting to propane fixtures, and from 2-Watt compact fluorescents to battery-powered, home-re-engineered IKEA tabletop lamps, off-gridders’ inventiveness knows no limits in its pursuit of domestic efficiency.

After moving from pricey Alberta to affordable New Brunswick 19 years ago in order to get over a family financial crisis, Jerry and Jo-Anne had to resort to kerosene to light up their 14-year-old daughter’s homework sessions. But they have now settled for a more powerful system. A 4-Kw photovoltaic array powers all the electricity needs of their self-built 2600 square-foot multilevel home. Locally-collected wood from their 20 acre property is used for space-heating, cooking, and heating water. Everything screams efficiency around here, I observe.

‘It’s a new age home for a new millennium,’ observes Jo-Anne.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Put it this way. We don’t need air conditioning because of the number of windows,’ they explain adding to each other’s list of accomplishments, ‘we have very efficient pumps. Our refrigerator, our appliances, our stoves and our cooking stove are very efficient. Our house is well-insulated. Even our generator is very efficient.’

I ask Jerry and Jo-Anne to show me their most efficient technology. Eagerly they rise from their indoor verandah and make a beeline for the kitchen, where their ‘Cadillac stove’ – as Jerry nicknamed it – awaits our attention. The four-minute long story behind the stove – available as a sound clip ²¹ – boils down to a simple idea: efficient is synonymous with resource-frugal, and this woodstove is the epitome of that value. Efficiency, in this lifeworld, is not about taking shortcuts to save time and dodging work, it is not about speed and immediate and constant availability of everything you may dream of, but it is about investing time with care and exercising care over time. ‘This is a far more labour-intensive life,’ declares Jo-Anne forcefully. The learning curve is steep. Patience, attention, mindfulness, knowledge are all required. ‘This kind of home demands a lot more involvement,’ Jerry continues, ‘you can’t come home after work and turn the TV on and go to bed.’ The house demands you. ‘There is no end in sight, there is always something to do,’ he goes on, ‘but work is not a dirty word, work is something we do instead of watching TV, instead of going to the mall to chit-chat with friends, instead of going on a cruise.’

Resource-efficiency, endurance, and care are what make this home efficient: a mix of old age and new age knowledge and values. People who mindlessly live their lives spending and consuming without care for the consequences of their conduct are the problem, they reflect. Learning old skills, like growing food, canning vegetables, living in tune with whatever the skies allow is a way of anticipating what the future holds. ‘Things have got to change,’ concludes Jerry. ‘I say this is a new age home for a new millennium,’ Jo-Anne clarifies, ‘because we’re not a throwback to the past. This is the way of the future.’

Slow(er) homes?

Over the last few decades a wide gamut of theories has decried the consequences of the heightened speed of modern lifestyles. Most notably among geographers, Harvey ²² has outlined the existence of a ‘time-space compression’ facilitated by technologies that make seemingly everything available almost anytime and anywhere, day and night. Similarly, Thrift ²³ has argued that speed is imbricated in the same assemblages that have brought light and power to the modern world. Electricity grids, natural gas pipelines, communication networks, airways, railways, and motorways have left indelible marks on the timescapes of modernity and shaped the very nature of capitalism, democracy, and everyday life. ²⁴

It is in light of this acceleration that countercultural (and yet increasingly popular) responses such as movements against light pollution (spearheaded by the International Dark Sky Association) and for slow tourism, slow food, and more generally slow urban living have arisen. ²⁵ As Parkins and Craig ²⁶ write in regard to the uptake of slow food, ‘hurry sickness, as a response to the acceleration of just about everything, has become a recognizable late modern malaise.’ ²⁷ Slow food, slow urban dwelling, and slow tourism represent a multi-faceted set of responses to the power of speed, light, and power, involving the deliberate renegotiation of the different temporalities that make up our quotidian existence. ‘Slow living,’ Parkins ²⁸ notes, derives from ‘a commitment to occupy time more attentively,’ investing time ‘with significance through attention and deliberation,’ and ‘engaging in “mindful” rather than “mindless” practices’ in order to ‘differentiate [our]selves from the dominant culture of speed.’ The slowness of off-grid homes and their cultivation of more natural rhythms have much in common with these trends.

