The Acorn Home: Off-grid Freedom

A home should provide the basic things a human needs: creative shelter, clean energy, healthy food, fresh water, and help to build healthy soil. Let's renew our vision of a modern home.

A home is far more than a house with four walls.

A home is where you feel safe. A home is where family is, where your belongings are, and where you go after working outside in the world.

Home is the place you might have a dog or cat waiting on you. It’s where you would plant a garden. Home is where your children sleep after playing. Home is where your spouse hugs you after a hard day.

Here in 2023, many young people want to begin to form their own homes. However, they cannot afford the actual house. If you can’t afford the house, it’s hard to begin to build the home that’s meant for you and your family.

Houses need to be reclaimed and reinvented, so that homes may once again become the cornerstone of modern life. A healthy home is one of the most important pillars for healthy families, which lead to healthy societies.

Much of modern society today is not healthy right now. There is growing anger. There is unrest. The costs for basic goods are rising fast with inflation. Families are broken. Divisions are fueled by big tech, big media, and other modern forces. We need healthy places to call home now more than ever.

We have a vision for designing a new blueprint for what a home is and how it works: A quiet, slow, and natural environment to help restore our health, finances, peace of mind, and heal the fabric of our community.

We have a vision for tomorrow’s house, to help build healthy homes.

We call this vision The Acorn Home.

Let’s dive into the specifics and details of what an Acorn Home looks like…

The Acorn Home is a blueprint our team is working to design, and then share with others. In a nutshell, the Acorn home is an off-grid house concept that is affordable to build, produces its own energy, handles sanitation simply, helps to grow local food, collects rainwater, and empowers its residents to produce many of the things they need independent from the monetary economy.

The Acorn home is an exercise in designing systems to produce ‘enough’.

What is enough water, enough shelter, enough energy and enough space to grow food?

We are working on two blueprints: a 2 person Acorn Home, and a 4 person Acorn Home. The 2 person Acorn Home focuses on mobility and a smaller footprint. The 4 person Acorn Home can be scaled to larger sizes for larger families.

Both Acorn home concepts have the following systems and functions supporting their inhabitants on a 1/4 acre to 2 acre footprint:

• Passive thermal design, oriented towards sun, to help warm home in winter.

• Windows and roof overhang to catch winter sunlight, and deflect summer sun.

• Highly insulated walls to keep home warm or cool in proper seasons.

• Lightly colored roof to reflect solar heat back into atmosphere.

• 800-1600 sq ft design to minimize areas to heat and cool.

• Solar hot water heater to eliminate hot water heating energy needs.

• Small photovoltaic panel system for powering lights, fans & electronics.

• In windy locations, a micro wind turbine could generate electricity well.

• In areas with a creek & elevation drop, a micro hydro turbine can work well.

• Brick rocket mass heater in thermal mass backed wall for winter heating.

• Rainwater collection system with cistern running from the tin roof panels.

• Methane digester for producing cooking fuel and liquid fertilizer from food waste.

• Solar ovens for cooking on sunny days.

• Biochar fire pit for producing carbon for composting systems.

• Permaculture gardens around home for growing local produce, greens, and herbs.

• Permaculture food forest for growing fruits, nuts, and other tree species.

• Chickens for eating food scraps, weeds, insects, and producing eggs & manure.

• Composting bays for converting green biomass & brown biomass to compost.

• Composting toilet with peat directing solid wastes to permaculture forest.

• Methane digester toilet for processing wastes into wood chip / reed bed.

• Anaerobic fertilizer tanks for fermenting green biomass into fertilizer.

• Grey water saved from showers, baths, sinks & washing clothes to water gardens.

• Overflow rainwater pond for fish, aquatic species & aquaculture.

• Small livestock such as dwarf goats or kune-kune pigs (rotated regeneratively).

• Walkable paths in community with micro EVs for travel beyond home.

This list of concepts primarily revolves around passive home design, permaculture farming, composting, and simple energy systems. Everything here is small scale, made specifically for humans within a family to address and maintain.

