How to stay cool off the power grid

Our family owns a small cabin in the mountains of Virginia that is completely off the grid. We use it for a weekend retreat as an escape for our hectic, fast-paced city life. Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in the summer temperatures with many weekends exceeding the 100s.

We have a small gas powered generator to run the microwave, lights and a ceramic heater, but we didn’t think it would be anywhere adequate to operate a portable air conditioner.

It was a rather frustrating issue for us for several months since we mainly used the home in the three warmer seasons, and we had been skipping July and August making the property unused for five months of the year.

After speaking with several of my family and friends, we had the idea to apply a sail shade over the southern face of the house. This would keep the hot sun rays out of the house which lowered the max temps. Installing the sail shade took about 45 minutes. It was a fairly simple process, and I may include a video of someone doing a similar install in this post. We chose this sail shade. It had great reviews on Amazon, and I thought at worst we’ll have a shaded area outside that we can relax in the middle of the day. The sail shade worked far better than we imagined.

It was one part of our overall changes. We also installed screens for the windows and started opening all the windows to create a cross draft.

The final change we made was to get a lower power electric fan that we occasionally run on the generator. We only run the fan on days where there is little wind to keep the air circulating through.

After writing this post, we received a lot of questions about our off-grid weekends so I’ll answer them below. We have a portable solar charger that we use to keep our phones and tablets charged.

It folds up to about the size of a magazine, and it keeps our phones charged. Thankfully, we have phone reception out here so it’s just a matter of keeping them charged. For food, we do not have a refrigerator. We have two coolers with reusable freezer packs. We take cold cuts, condiments, and bread for sandwiches.

We also keep a bag of ice that we use to keep our beverages cool. I no longer drink soda after getting diagnosed with diabetes, but it does the trick for tea, non-sugar kool-aid, and water. When it comes to entertainment, we try to do family time with board games. It’s a great bonding time to spend Friday or Saturday afternoon making memories.

We have a campground about 10 minutes from our cabin that rents kayaks if we want to have an active adventure. We didn’t initially buy the screens for the windows, and it was a huge mistake. The home was quickly bombarded with mosquito and flies. We didn’t get enough screens for all the windows, Just the ones we planned to open to keep the cabin cooler.