The temporalities of off-grid homes hinge on a unique factor: their relation with meteorological darkness. In the off-grid lifeworld the sky’s darkness in all its various manifestations is a concrete and lived occurrence as well as a planned-for affective possibility: a space of anticipation. ²⁹ In other words, if today the sky is overcast David and Debbie will act accordingly in order to draw less power and have some more left for tomorrow. But darkness affects off-gridders’ conduct even on a sunny day. By anticipating the likely occurrence of gloomy weather and short winter days off-gridders carefully conserve their stored energy continuously and ‘splurge’ only when their batteries can no longer accommodate any further charge. Their anticipation therefore takes darkness into account as both a continuous and repetitive event as well as an indefinite and less foreseeable occurrence – rhythm after all is both repetition and difference. ³⁰ Darkness – intended as a natural event (i.e. bad weather) and a technological condition (i.e. a blackout) – is deeply woven into off-gridders’ everyday consciousness. Thus, their experience of darkness, in Edensor’s ³¹ words, ‘might best be understood as an ongoing flow where the body’s rhythms and those of the earth, sun and moon, and the variable levels, intensities and features of the landscape . . . facilitate or restrict movement, focus attention . . . and shape the emotional and affective response to space.’

A key qualification is however necessary. Whereas natural darkness (i.e. nebulous skies or limited hours of sunlight during winter) is a given event, technological darkness or absence of domestic light is a possible but relatively unlikely occurrence in the off-grid lifeworld. Running out of stored power is practically improbable because generators may be available for backup, or batteries could be pushed one Amp closer to the limits of drainage, or in worst case scenarios electricity-free technologies like candles could be employed. But this improbability is no true matter. What truly affects off-gridders’ energy conservation practices is not the high likelihood of a blackout in and of itself, but its affective significance. To run out of power would be equivalent to being unprepared, unskilled, greedy, and unable to practice self-sufficiency. Off-gridders embrace the idea that the renewable energy one can accumulate is enough and that therefore one should make do with it. In other words, off-gridders are not scared into conserving energy by the prospect of domestic darkness, but are rather deliberately attuned to the demands of their lifestyle on the basis of their conviction in its principles and in the abundance of light. At the root of their conviction are values such as efficiency.

In common parlance efficiency is synonymous with ease and speed, but in the off-grid world efficiency denotes primarily something else: a more technical meaning related to the ratio of energy reproduced to the amount of energy invested. Off-gridders are people of this world so ease and speed also matter to them, but only insofar as they cost no excessive expenditure of renewable energy. This valorization of renewable energy – which is not copiously available all the time – means that off-grid living is practiced at a distinct pace that is discernibly slower than prototypical grid-connected homes where connectivity, mobility, and availability of electricity are not dependent on current sunlight or locally-stored energy. In the off-grid lifeworld efficiency – to put this in a succinct and compelling way – is then about making do with available sunlight and being prepared to accept and deal with dimness whenever necessary.

All characterizations of practices or places or objects as ‘slow’ inevitably beg for comparison. To state that a particular town in the Lake District, or a meal in rural Tuscany, or that a particular home in New Brunswick is slow, is to open oneself up to the challenge of how much truly slower other cases are in contrast. Slow is a relative term. Hence we hesitate to peg off-grid homes as ‘slow homes’ in absolute terms. There is nothing but trouble in conceptualizing slow/slowness as an ideal type or quality, as if there were some kind of definitive threshold against which it could be judged against. It might make more sense, therefore, to claim that off-grid homes are simply slower than grid-connected homes.

Whether it is Jerry and Jo-Anne’s, or Marc and Vera’s, or any other off-gridder’s dwelling, the ‘decompression’ typical of the atmosphere of these homes is clearly palpable. At times this atmosphere may be brought on by candles romantically illuminating a room, at times it could be a cold 2-Watt LED light enabling the reading of a book, and at times it could simply be the sheer absence of domestic light allowing for the enjoyment of a star-studded summer night. Typically sensitized to the perils of a frenzied lifestyle by their former lifestyles, or by comparison with friends and relatives, off-gridders are able to view the value of their current slower domestic routines relationally. Their present slowness takes into account what their life used to be, or could be, and how quickly they could do things if they were on the grid. Their experiences, motives, and relational position informs the conscious efforts they make to slow down and to live in synchrony with varying textures of grey and radiant skies and the technological and meteorological duration patterns their life is enmeshed within. From the amount of Watt/hours their batteries can last to the number of daylight hours in a winter day, and from the length it takes to accomplish domestic tasks to the lingering of a low pressure weather front, off-gridders have to take into account the rhythms and durations of life and energy dynamics in a way most people, regardless of wealth and income, do not.

