Not off the grid, but we can see the edge from here: one family stumbles toward quasi-self-reliance.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: LIFESTYLE

COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA--OUR power went out for the better part of a week in 2008 after a particularly nasty storm. It failed quite frequently when we lived in our previous house at the end of a dirt road in Cornville, a few miles from our current locale. That might have had something to do with our remoteness, or the extreme weather in the state. Or maybe it was the local tradition of crashing pickup trucks into desiccated wooden utility poles and knocking them over.

During a blackout, having your own well isn't necessarily as independence-enhancing as you might think--not when the pump requires electricity and the surface of the water is far too low to dip some out by hand. Then you have nothing but a steel well cap to meditate upon as you consider the requirements of coffee pots and modern plumbing.

Unless you're prepared.

Because outages were common, we had stored water, cut firewood, and fueled up the camping stove and lanterns. We remained hydrated, warm, and fed through that and every other experience with the electric grid's fragility. All in all, it was a bit Little House on the Prairie for our tastes, though with a better wine selection--but ultimately more of an inconvenience than a disaster.

But tolerance for inconvenience can decline with the years.

"We need a way to keep the air conditioning on if the power goes out," my wife told me when we moved to our new house in the foothills. Wendy had reached a point in life marked by the occasional mood swing and extreme temperature sensitivity, and she made it clear that maintaining a climate-controlled environment in the house through all scenarios that nature or man might send our way was a non-negotiable requirement.

This being Arizona, where everything bakes for much of the year under the fireball in the sky, my first thought was solar. But I quickly discovered that all of those panels adorning people's roofs were nothing more than expensive shingles during a power outage. Most solar installations are designed to feed the grid, not keep you independent of it. I priced adding batteries to the mix to gain some autonomy, but they more than doubled the cost. And batteries couldn't handle the power demands of an air conditioner anyway.

So we settled, if that's the right word, for a 22 kW standby generator, which can handle the well pump and keep the air conditioning...