ShareDo you think you could live without commercial power like the Langleys?
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Dressed in denim jeans and a floppy, wide-brimmed straw hat, Jerry Langley brings to mind a modern-day Charles Ingalls, the patriarch of Little House on the Prairie.
Langley, 53, lives modestly with his wife and two children in a small two-bedroom home.Their dwelling is made of ferro-cement, a composite building material, and sits partly underground on the rolling Blackland Prairie in Rainbow Valley, a 220-acre self-governed agricultural cooperative near Sanger in north Denton County.The Langleys can look across their 2 1/2 acres and view fields of coneflowers and purple thistle. A rutted, one-lane gravel road winds through the picturesque landscape, which is home to a variety of wildlife -- turkeys, raccoons, roadrunners, great blue herons. At night, coyotes turn their lonesome howls toward a canopy of stars.A summer visitor, a box turtle, regularly appears at their front door.Now and then the critter moseys into the living room, as if entitled, and helps itself to food left for the family cat.The Langleys' rural lifestyle -- secluded, peaceful, private -- is far different from that of city dwellers in another respect.There's not a power line in sight.This family and the seven other Rainbow Valley members live off the grid -- without the benefit of commercial electricity.The co-op was formed in the late 1970s by a group that Langley said was dedicated to "walking lightly on the land.""We've got most everything we need out here," Jerry Langley said. "Except air conditioning."Environmentally conscious, the Langleys live frugally on his small income, sharing a sense of pride in their self-sufficiency. So do a growing number of Americans.An estimated 180,000 homes in the U.S., mostly in the West, draw their power from the sun and wind and other sources."It used to be people living off the grid were out in nowhere, where it was very expensive to get electrical lines. That's no longer true," said Dona McClain with Solar Today, a bimonthly magazine published by the American Solar Energy Society. "Now you're finding off-the-grid homes right in the middle of a city."Those accustomed to modern conveniences like thermostat-controlled heating and cooling might view the Langleys' lifestyle as difficult.Take washing clothes, for instance."You don't just push a button," Langley's wife, Tammy, said.Their washing machine, bought secondhand for $30, sits outdoors on the front porch.Every other day, she fills the tub with water from a garden hose and then climbs a staircase of rocks to the tin-covered roof. Mounted on top of the house are three solar panels attached by cables to eight golf-cart batteries -- the main power source -- and a generator. To run the washer, she starts the generator by yanking a rope, like a lawn mower.Garments are dried the old-fashioned way, on a line stretched between a silver maple and a black willow tree.Jerry Langley invested about $3,000 for three solar panels, batteries, a charge controller, a generator and inverters. The panels produce power for the lighting, television, stereo, answering machine and fans.
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