Synchronous power

Over the two years of fieldwork, during our numerous stays off-grid, we ourselves observed a few interesting changes in our own typical evening behaviors. Back at home (both of us live on-grid) the dark hours of the evening would be typically spent watching movies or surfing the web. But while in the field the limited electricity available in our rental off-grid cabins translated into different routines. In the absence of power-sucking bright digital TV screens the two of us would generally employ a single LED light each to read our respective books, while the limited electricity stored during the day would be used to recharge our cameras and laptops for the following day’s work. As well, unavailable WiFi – even modems and wireless routers consume notable amounts of electricity that not all off-grid cabins can afford to waste – would make it easier to find entertainment in outdoor activities like fishing, stargazing, sitting by a bonfire, snowshoeing (Figure 4), or simply doing nothing. More than ever before nighttime felt like a time to rest and appreciate darkness for what it was, rather than something to avoid and annihilate through bright lighting – a sentiment that was uniformly shared by all the off-gridders we interviewed as well.

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Figure 4.

Blowing snow and its reflected glow render nighttime darkness less black at this remote home, situated over 100 km away from the nearest artificial light.

Our fieldwork has indeed shown us that off-gridders perform a deliberate deceleration in their everyday domestic lives, a deceleration unfolding in parallel with the limited availability of sunlight and power. As a result, the durations of their chores tend to be longer and their pace of life seems to be less hurried than most typical homes. Theirs are discordant speeds, rhythms, and durations that pose ‘alternative modes of spending time, different pacings and pulses which critique normative, disciplinary rhythms and offer unconventional, sometimes utopian visions of different temporalities.’ ³² The validity of our argument depends, however, on an effective empirical contrast. Even ‘slower,’ after all, is subject to comparison. So, are in fact contemporary grid-connected western households experiencing busyness, rush, and acceleration? A great deal of research points indeed to the existence of a diffused time pressure, but the trends are not univocal. ³³ As Shove, Trentmann, and Wilk ³⁴ point out, stress, burnout, and time poverty are on everyone’s mind these days, but the alarmism typical of some circles conflicts with some research evidence.

The acceleration thesis has clear persuasive power amongst the general public, as evidenced by mundane chit-chat and by the commercial success of books outlining these trends and their roots and consequences. ³⁵ Off-gridders are especially quick to position themselves against overworked and overspent citizens caught in ‘the rat race.’ But is there really such a thing? To be sure, a plethora of disconcerting findings echoes their case. Consider just a couple of trends pertinent to this special issue. First, increased media connectivity has come to mean heightened expectations to be always ‘on’ and at the mercy of a bright digital screen. These expectations have begun to seriously colonize private times such as evenings and nights. ³⁶ ‘The drone is never-ending and ever-present,’ Nansen and colleagues write ³⁷ and feeling the need to constantly remain ‘on’ can cause fatigue, frustration, and anxiety. Second, the blurring of daily rhythms has manifested itself not only in private spaces but in public domains as well. Electrification and the diffusion of lighting technology have resulted in the progressive expansion of leisure, consumption, and surveillance regimes into the night ³⁸ almost obliterating deep darkness and the times and spaces when people can be ‘off.’

On the other hand, arguments that point to a uniform acceleration in the pace of everyday life often tend to simplify both the present and the past, unquestioningly assuming the existence of golden days of unhurried synchrony between natural and social rhythms and positing a clear shift to an industrial-style domesticity attuned to the new 24/7 consumer economy. More critical and systematic research reveals instead that ‘natural and commercial rhythms have co-evolved and often complemented each other in the modern period,’ ³⁹ thus highlighting the coexistence of multiple and contradictory temporalities throughout history. ⁴⁰ May and Thrift ⁴¹ argue that ‘the great acceleration’ was neither as comprehensive nor as disorienting as it is sometimes assumed. Historians like Tobey, Parr, and Schwartz-Cowan ⁴² similarly find that the diffusion of electricity, the acquisition and domestication of domestic labour-saving appliances, and the consequent ‘industrialization of the home’ were neither quick nor pervasive processes. To say that social conditions have dramatically and uniformly changed with successive stages of the electrification and digitization of private and public spheres is at best a simplification of the case and at worst another way in which technological determinism can rear its ugly head.

