30 Years Off the Grid Made Possible by Passive Solar Principles – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building Blog

Solar pioneers describe the evolution of their house and what they’ve learned about efficiently using power and water.

| October 14, 2026

Gale Marsland moved to Arizona after falling in love with its desert climate and later built an off-grid home with her husband using sustainable design, passive solar principles, and traditional Southwestern building techniques. Living without utility power, they relied on photovoltaic solar panels, batteries, propane, and innovative cooling systems, gradually upgrading their technology as renewable energy became more efficient and affordable. Their house was originally featured in a Fine Homebuilding article in 1997. In this new article, Marsland explains what she and her husband have learned over 30 years of living in the house.

Westward Bound

I first visited Arizona by hitchhiking there with a friend who knew people in Tucson. We had left school at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, for a spring-break adventure. The dreary weather was wearing on us, so we headed out West looking for a change of scenery. I did not see a cloud the entire time I was there, and it was such a contrast to the industrial haze of 1970s Cleveland where I grew up that I transferred to the University of Arizona the following year. There I met Richard, a second-­generation builder who would become my husband.

In 1988, after we’d been married for eight years, Richard and I moved to the Tucson Mountains surrounded by Saguaro National Park to live in an off-grid home that we had built. The land we bought to build on started out as an 1890 mining claim, and the nearest neighbor and utility power were almost two miles away.

Richard and I met because of our similar commitment to sustainable living and environmental awareness, and we had been designing and building passive solar homes for years, so we viewed building our forever home as an opportunity to use photovoltaics and a few propane appliances to live completely off…