The Acorn Home is a vision for integrating these technologies together, to provide for humans needs in a new, hyper-local manner. This is as local as you can get. These systems provide sustainable, engaging, and healthy ways for humans to power their homes, grow local food, cook their food, collect & purify water, build soil, and have a daily purpose in maintaining these systems.

This is what future freedom looks like.

Acorn homes need a bit of space. A 1/4 acre lot for a 2 person home, and a 1-2 acre lot is more ideal for a 4+ person home. These sustainable systems need some room, but not much, to operate and function well.

The primary challenges with off-grid homes currently are zoning restrictions, cost of land in metro areas, lack of awareness & education about these systems, and the ability to finance these off-grid systems. None of these roadblocks entirely prevent this blueprint from being built. It’s all possible, we just need to establish this as a viable blueprint for tomorrow’s homes.

Many regions don’t have overbearing zoning, and some financial institutions will finance systems like this. For a new concept to begin to gain steam, you just need a few viable examples to show people. This is what we are building. Two examples of both the Acorn Home for 2 people, and the Acorn Home for 4 people.

This concept turns traditional suburban housing entirely on its head.

A traditional suburban home is a very expensive box with a mortgage. It provides shelter, but none of the other human needs. The other needs from water, sanitation, food, and energy all additional monthly expenses. The modern suburban home is energy inefficient, often made from toxic materials, built for profit, not build to last more than 30 years. The modern suburban home requires the owner to own one or more vehicles to commute through traffic to work to pay for the mortgage and all the utilities.

We think the Acorn Home concept could change this model.

Many people like to be home. Many people like to work with their hands.

Many people would rather not commute. Many people want to have more purpose than their modern desk job provides.

Home should be your sanctuary and refuge.

Everyone who works hard should be able to purchase a small home, that provides for a person’s needs.

Our monetary economy continues to devalue and break down, and it likely will keep breaking down over the next few decades. This poses a serious danger to the global middle class. Historically there have almost always only been the haves, and the have nots. Our global middle class is a foundation of stability, equality, and hope that we absolutely must work to preserve and grow further.

Normal people are working just as hard, getting less and less for their efforts in our monetary economy. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a generational cycle of rise and decay. We’re on the downhill cycle until the culminating financial, geopolitical, and environmental crisis come to a head. After the rocky decades to come, we’ll likely be looking at a new age of progress. But the waters immediately ahead are stormy. We want to help build systems to help families and individuals navigate the stormy waters.

Here in the 2020s we’re witnessing the decay of global financial systems, the American order, and globalism as we know it. The world is moving towards degrowth whether people like it or not.

Honestly, degrowth managed well will likely be far better for most of us normal people. Elites can’t keep robbing the global piggy bank for their projects and excessive desires. Most of us simple people just want to have enough. Our aim is to build the Acorn Home for those of us who want enough. When we produce most of what we need directly, elites are unable to as easily rob that hard work using the monetary tools of inflation, fees, taxes or other financial schemes.

Permaculture, clean energy, local food, and home life are good answers to a failing financial system. The Acorn Home is the confluence of these methods, technologies and ideas. Perhaps it’s time to return home, live slower, live simply, and prepare to weather the turbulent times that are beginning.

A home to grow food. A home to harness sunlight. A home to capture rainwater. A home to live simply. A home to build soil and increase biodiversity through gardens.

Would you like to live in an Acorn Home?

If you’re interested in making the Acorn Home a reality for yourself, or others, please consider supporting our kickstarter below to build a digital app to simulate the design of the off-grid systems and technology outlined in this article!

Acorn Land Lab Off-Grid Simulator

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/land-lab-simulator/off-grid-simulation-designer-app-the-land-lab-simulator

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Our mission at Acorn Land Labs is to share the ideas, methods, tools & concepts needed for people to leverage off-grid systems to live more freely and affordably. Go build something!

🎥 Off-Grid Systems Video Course - 10 hour off-grid systems course

📗 Acorn Off-Grid Home eBook - 50 key off-grid systems we use for living simply

🎧 Acorn Off-Grid Audiobook - 50 key off-grid systems we use for living simply

📚 Acorn Off-Grid Systems Paperback / Hardback Editions - buy on Amazon