Now that living off the grid is such a hot topic with todays energy prices more and more people are asking me questions about how they too can live off the grid.

16 long years ago my family decided to completely change their lifestyle. I didn't understand exactly why my parents wanted to live differently then everyone else, but now that I'm older I understand better. They were forward thinkers.

I can't go one day without hearing something on the news about green energy. I'm sure that many of you hear the news about how we all need to 'go green' or the planet will die. The problem with the news is that they tell you it's going to cost you $25,000 to make the conversion.

One thing that I tell people over and over is that they can make their own conversion to renewable energy. It's not really as hard as you think, and it doesn't cost nearly as much as you hear on the news.

When we moved off the grid 16 long years ago one of the things we wanted to do was build our own off grid home. My father had always wanted to build his own house because it would be built the way he wanted... not something that he had to settle for.

Wow! Is it ever hard to find low cost wind turbine plans. A couple years ago when we went online looking for wind turbine plans we found plenty of sources of them.

Now that renewable energy is so popular many people ask me if I have a guide to living off the grid. Many people have the preconception the living off the grid is harder than it actually is.

If I had to pick any of the renewable energy methods when starting out again I would start out with building a wind generator. If you were to compare the cost of building solar panels to the cost of building a wind generator you would see that the wind generator options costs about 20% of the solar panel option.

It's true... in the last 10 years living off the grid has become a real and viable alternative to divorcing the electric company. We decided to make the change to living off the grid well over 16 years ago and haven't looked back since.

Most people assume that homemade wind generators are very difficult to build. A couple years ago I would have agreed with you. I mean they look very hard to build with those fancy blades spinning atop of their tower.

I remember when we decided to build a homemade wind generator. It was after we had went looking around at the commercially available wind generators and found that they were way to expensive to buy on our tiny budget.

It seems like yesterday when we decided to take the plunge into off grid living. In fact it's been well over 16 years now. We're a little different from most people who live on renewable energy though in the fact that we did our entire conversion for a very low cost. To start out with we decided that we should probably have a wind generator because it was pretty windy where we lived.