Visitors might be too busy watching for potholes and pack rats or glimpsing at Vulture Peak while driving in to notice as they rumble past the last power line.
Once in the driveway, three arrays of solar panels on the roof and ground reveal the extreme effort required to live off the power grid, in the desert.
So do the two small wind turbines that cut the air overhead, the battery assembly on the porch, and the small refrigerator covered with insulation in the house.
Families living in the far reaches of the desert face the challenges of 50-mile round trips to the grocery store and pumping their own water, but nothing separates them so much from the city as their continual quest for energy.
For them, using compact-fluorescent light bulbs isn't a political statement but a necessity. Repairing diesel-generators is a highly coveted skill, and solar panels get passed along to friends in wills.
Briggs knew what he was getting into when he moved to the remote Whispering Ranch area south of Wickenburg 11 years ago, joining about 200 families spread among the hills.
"I wondered if you could do it, and it's worked out good," he said. "I can keep it under 80 degrees in the house pretty much all summer."
The retired correctional officer and truck driver from Oregon uses a combination of handiness and conservation to keep his 800 square feet of space livable.
Unlike off-the-grid homes in cool places, where people can bundle up and burn inexpensive wood, heating oil or even coal to stay warm, desert dwellers only have the choice of electric cooling or sweating.
Many choose lifestyle
Briggs' particular corner of the desert is a virtual hotbed of energy-independence experts because the land was subdivided and sold to investors in the 1960s and 1970s, long before utilities considered serving the region.Now bringing public power to the area is much more complicated than with master-planned housing and commercial development, considering there are hundreds of five-acre parcels. Each property owner has a different opinion about development, who should pay, and where the lines would go. Community planners usually decide those things before people more to an area.
Some of the people appreciate the seclusion and prefer utilities stay out of the nearly 19,000 acres they call "The Ranch." Others have been waiting years for power lines to arrive, including real estate agents who want to see land values and sales commissions rise.
Meanwhile, the people who have moved in over the years have learned to cope.
Some residents have air conditioners, but they are mostly used as a backup to swamp coolers. And everyone out here already knows swamp coolers run more efficiently by replacing the fan with one borrowed from a car's radiator.
Briggs' solar panels and small wind turbines spinning their 2-foot blades charge 12 golf-cart batteries that he says can store power to keep the place lit for three days if he needs.
"We don't get a lot of wind," he said. "Solar is really the thing out here."
He's got a diesel generator for the air-conditioner if he needs to run it.
He's also conscientious about using other appliances like the television. After finding a reliable satellite provider recently for high-speed Internet service, Briggs had to buy another solar panel because his e-mails required more electricity.
Count Briggs among those not interested in public utilities.
"I'm happy the way I am," he said, conceding it would raise the value of his 10 acres. "I didn't come out here to make money on real estate."
Not everyone living off the grid is as inauspicious as Briggs, but it doesn't make those people any less focused on energy.
Big spread, big bills
Eddy Hudson and his wife, Susie, have a pond with koi carp nipping at the water's edge under their large, shaded front patio. Visitors don't hear the gurgling water until they are at the doorstep of the 6,000-square-foot home in Whispering Ranch because of the large generator running in a nearby building.Hudson bought his 10 acres of desert more than 24 years ago for about $15,000. Shortly after he bought it he was laid off from a job in Phoenix and lost his apartment.
He packed up his camper and moved to the desert. He eventually found another job, but stayed on the land to build a house, which has seen substantial additions.
He fills a 55-gallon tank with diesel weekly - for about $185 at current prices - to power the home, and each addition takes more electricity. The couple is living in a more conservative corner of the house, reserving the larger add-ons for parties, but summer fuel bills still top $1,200 a month, not counting the gasoline he and his wife use to commute into the city.
"People complain about $200 or $300 power bills," Hudson said. "That's nothing to me."
When he first started dating Susie seven years ago, she lived in Chandler, but she quickly adjusted to the lifestyle.
That meant learning to run the generator so she could work from the house.
"I used to say, now I've passed Generator 100, or, now I know Generator 101 whenever I learned something else about the system," she said.
