Off Grid Living – Part 2

Jan Emming loves succulents and living off the grid! He moved here to the desert over 20 years ago from Colorado with the dream of building an alternative construction home (Papercrete: the ultimate off grid building material!) and growing succulents for his cactus nursery. Jan is a modern day Renaissance off-grid man. Here’s how he does it…

Jan’s Off the Grid Setup

Jan has 40 acres in the Sonoran desert at approx. 3000 ft. elevation. He has a 400′ deep well with a solar pump feeding water to two 1500 gallon water storage tanks on the mountainside above his home. It provides approx. 250 gallons a day to his tanks on the hillside with his current solar pump. This provides his home with water by gravity flow.

Jan has built two large water catchment pools next to his well to help resupply the source and reduce erosion through his land. The water catchments are each roughly the size of a good sized swimming pool. Each pool has a backup overflow channel when the water becomes too full to avoid washing out the dirt dams. This system allows significant amounts of rainfall runoff to soak back into the water table near Jan’s well.

What is Papercrete?

Jan’s home and outbuildings are made of papercrete. “What’s that?” you say. Well, according to Mother Earth News, papercrete is an industrial-strength building source comprised of paper (or cardboard), sand, and Portland cement which was originally patented in 1928. However, it was so cheap and easy to make that it never earned it’s patent owners a profit and the patent expired. Since the 1980’s, there has been a renewed interest in papercrete by the alternative home construction movement as a cheap and easy way to make an environmentally friendly home.

The papercrete process is simple! You build a mixer (think of a blender but much larger), mix the dry ingredients with water to form a slurry. Then, the slurry is poured into blocks or forms to dry. When papercrete hardens, it is both ultra lightweight and has great insulating factors (up to R-2 per inch). It is very strong with a compressive strength of 300 pounds per square inch (psi). Papercrete also keeps its shape and integrity when wet. Jan discovered (by accident) that papercrete is also quite fire resistant, making it a truly wonderful building material for living off the grid.

Jan built his 600 sq ft papercrete home himself over the course of 3 years. He pulped the paper materials that he collected from friends, newspapers and other businesses and mixed them in his hand mixer with Portland cement until he achieved the right consistency. Then, he poured them into large brick molds he made from plywood. Jan made his papercrete forms quite large to have oversized bricks. In retrospect, he wishes he had made them smaller like a traditional masonry block to maintain consistent size and shape easier.

Jan powers his house with a separate solar system than his well. Neither solar system is overly large, just enough for running Jan’s essential appliances. He has no cooling system since it would take too much power to run a swamp cooler on his current solar setup. However, he does run a propane heater on the colder nights in the winter.

Jan’s Life

Jan enjoys the simple life. He enjoys his peace and quiet with occasional visits from friends, neighbors and nursery customers.

Jan spends most days at home working in his “garden” which is the 2-3 acres around his home that he has pruned, raked, and planted exotic and unusual succulents mixed in with the natural landscape. He also spends a lot of his time running his cactus nursery, Destination Forever Ranch and Gardens (which does sales in person and online) and writing his blog: JanEmming.com on succulents and travel!

Jan rarely goes to town for supplies more than once a week, sometimes once every two weeks. He goes sometimes days at a time without seeing another person, but other times he has tours scheduled like the Lake Havasu Garden Club (which was coming out for their annual tour of his cactus nursery and garden the day after I visited him).

If you enjoyed this interview, don’t miss out on my other Off Grid Living interviews: The Federicos (Straw Bale home), Tina Payton (A Woman and her Burros), and Off Grid Living with a Rocket Scientist (Mark & Kelley). Leave a comment below! Don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter!

Jan’s Garden

Jan loves succulents. One might say he loves them all. However, we both agree that Buckhorn Cholla (the bain of my existence) is the least desirable cactus on earth. Here’s few pics of Jan’s garden, including some pretty exotic cacti…