A brief look at how labour-saving technologies intersect with the temporalities of different households ought to confirm that domestic spaces are characterized by multiple and diverse rhythms, and that speed and slowness are no univocal phenomena. Even though appliances like microwave ovens, toasters, refrigerators, dishwashers, freezers, tumble driers, cooking ranges, and vacuum cleaners are customarily marketed for their potential to free home-makers from the busyness of domestic work, the reality is that their purchase, operational demands, coordination, and the ways in which they raise expectations for convenience, cleanliness, and good housework tend to nullify whatever time-saving effect they may have. ⁴³ And it does not end there. In some cases domestic technologies can enter into conflict with families’ values, ideologies, and identities ⁴⁴ and their effects can be profoundly confused by important socio-structural variables like gender, class, education, and employment status ⁴⁵ as well as actual usage and everyday practices. ⁴⁶

With all of this in mind we can now more critically asses our claim that off-grid homes are slower. Off-grid homes are not slower because they are un-electrified or un-digitized. Indeed, electricity and digital technologies are generally present in off-grid homes and often extensively so, and it would anyhow be a mistake to impute clear deterministic effects on the impact of these technologies on domestic rhythms. Also, off-gridders do not live slower lives because they have selectively appropriated domestic technologies and rejected others outright, as labour-saving appliances are known to have limited effects on everyday feelings of time pressure. Instead, off-grid homes are slower because of off-gridders’ uniquely opportunistic and efficient power synchronicity; a synchronicity of domestic energy production and consumption with their everyday rhythms and the rhythms of light and darkness. Let us explain.

The most common denotation of ‘slow’ is a chronometric one: a reduction in speed. But the slower ways of living typical of off-gridders show the importance of another dimension of slowness as well, one that is less based on chronos and more based on kairos. Kairos – meaning an opportunistic or a propitious time to do something – is an important but much neglected dimension of slow living. ⁴⁷ Off-gridders closely monitor the weather – frequently thanks to elaborate domestic weather monitors – on a daily and even semi-daily basis and choose to become involved in certain activities at select moments in time in accordance with the sky’s light textures (that is, with weather, seasons, and availability of sunlight) in opportunistic ways. Interestingly, the word ‘opportunistic’ derives from the original denotation of opportunus: a combination of ob- (in the direction of) and portus (harbour) – in essence the condition of enjoying a favorable wind for sailing into port. As Tam ⁴⁸ indicates, opportunistic, therefore, has come to refer to a skilled, knowledgeable, and strategic person who seizes the right moment to achieve one’s goals. If off-gridders are opportunistic then, they are opportunistic in the sense of being strategic in their actions while also being careful about sustaining themselves and their environment. Being opportunistic means being efficient too.

From the perspective of off-gridders, grid-connected electricity is a bit like fast-food in that in its essentially uniform availability across time and space it tends to erase differences between here and there, between now and then. In the words of an off-grid child who volunteered to explain to us the difference between grid-connected and his off-grid home, ‘in a normal home you can turn on the light and it’s always there.’ Grid-connected homes obviously function differently from off-grid homes when it comes to synchronicity. Whereas power is available constantly to grid-connected homes as long as bills are paid regularly, regardless of availability of wind or sunlight, off-grid power availability is more irregular, more intermittent, and more dependent on proximate weather conditions – that is: on the availability of recent sunlight and freshly-stored power at that very moment. There are exceptions to this distinction, of course. Rotating black-outs, unexpected power outages due to seriously inclement weather events and disasters, and other cuts in service go to show that even grid-connected homes do not live in a vacuum from the outside world, but to a great extent their energy consumption occurs asynchronously, that is, in a state of relative disassociation from ephemeral mutations of their landscape. Off-grid homes, on the other hand, live in a state of power synchrony: their energy generation and consumption unfolds in sync with the constantly changing availability of resources proximate to their surroundings. Though it is not intended to work as binary opposition, the concepts of power asynchrony and power synchrony – with their different ways of practicing efficiency, their different rhythms, their different rapport with day and night and cloudy and sunny skies, their different speeds, their different ways of assembling electricity – is a key heuristic tool for our understanding of distinct grid-connected and grid-disconnected temporalities.