But passing the course was only the beginning of the desert energy education required before marrying Eddy and moving to the ranch.
She also had to learn about propane-powered refrigerators. And when the generator goes off at night, so do the lights. Every countertop and bed stand has small, battery-powered flashlights so they can get around until morning.
With a wood fire burning in the winter, the generator isn't always necessary.
Hudson has built the home with energy-savings in mind by placing the well-insulated air-conditioning ducts under the home, rather than in an attic where they'd be susceptible to heat, he said.
With diesel prices setting new records in Arizona last fall, the Hudsons would be willing to lose some of the desert's seclusion if it meant getting reliable electricity to the area.
"I'd love to get power out here," he said.
The last time Hudson asked Arizona Public Service Co. about extending power a mile and a half from the existing grid to the house, the estimate was about $300,000.
That makes connecting to the grid far out of reach for Hudson and many others who move to distant places and later decide they would like to be connected to power.
Some people are more fortunate because they live closer to the lines, and as they add power, they bring it closer, both literally and financially, to the others.
Changed lives
Claudia Gomez and her husband Francisco Javier lived with a generator and solar panels for more than a decade before they chipped in with some nearby property owners to extend power lines to their land.The neighbors took advantage of the 1,000 feet of free extension per house offered by APS, and got 3,000 feet free and had to pay a few thousand dollars each after that. APS no longer offers those extensions after regulators directed the utility to make growth pay for itself.
"It's hard living," said Gomez, who raised three children in the house before it was connected to the grid. "I couldn't do it again."
When the children would return from school (busses picked them up at 6:45 a.m.), the family would turn on the generator so they could watch television and take baths, she said.
"Our batteries only held power until about 3 in the morning in the summer," she said. "Then you'd start sweating and you'd get up and open the doors."
They spent more than $500 a month fueling the generator before connecting to power five years ago, and learned to conserve.
"Your small appliances take up incredible amounts of electricity," she said. "With solar only, there's no pulling out your blow dryer."
Tying to the grid presents different challenges for people who have installed solar on their homes. Utilities such as APS require solar systems that tap into their network to be installed by qualified contractors if the resident is to receive credit for the energy their homes produce. Few of the rural do-it-yourselfers are willing to pay for that.
"Everyone who lives out here knows what a solar panel costs," Gomez said. "There is a huge markup on installation. For $30,000 you could get something you'd never have to worry about."
Gomez and other rural energy experts scoff at the $30,000 to $70,000 price tag for residential solar systems without batteries that supplement homes on the power grid, which produce energy during the day but draw from the system at night.
Sun cheap, plentiful
Otis and Katie Mallory paid about $650 each for the eight solar panels hiding behind their small trailer home and about $1,200 for an inverter to make the electricity usable.Like Briggs, who helped them put in their system, they use golf-cart batteries to store power for the night, and said they wait for them to go on sale at Sam's Club for $50 each.
"Ordinarily, the solar panels make more energy than we use," said Otis Mallory, who is retired from the Air Force and various public school positions in Arizona and California.
"We are kind of surprised," added Katie, also a retired educator. "Even with thin clouds, the solar panels make energy."
Their system wouldn't power a full-sized house, but if they quadrupled the size and the cost of about $7,000, they'd have enough for a swamp cooler and appliances for a modest home.
The couple has only owned their rural land a few years, but quickly had to replace a faulty inverter on their system. They said the manufacturer honored the warranty, but would not have had the damage been caused by mismatching the positive and negative connections on the batteries, making that step in the installation the most critical.
They need to fire up a generator if they want to run air conditioning, but find they can get by with just a swamp cooler.
Living without a guaranteed supply of electricity is hard, but hardships are relative. The couple wouldn't trade it back for city life and the freeway congestion they gave up but still watch each day on their small television, they said.
"If we wanted to be in a retirement community, that's what we would have purchased," Katie said before Otis offered his take:
"I'd rather be hit in the face with a dead rabbit than drive though downtown traffic."
Reach the reporter at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com, or 602-444-4331
