Best new gadets and trends for living off grid
Living off grid no longer means living roughing
The biggest trends centre around hyper-efficient solar power stations, smart water conservation, and portable, multi-use gadgets.
Modern technology now allows you to run a tiny home’s amenities or a remote cabin setup without sacrificing comfort or connectivity.
Portable or onsite Solar Coldrooms mean you can store enough food to make bulk buying a real option. Buying an entire beast or a dozen chickens at a time means great savings.
A cold room provides massive bulk storage, strict temperature control, and superior energy efficiency. It eliminates the need for multiple standard appliances, saving you on utility bills while extending the shelf life of perishable items, agricultural produce, and temperature-sensitive goods.
Precise Temperature & Humidity Control: Unlike traditional domestic fridges, cold rooms allow you to strictly dial in exact temperatures (from chill to sub-zero freeze) and manage moisture to prevent cellular damage or freezer burn.
Enhanced Energy Efficiency: Modern cold rooms feature heavy-duty insulated panels (such as EPS or PIR) and specialized seals that minimize heat transfer, meaning they often consume less total energy than running multiple inefficient household units.
Coldrooms come in small portable sizes that start from about $7000, up to purpose built coldrooms for businesses or a large family.
Food security is an important aspect of keeping your family safe when living Off Grid. Save time, money and effort travelling to buy food and goods that needs to be stored at a cool temperature.
In Australia and Queensland especially, our summers are hot and food that would be normally kept in a pantry will last longer if kept at a cooler temperature. We keep flour, sugar, tea and tin foods in a cooler place as our temperatures inside our house can reach 30°C.
No food does well for long at these temperatures.
🚰 Water Management & Purification
With water being a precious commodity, automated monitoring and highly efficient off-grid fixtures are trending.
Choosing a home water filtration system depends on your needs, your water source, and whether you want to filter all water entering the house or just a specific drinking tap.
Whole-house (Point-of-Entry) Home Filtration systems, treat water at the main entry point to protect plumbing and supply clean water to every tap. Under-sink Point-of-Use systems, like Reverse Osmosis (RO) setups, provide maximum contaminant reduction (such as fluoride and PFAS) specifically for drinking and cooking.
Smart Water Monitors: Gadgets like the Flo by Moen clamp onto your main water line to detect leaks, monitor usage, and automatically shut off the water if a pipe bursts to prevent devastating damage.
Foot-Operated Water Pumps: Off-grid minimalists are increasingly adopting manual foot pumps (like the Whale Gusher) for sinks to save power and eliminate the need to run an electric water pump for minor tasks.
Shower heads that use less water but still give you a decent shower.
We have both a whole house filtration system with 3 filters which are replaced each year and cost about $300.
As we drink mainly water in our house we also filter our drinking water through a ceramic water system using a silver-impregnated ceramic cartridge which is highly effective filtering sediment, bacteria, taste, odour, chlorine and heavy metals.
🍳 Off-Grid Cooking – Solar Stoves
Compact Campfires firepits are just that, the most compact and easily transported outdoor firepit/camp cooker available.
You can cook on top with a grill plate or a hotplate. They can also double as an oven for pizza and dampers etc.
Rotary spits can be attached for a real campfire taste to your meats.
Another method is popularized solar stoves that utilize vacuum insulation and compound-parabolic reflectors. They can cook meals or boil water in minutes using just the sun—even in partial cloud cover—without any fire hazard or gas canisters.
Solar ovens use sunlight to generate and trap heat for cooking. They work using three core scientific principles: reflection, absorption, and the greenhouse effect. Highly reflective panels bounce sunlight into an insulated cooking chamber, where dark-colored cookware converts the light into heat. A transparent lid or bag lets light in but traps the warm air, steadily raising the temperature to bake, boil, or roast food.
We use gas cooking and outdoor cooking depending on the weather.
🛰️ Staying Connected & Safe
Living off the grid no longer means losing connection to the outside world for emergencies.
Satellite Communicators:
Vehicle mounted Starlink that works in motion. Outback Comms specialises in transforming your vehicle into a mobile connectivity hub with our Starlink vehicle mounts and DC conversion solutions.
Off-Grid Routers: Specialized off-grid routers are becoming a staple to keep a reliable internet connection even in the most remote corners of a property.
Harness the power of the sun so that you can charge your phone and portable devices anywhere and anytime. Built tough for the outdoors, SunSaver will keep you powered and connected in any situation.
Solar power banks – These have a built-in battery to store up charge for you to use anytime, and with an integrated solar panel, they can trickle charge themselves in the sun.
Solar panel chargers – Without any storage, these are a direct feed from the sun, which are a great way to turbo boost solar charging for power banks and can charge a phone directly from the sun on a sunny day.
I use power banks that I have charged through the day to charge phones, laptops or gadgets if they are needed over night.
Learn More about our Off Grid Expo HERE | Buy your tickets for EXPO Here
Event Organisers:
Dee White: dee@offgridexpo.com.au
0434 630 510
Di Woodstock: di@offgridexpo.com.au
0419 224 628
Event Organisers
Dee White
dee@offgridexpo.com.au
0434 630 510
Di Woodstock
di@offgridexpo.com.au
0419 224 628