At home, out in the open

Power synchrony is only relative and approximate. The sky may be dark today but Wendy, Jo-Ann, and Jerry can still keep their veggies refrigerated because of the energy they collected yesterday, when sunlight was abundant. Synchrony and asynchrony are but mere variations along wide continua, yet these variations are very meaningful. While the oscillation of light due to the alternations of day and night, overcast and fair skies, and winter and summer does affect us all, off-grid homes are more immediately impacted than the rest of us. ⁴⁹ Darkness is easier to ignore when you can flick on a switch and turn on an appliance powered by distant resources. Weather- and seasonality-induced darkness, in contrast, are key players in off-gridders’ lives. The rhythms of sun and light render off-grid dwellings lively, in constant movement, in need of synchronization with the outdoor world. Changing light patterns demand that power-synchronous lives be ‘open to change through caesuras operating between the existing ecology and external elements, both material and immaterial, human and non-human.’ ⁵⁰

As in the slow food movement, the decelerations practiced in the course of day-to-day off-grid living are invested in diversifying and localizing resource generation and utilization. Implicit in this process is a ‘redemption of the quotidian’: ⁵¹ an affirmation of the value of everyday life as a productive, emergent, ‘hybrid timescape’ ⁵² in constant negotiation with ‘the little affected modifications that permeate [its] functional ecologies.’ ⁵³ Immanent in the experience of living in greater synchrony with the weather is thus an affirmation of mundane domestic spaces as place-specific and place-sensitive. In this sense off-grid homes can be understood to be vernacular and idiosyncratic. Fieldwork shows that their temporalities are deeply linked with the ephemeral qualities of place, qualities which ‘may change from minute to minute, or through the day, or over the seasons.’ ⁵⁴

Some ephemeral qualities of place are short-lived and irregular, like the cloud formation obscuring the sky right here, right now. Others are seasonal, like the different periodicities of light and darkness across the year at particular latitudes. ⁵⁵ As the weather and the seasons change so do light and darkness, and as light and darkness change, so do the worlds of power synchronous home dwellers. Hence the cyclical rhythms of darkness and the more linear rhythms of everyday life deeply intersect, demanding that off-gridders be sensitized, indeed trained, to respond to meteorological arrhythmias and avoid the impending doom of a blackout. ⁵⁶ Rhythms of darkness and light are ‘a rhythmpattern of timespace’ ⁵⁷ that meaningfully shapes electricity use and everyday rhythms. As Lefebvre ⁵⁸ suggested, ‘cyclical repetition and the linear repetitive . . . interfere with one another constantly.’ While changing configurations of light do not determine off-gridders’ behaviors, changing amounts of ultraviolet rays interfere with off-gridders’ domestic practices by increasing or failing to increase the Amps they can deposit into their batteries. Varying textures of light and darkness therefore variously constrain and enable off-gridders, meshing with their ‘practices to become embedded over time . . . to follow particular courses of action, and produce an everyday practical orientation toward their taskscape.’ ⁵⁹

Ingold ⁶⁰ writes that light is the primary medium for our inhabitation of the world. We could not live in sheer darkness, for light is a quintessential ‘experience of being’ that is immanent in the life of the world and our involvement with it. ⁶¹ Similarly, Edensor ⁶² suggests that ‘the cycles of the moon and sun . . . possess rhythmic patterns and irregularities that deeply impact on place and space.’ Off-gridders would agree; time and time again our research participants say that the greatest fear they had about going off-grid was to live in domestic darkness. None of them live in absolute darkness, however, and upon learning to live off-grid they actually begin to appreciate the simple pleasures of domestic light, the romantic appeal of a less bright living environment, and the aesthetic rewards of a star-studded night made possible by the darkness of their areas of residence and by respecting the rhythms of sun and moon. So in practice, we do not all experience light equally. Spaces of illumination – both domestic and public – are differently constituted by different assemblages of light and power. Power-asynchronous spaces, for example, can be said to separate the inside (e.g. a domestic environment) from the outside (e.g. the sky in which a house is immersed). Many of our dwellings are known to operate on the very basis of the detachment of the inside from the outside. ⁶³

