I love the imagery that “belt and suspenders” provides for redundancy – and we’re big advocates of designing redundancy in at the onset. There’s a direct correlation between how remote a place you’re building and the level of self-reliance required. One step further, I’d argue that as the self-reliance goes up, so does the importance. For example, it’s very likely you are your own power/water company when there’s an outage.

The Boy Scout’s motto is, “be prepared” and we often attribute that to when you go to do something – like camping. For building somewhere remote the motto is instead, “always ready – always prepared.” And while this is easily applied to things like how you install a window, how to choose appliances, and having a back-up water source; it should also be considered for things like having extra food and medicine on hand at all times.

To summarize, the more redundancy you can design into your home – the less likely you are to ever have real issues.