Start in downtown Boulder, near the frenetic Whole Foods emporium. Travel west, up Mapleton Hill, through its spectacle of grand Victorians and Queen Annes, then up, up, beyond the stop signs and cross streets and porch swings. The pavement changes to gravel. Up, through the tiny town of Gold Hill (population 210) and its Lilliputian elementary school, past grazing deer,canyons, slopes and aspen groves on a crisp fall dawn swabbed in a yellow more rich than Irish butter, a lemon flirting with saffron.
At some point you’ll reach Kevin Tone’s house at the end of a rutted dirt driveway. And like Tone, you’ll be unhinged from a category of civilization’s comforts. You’ll be off the grid, divorced from power companies and their utilitarian charms.
“It’s got to be in you,” says Tone, 43, standing on his redwood deck on a recent weekday morning, the view nothing but evergreens and mountains. “You have to love nature enough that you want to be in nature more than around neighbors.”
“It’s pretty cool,” says his 9-year-
old daughter, Kaya, in furry pink slippers emblazoned with blue stars, shortly before heading to third grade in that miniature elementary school with her 6-year-old sister, Siena. “I like the porch because you can Rollerblade on it. I like the hot tub. I like my room, even though it used to be a bunch of hay bales.”
Here, 4 miles from Gold Hill, 10 miles from the nearest supermarket and 14 steep, windy miles from Boulder, Tone runs a house powered entirely by sun and wind, a way of life to which he’s hewn since leaving Boulder for the wild eight years ago.
Lights. Dishwasher. Radios. Computers. Dryer. All of the switches you flip, buttons you press and knobs you turn without flashing even a spark of thought because the power company’s got it covered, because energy is fathomless, infinite, effortless – all of it in Tone’s world is the fruit of his own harvests.
“Oh!” says Siena later in the morning, shortly after helping lead a tour of the house, including her bedroom with a gnome painted on the wall. She scurries back inside the bedroom and turns off the light. “There.”
It’s a lifestyle in the 3,500-square-foot Tone home, a green-roofed, cornmeal-colored spread built out of straw bales and timber, although the family’s parsimony with electricity doesn’t translate into candles-only at night, once-a-week clothes washings and sleeping in sweaters and knitted caps.
Their remove from the power grid manifests in mild inconveniences: running the dishwasher only when the sun is out; chopping more wood than a typical on-the-grid homeowner; making coffee with a French press rather than an energy-hogging electric machine.
“I have parties until 3 in the morning,” Tone says. “You’re panicky when you first move in. You’re like the light Nazi.”
And then in his case, he says, he realized that the whole improbable thing – the 24 solar panels standing on long poles, the shed where 16 white batteries silo the crop of sunshine, the woodstove, the small windmill, the tank of propane – gave his family what it needed, without hardships.
Their story isn’t commonplace, but it’s not one-of-a-kind either. At least 700 people across Colorado live off the
grid, depending largely on the sun for their energy, says Leslie Glustrom, director of the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association in Boulder. “The trend is definitely headed up,” she says.
Nelly Higginbotham lives inside the grid now, but she’s working hard to detach from it, spending the past year building a 2,200-square-foot solar house in Paonia out of bags stuffed with earth and sand.
She’s got solar panels for most of the electricity, but she also plans to harness the energy contained in a stream near her house for an additional 600 watts of power. The only nod she’ll make to corporate dependency is a propane tank to fuel her stove.
“I’ve always wanted to live off the land,” says Higginbotham, 46, an herbalist and farmer who lives with her 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son. “The utility companies have us … I don’t want to be at the beck and call of the utility companies.”
Whether they go off-the-grid or not, more and more people are going solar in Colorado in part because of a bill passed by the legislature in 2004 that offers big rebates to people who install solar systems.
“A typical system might cost $18,000 before the rebates, but when you’re all done, it costs you $7,000,” she says. Solar system “are really going up fast.”
“Almost all of the systems prior to this year were off-grid systems. People had a cabin. It would cost a fortune to run transmission lines to the cabin, so they went solar,” she says. “Now people are saying, ‘Yes, I’m so ready.’ We have people in Highlands Ranch and all over.”
Tone’s off-the-grid solar home, which is part of a national solar tour next month, lacks most of the commercial amenities that would come with a solar house in Highlands Ranch. There’s one store, a tiny market 4 miles away, that qualifies as “convenient” for members of the Tone house.
But Tone, who grew up in a suburb of New York City and then lived in Manhattan before moving to Boulder, doesn’t pine for all that he’s left behind.
“When I come back here it’s like a vacation, but it’s home,” he says. “It’s like a vacation home. I love that.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
National Solar Tour
The American Solar Energy Society, based in Boulder, is holding its National Solar Tour in October, with most of the tours nationwide and in Colorado taking place Oct. 7 (although Boulder’s tour is Oct. 8). The tour involves walking through solar homes and learning about solar energy. For more information, visit nationalsolartour.org or call the society at 303-443-3130.