The separation of indoor and outdoor spaces is part and parcel of a general cultural orientation that treats natural and social things as separate. ⁶⁴ Power-asynchronous spaces, however, do not treat the sky as a background surface external to their homes, but rather as an open space demanding direct involvement. In power-synchronous dwellings the sky and the electricity bestowed by sunlight are recognized to be enmeshed in a ‘perpetual metabolism’ that gives form to a hybrid and intimate socio-nature. ⁶⁵ The sky, and its varying degrees of light (or lack thereof), thus becomes a place for everyday inhabitation, a going concern, a tool for everyday living. This opportunistic way of being-in-the-world is a mode of inhabitation that differs from the mere mode of occupation typical of someone who – unconcerned with power synchrony – may very well go on ignoring the unfolding, dynamic, moody weather and its ever-changing light patterns. ⁶⁶ Power synchrony is a different orientation to time and place then, a way of living life more ‘in the open,’ ‘within a weather-world in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain, sunshine, and earth in the continuation of its own existence.’ ⁶⁷

Power synchrony demands care for what goes on in the sky and in the weather world. It requires constant monitoring and thus a sharp sensibility toward changing levels, shapes, and shades of light and energy and continual ‘attunement’ with its imperative demands. ⁶⁸ It demands attention and capacity for immersion in the changing cycles of various textures of light and darkness, in the unfolding rhythms of the sky over the day, the week, and the seasons. This temporal care exacts a capacity for reflection: a ‘critical capacity for reflexivity which is insisted upon as central to slowness.’ ⁶⁹ The slower rhythms of power asynchronous homes therefore arise out of a realization that the inside and the outside are not separate, that the surfaces of a house – from its windows to its solar panels, and from the vents to the roof – are not boundaries but channels for the ‘comings and goings’ ⁷⁰ of daily activities and of the formations, movements, and fluctuations of a temporally evolving luminous, nebulous, and nocturnal landscape. ⁷¹ In this sense, living slower, in greater synchrony with continua of sunlight and darkness, is a way of learning to be sensitive to the ‘vibrant matter’ of the lifeworld and the vitality of the things inhabiting the interface between animate and inanimate life. ⁷²

Conclusion: a new enlightenment?

When powered by weather-dependent renewable resources, electricity, ‘the stream of vital materialities called electrons, is’ seemingly more than ever ‘always on the move, always going somewhere, though where this will be is not entirely predictable.’ ⁷³ Weather-dependent electricity moves erratically and the ‘hybrid socio-natures’ ⁷⁴ generating and distributing this unpredictable force are vast and diverse, with some affording more and some affording less foreseeability. Most of us have settled for rather predictable assemblages and enjoy lives seemingly independent from diurnal, seasonal, and meteorological rhythms. Instead, off-gridders have chosen to synchronize their lives with the ‘turbulent matter’ ⁷⁵ of these patterns to a greater degree. Their life is in many ways similar to ours, but in many ways it is different as well: being more deeply shaped by ephemeral qualities of place, more open to the continuous coming into being of light and darkness and the multiple brilliant textures of the sky, less enclosed by surfaces aiming to separate their homes from the sky, and more ‘involved’ and ‘engaged’ with the ‘telluric, celestial, and organic’ agitations of matter. ⁷⁶

‘It’s a new age home for a new world,’ finds Jo-Anne. Her statement rings true if we believe that our future might demand from all of us more of the sensibility exercised by people like her, people who feel the need to be more attuned to the ‘vital connections between the geo (earth) and the bio (life).’ ⁷⁷ To become more attuned to the ‘livingness of the world,’ to shift our attention from indifference to intimate involvement, requires a new orientation: an orientation that is sensitive to the ways in which our everyday lives are imbricated with lively matter, in which our existence is ‘co-fabricated’ with the reverberations of the world. ⁷⁸ Perhaps these slower, supposedly more efficient, power-synchronous homes are but utopian spaces. Maybe they’re impractical experiments, microscopic life enclaves not worthy of a second look. Or maybe they’re the dawn of a new enlightenment: one not so keen on obliterating the night in search for eternal – and utterly unsustainable – artificial light.

