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It started with a practical problem.
Two decades ago, we were designing renewable energy systems for places where conventional infrastructure simply wasn't available.
Weather monitoring in the Arctic. Hotels in the Pyrenees. Telecommunications in the Caucasus. Remote homes, farms and communities.
They needed energy. There wasn't a grid. So we found another way.
Back then, off-grid wasn't really a lifestyle choice.
Solar, wind, batteries, generators, controls and sometimes water systems all had to work together, often in remote places where reliability mattered and getting somebody back to fix it wasn't straightforward.
Most of the systems we worked on were independent because they had to be.
There wasn't one box that did everything.
There wasn't an app. And there usually wasn't much point blaming the equipment when you were hundreds of miles from the person who installed it.
You had to understand the whole system.
Start with what you're trying to achieve.
Twenty years of working with independent systems teaches you fairly quickly that adding more equipment isn't necessarily the answer.
A good system starts with understanding what you're actually trying to achieve, the place you're working with, and the resources already available.
Sometimes that means generating more energy. Sometimes it means using less. Sometimes it's storing water, changing how something is controlled, repairing what you've already got, or simply doing something in a different order.
The technology comes later.
The same questions kept appearing in different places.
How much energy do we actually need?
Where does our water come from?
Could we repair this rather than replace it?
Could this building do something useful again?
Could we make better use of what the land already gives us?
We began applying the same thinking to buildings, vehicles, boats, workshops and the places we lived.
They weren't really separate problems. They were parts of the same system.
Eventually, we started living it.
Off-grid stopped being something we designed for other people.
We lived with the systems ourselves. We learned what happens when the sun doesn't shine, when water becomes scarce, when something breaks, and when the clever solution turns out to be unnecessarily complicated.
It changed our perspective.
Living with limited resources makes you think differently about what you actually need. About waste. About resilience. About repairing things. About where energy, water and materials come from, and what happens to them afterwards.