@Liv
Thanks for bringing this topic!
We are thrilled to be hosting in our Frank Lloyd Wright school designed, all solar home, on top of a mountain on 180 wilderness acres, surrounded by wilderness on all sides, with a view to the ocean 25 miles away as the ravens fly. Public utilities have never been here, so we are totally off grid, and without having to "rough it". We have all the modern appliances and conveniences. We have 77 solar panels, both manual and automatic trackers; an Outback power system with 2 industrial deep cycle battery banks; a deep, pure water well, pumped by solar when we have adequate sunshine. We have a 2 acre organic garden, wildflowers, trails, abundant forest, and all sorts of wildlife - from wonderful birds, & bats, to mountain lions & bears.
Do we recycle? Of course! We have no trash pickup here, so we are fastidious. There is no sewer system either, so we have low flush toilets, efficient shower heads, and have been known to reuse grey water for ornamental irrigation, according to the dictates of county codes. We also have a firefighting system with large water storage tanks, which we fill with collected rainwater. Our regularly tested drinking water from the well is pumped about 500' total, with solar, to storage tanks on the highest point of the mountain, where it falls gravity flow to the house with 60 lbs of pressure at the tap.
We have a solar hot water heating system on the roof, low wattage/ high output lighting everywhere, electric heat on cool but sunny days, and solar powered A/C in summer when needed. In summer we maximize electrical power use in our kitchen with induction cookers and microwave. For drying laundry we have the option of a gas powered clothes dryer or the clothesline in the sun. In winter we love to augment heating the house using passive solar heat collected in our solarium. Our broadband internet comes to us wireless, from a tower on another remote mountain. We provide locally handcrafted bar soap in our guest suite, the same as we use it for ourselves. We provide and use cloth towels and table napkins, real dishes and silverware.
Our wilderness location, with no neighbors, has a dark night sky for viewing stars, planets, and meteor showers.
Our guest suite was built with reclaimed redwood and oak milled on our property from a down tree. The hardwood floor is sustainably raised red oak, sprung for comfort.
We've lived here full time for 30 years, so we often, when asked, give educational tours of our off grid systems. Living off grid is definitely not cheap, nor is it simple, so this is a working example, to a lot of off grid hopefuls.