Most of us nowadays ‘live with burgeoning temporal ecologies,’ writes Jones, ‘which we often misread or just ignore completely.’ ⁷⁹ If we wish to become more opportunistic, more efficient about energy production and consumption, then we can no longer afford to ignore the cosmic and climatic rhythms of daylight and darkness. If the future will call upon our civilization to diversify our energy resources and learn to rely more on renewables, then the rhythms of darkness will open ‘a potential for change, for everyday life to be interrupted and its organization to be changed, if only for a short time,’ ⁸⁰ until light becomes available again. A renewed attention toward the rhythms of ‘patterned’ entanglements of society and natures ⁸¹ such as the rhythmpatterns of light and darkness, might very well be one of the keys to regaining the sense of enchantment and wonder necessary for the sustainable regeneration of everyday life. ⁸²

Such renewed attention might also be the source for more imaginative social policy and commercial ventures. If there is one clear positive message about off-grid living it is that despite the intensity of the mundane adjustments to weather-dependent resources, reliance on renewable energy does not seem to lessen quality of life. Off-gridders’ practical everyday lessons in living with renewable-energy resources might teach the rest of us that conservation is more easily achieved whenever people feel a sense of ownership over the resources they consume and whenever they see that the immediate impact of, say, keeping unnecessary lights on. Dimming down might then seem to the rest of us not such a big deal and, perhaps, a more compelling way of making light of, and making do with, natural gloominess and darkness.

Encounters with darkness are generally viewed by most of us with suspicion and anxiety, if not downright fear and avoidance, as some of the contributions to this special issue have highlighted. Things, as we have seen, are much different in the off-grid world. While not one of the many off-gridders that we met claims to enjoy an utter absence of domestic light, in all of their homes as well as immediately outside of them, light and darkness are enacted differently. It is in the subtle textures of these processes of dimness and illumination that interesting cultural realities can be gleaned. It is in low-wattage lighting, in efficient appliances, in unplugged labour-saving technologies, in portable flashlights, in the flickering of a candle or an open outdoor fire, and in all the variable mutations of the sky across weather conditions and seasons that we can learn to appreciate that light and darkness are complex spectra, far from a black and white phenomenon. So, perhaps more than anything else, off-gridders’ preoccupation with efficiency, slowness, and power synchronicity can remind us that brilliance and dullness, luminescence and obscurity, or light and darkness are not absolute states but rather dynamic assemblages, events, and practices highly variable along nuanced continua that are subject to differing actions and orientations.

Few amongst the rest of us have ever experienced off-grid living, save for the occasional camping trip or cabin getaway. As a result, our understanding of light and darkness may very well have been conditioned by the nature of the mechanism we regularly employ to regulate the luminescence of an environment: the on/off switch that enables us to direct the flow of grid-supplied electricity. Uninvolved as we are with the supply of resources to centrally-generated power stations and in turn to our homes and places of work and consumption we have learned to view darkness as a condition we can easily avoid by selecting a term of binary condition: on or off. Off-gridders instead must deal with the same choice in less certain, less dyadic terms that are not subject to a ‘whether/or’ decision but rather to a ‘how’ consideration. ‘How’ as in how much Amperage is available in one’s batteries, how badly needed light and power are at that moment, how precisely power can be generated and how much effort that entails, how efficient alternative choices are, how much sunlight or wind was available today and will be available tomorrow, how dark is too dark, how much light is enough, and how else things could get done. In this sense, darkness becomes less something to avoid and more something to carefully weigh, negotiate, and act toward. This might look like a vernacular curiosity to us. Or, more insightfully, it might appear to be an enlightening new (and yet very old) way of dealing not only with light and darkness but also with one’s environment: a way of managing resources that is less anxious about the prospect of future blackouts and sacrifice in an energy-challenged world and a way that is more optimistic and resourceful about making do with whatever is available whenever opportune.