Does living "off the grid" just refer to solar power or wind mills?

Check out earthships if you are looking into building sustainable housing.

If I were you, I would look into building an earthship house. That might be your best bet. They have those out in New Mexico. When I saw the exhibits, I was in awe. Here is a website if you are interested.

I looked over some of your other questions. At first I figured you to be a teenager, wanting to live the perfect "green lifestyle."

Read your health problems. Now I see why the earthship answers probably received thumbs down. Earthships are the best type of home to build. However I do not think you would be physically up to pounding all that dirt, and it's extremely hard to hire having an earthship built.

To answer you question, you really need to have a mix of power sources. There will be days the sun does not shine enough to charge the batteries…but the wind is probably blowing.

If you are going to be off grid entirely, you need a mix of 2-5 different sources for your household power.

We will be building entirely off grid. We live in the Pacific Northwest, about 20 miles from the Canadian border. So we can have some pretty cold and snowy winters.

We will have wind, active solar, passive solar, a Central Boiler (brand name), hydro if we can legally, wood stoves (heat), wood cook stove, solar gain from the proper positioning of our home, wind cooling of our home from proper possitioning. We debate installing gas appliances run on propane. That however makes us dependent on companies and we don't really want that. Natural Gas is not an option where we are.

Active solar…charges batteries and provides electric for your use.
Passive solar…only heats up water, and provides hot water that way.
Wind turbines produce electricity
Wind mills grind grain, or pump water

Skystream 3.7 makes a very good wind turbine product for homeowners. Here's a link:

For a protien source, you really need to check out goats. Both the meat, and the milk from goats. Do some research, you may be suprised at how good they are for you, and how gentle both are for the human body to digest.

If you are building your own house, build it to take maximum advantage of solar gain for winter, and prevailing winds for cooling. You can make 50 degree differences in your home just by doing that.

Only build/buy in an area where it is legal for you to have a rainwater catch system. Install a metal roof on your home, and catch your own rainwater.

Start to make lists of what is extremely important to you (cannot live without) and what you are willing to be flexible on. Start doing lots of research. Check books out from your local library and read up on your topics of interest.

Think outside the box (or maybe in the box!). Those places you mentioned are very termite prone. Concider using Conex boxes to build your home. They are made of metal, and easy to use to build homes. You can insulate the outside of them, and get rid of the industrial box look. Best of all, termites cannot eat them!

~Garnet
Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years
Raising meat goats since 1999

Living off the grid refers to living without any utilities. It applies as much to a log cabin with a wood stove as it does to high tech solar photo-voltaics.

Wind mills are far less expensive but tend to produce power at night when you need it the least and require more maintenance. Without a grid tie in, you can't use the simple accounting of net metering to bank your power so you'll need batteries to do the same. Alternatively, if you have the terrain for micro-hydro, you could have an upper and lower pool and use a mechanical windmill to pump water from the lower pool to the upper pool, drawing power via micro-hydro when you need power. You'll also benefit from any stream or ground water that you might get going into the upper pool. However water rights are usually not included with the property as they've probably been signed off a long time ago to some neighbour drilling a well, it's a thorny situation to sort out who has the water rights to a given piece of property.

I expect by now you have found yourself some property and are underway on building your ideal home.
We have been living off grid, on a small unserviced island for over 14 years.
We have a small solar system, the house is a passive solar design which works extremely well in both summer and winter.
We use wood to heat our house and either the wood stoves or propane for cooking.
We do have 120v AC power via a 3,600 watt inverter for anything that requires electrical power.
It doesn't take long to realize that once you are off the grid you come to realize just how little electricity you actually need.
Most people build a house that is larger than their real needs (myself included!) but if you keep it small, all your energy needs are reduced.
Bohemian says to use a metal roof, but I don't necessarily agree. Some folks think a metal roof is cleaner than other types, but the same amount of debris will fall on your roof no matter what it is made from.
And a little known fact…metal roofs are worse in a fire than fiberglass reinforced asphalt. In the event of a small forest fire, the metal roof will transfer heat through to your roof framing very quickly, whereas the reinforced asphalt shingles are extremely difficult to burn.
We have been drinking the water from our catchment system since day one. We do run it through filters of course for domestic consumption, but not for watering the garden.