In June 2016, Sarah Richardson broke ground on a hilltop property less than two hours from Toronto. Nine months later, she moved in with her husband, Alexander Younger, and their daughters, Robin and Fiona. Her house is pretty much self-sufficient, with its own solar system and private well, and the building process was captured on her HGTV series, Sarah Off The Grid. According to House and Home, which featured the finished home in 2018, Richardson named the property Starlight Farm. Projects like this can also reflect broader interest in off-grid living. A study titled ‘Who Stays in Rural Areas? Understanding Gender Differences in Location Decisions Among Millennials in the United States,’ published in the journal Population, Space and Place, compared millennials who stay in rural communities in the north-central United States with those living in cities, and found that people living in rural areas place more value on outdoor space and environmental quality than their urban counterparts.
Building a farmhouse from scratch, one solar panel at a time
Living off the grid is not easy. There is no existing power line to tap and no city water main to connect to. Everything, from electricity to heat, has to be created on site. Richardson’s team installed a solar array to power the home and drilled a well for water. As House and Home reported, the mudroom floors have radiant in-floor heating, run off the same system. Off-grid solar is no longer a niche option. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Spring 2024 Solar Industry Update, the United States had a cumulative 32.9 gigawatts of residential solar capacity installed by the end of 2023, and off-grid solar products are now used by more than 100 million people worldwide. Richardson’s project is part of a much larger trend of homes making their own power.
