Excluding homeless people, are there left any people who live without any electricity?
Are there any people left in Britain who live without electricity?
r/AskUK
Excluding homeless people, are there left any people who live without any electricity?
Comments
Please help keep AskUK welcoming!
When repling to submission/post please make genuine efforts to answer the question given. Please no jokes, judgements, etc.
Don’t be a dick to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Plenty, I believe some estimates put it between 200k and 300k homes that are off grid.
Doubt they are gunner respond to this mate
There’s a youth hostel in the Lake District that’s completely off grid: https://www.skiddawhouse.co.uk/
why are you excluding homeless people?
There are quite a number running off grid, solar panels/wood burners/ etc. I lived on a small site a few years back!
Planning to return to that lifestyle in the form of a Van. Fuel will be an issue though unless I can figure out biodiesel!
There are a select few who don’t use electricity at all, though you’d be hard pressed to find them! You kinda have to know where they are already to find them
Do you mean with out mains electricity?
Without owning any electrical devices at all, ie including torches, phones etc?
Without using any electrical devices at all?
Without electricity at all (some kind of alien that has a body which runs purely on magnetism or something?)
A woman in Fermanagh does. Here
There are vulnerable people who can’t manage their finances even to the point of using a top-up meter but who don’t have carers or other support to help them. So despite having Electric connections in their house, they don’t have any usable electricity.
They are rare but there’s more than you would expect. With electricity you pay a standing charge, on a prepayment meter that doesn’t have credit it builds as a debt. So when they finally do try and use electric then most of their top-up goes to the debt. So they get £1 worth of usable electric for the £10 they topup by. Then decide it’s not worth it.
If a supplier is made aware of the situation they can either change the way the debt is repaid so only a small amount of the top-up goes to the debt or wipe the meter and put it back to zero, depending on the circumstances. But they have to be made aware. And the person who is incapable of using their electricity themselves will not be able to call and explain the situation. So it’s reliant on social services or a friend helping them out.
I love in Northumberland and there are quite a few properties that aren’t hooked up to the national grid.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr4r30p63nqo
I live on a narrowboat with no electricity. I heat with coal, cook with gas, read by candle.
The only things that are electric are my mobile and bike lights, but I charge them at work.
Without mains electricity, probably in very rural areas. I don’t know if they still do, but there were some farms in rural Northumberland who relied on diesel generators for electricity even just a few years back.
Not sure if they’ve got electricity yet but Scotland has piped water, apparently.
There are the vulnerable amd the off grid people
Yes and no. Not mains power, as I currently live in my van.. But always entertaining when you have these electric company sales guys trying to sell you stuff.. until you do the "would it work in my van" comes out. 🤣
I can’t tell you I’ve not got any electricity
There a bunch of people who live on canal boats. Some are based in marinas which have electricity hookups, some have solar panels… some have neither
My folks live in a rural part of NW England. They have no mains gas, no mains sewers, no mains water it comes from a well, no mobile phone signal but they do have electricity.
A farmer put a pipe mole through the village cable and cut them off the grid for about 6 days last year. They got offered JustEat vouchers to be able to order food, the electricity board didn’t actually check if people delivered out there (they don’t) so it was pointless. They also had no WiFi, or phone signal so couldn’t even use the app! You’ve got to drive about 3 miles to get a signal!
I’d wager most people now that don’t have national grid electricity are by choice.
Yes – my father’s cousin lives in a hut which doesn’t even have a proper floor, just dirt. Ever time I see him he’s wearing some kind of camo gear. He’s always got a lady on the go though, usually a fairly well-off divorcee. I imagine they think they can “fix” him. So I don’t know how much time he actually spends at home.
The Welsh
No. Maybe. I haven’t seen this film.
Someone I know who is from Northern Ireland grew up in a house without mains electricity. They had a generator which they would sporadically use, but their heating was all from a wood fired stove.
I believe they have very recently finally got hooked up to the mains.
Never quite sure if it was down to feeling it was unnecessary, or because they were so rural (and the only house for miles) it just wasn’t a priority to go through the hassle
Rotherham still uses steam and put live toads in their shoes to cure gout.
I’ve worked in a number of properties without electricity in remote areas. They generally want it that way. Candles for light, gas for hot water/cooking and a stove for heating.
More than you would think. Having lived in mid Wales, you experience as close as you get to the old ages. My sister has had multiple people come into the home who have lived without electricity
Me. I don’t even tinternet
I recently moved to a remote-rural house that was still using the old electricity key that you have to go to a post office and top up then plug into the meter.
It’s a fair trip to get to the shop to top it up, often closed due to staffing without notice and the old 70’s hearing in the house was gobbling up all the top ups I was putting on (we’re talking just shy of £1k a month on electric alone in a 2 bed cottage style home). All this meant I went without electricity on several occasions, nothing to be done about it. I am someone who has access to private transport and a fairly good income, how on earth anyone without either of those two things would manage is completely beyond me. I have zero suspicions that there are people who cannot access electricity due to a lack of support/funding/physical access.
Thankfully, with a new heating system and a direct debit for electricity set up… I am back in the modern world.
This woman lives in rural Northern Ireland which is where my mum and her family came from:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqr4v6539o
This used to be more common back when the British eccentric was still a thing. Doubtless there will be at least one eccentric holdout somewhere living in an utterly dilapidated building without gas or electricity. People like this used to be fairly common in the UK before the millennium but are increasingly rare.
Even looking back to the nineties, I can think of 2-3 people who were off grid before it was cool, because they were isolated and eccentric. They’re all long dead sadly.
Meeeee…. to a degree… I dont have plugs or mains, my electric all comes from a portable le solar generator (Jackery Explorer 500 woth 100w portable solar panel). I live in a caravan.
Travellers / those living in caravans
Wasdale head in the lake distract had no mains electricity until a few months ago and even now some houses use diesel generators.
Not Britain but my friend’s Dad lived his whole life in Ireland without electricity, heating or water. He passed a couple of years ago and was never tempted to “modernise”.
He got water from a well in his garden and boiled it in a large black pot in the fireplace. There were candles in every corner of the house of course. He never owned a car and would walk an hour each way into the village to spend each day in the pub. We’d give him a lift home if we ever passed him walking back along the road and he’d always make sure to be home before dark so that he could light his candles and get the fire going.
So I met a couple living in a house in Hertfordshire, with no electricity and no mains water. They have a wood burning stove and charge their phones (which they never use) by driving around in their car. There was a Tv, but that is powered by a small generator on occasion. In their 80s. Like something from a horror movie (their house had actually appeared in a crime TV series).
We are completely off the power grid. Strictly speaking we have a grid connection, but we haven’t imported for around 3 years.
7 years living on a narrowboat and relying entirely on solar.
It’s a pretty cool feeling, knowing you’re able to just draw from nature’s raw powers all around you. Opting out of the system.
Why aren’t portable solar panels more of a thing? Like ones you could stick outside your window or something… Solar panels don’t always have to be massive contraptions fitted to your roof.
Yes there are people living off the grid. Most won’t respond to this.
I am Edinburgh born and bred and know some people in tenements don’t have heating (neither gas central nor fitted electric) and there are some living without eg washing machines in their home (and this is frequent in places like NYC too) so despite some aspects of modern living being widely available and making life easier and more pleasant not everyone has caught up, whether due to financial reasons or being stuck in their ways (among other reasons).