If you need to live like you are in the city, in the woods, buy a place on a power line.
I'm rural Maine. Same as your Adirondacks except I can almost see the sea. (if I *could* see the sea the taxes would be quadruple.) On a spit of land 2X8 miles with just three roads (power lines). LOT of land here far off the grid.
I'm 500 feet off the road, 500 feet of #2 aluminum. When I start the microwave, the lights dim. Also when the well-pump or furnace start. So much the homebuyer inspector thought there was a bad connection somewheres. Nope, just a long way to the road.
And BTW, $5K for 200 feet of #4 indoor wire is City Prices. I figure that I could replace my 500 foot overhead line with a fatter one for $10K local prices. Wire prices are way up in big cities. Labor costs are WAY up in cities. The add-on that would have cost me $50K in suburban New Jersey cost $22K here.
> a small clothes dryer ... A small one is 6500W
No. They all the same size (except laundromat/industrial) and take 22 Amps at 240V (5300W). I know because I installed V/A meters to know my sag.
BUT... hard-burning Diesel to make pressure to make rotation to sheer electromagnetism into electricity, then resisting into heat, is lossy as all hell. With the engine in a shed, you could probably dry a *second* load of clothes in the shed from the waste heat of inefficiently running the dryer. (Engine is 40% efficient at best, alternator 90%, and not even that good below rated output... say 25% of your Diesel goes in the dryer and 75% heats the shed.)
Electricity is the "highest" form of energy. You can make anything else with it, from light to sound to heat. Because everything else is "downhill" for electricity. But hacking electrons up to that high state is really difficult. And generally inefficient. Especially if you lack Economy Of Scale. (The MegaWatt dynamos in the city-stations are not so bad; dozen-KW dynamos are.)
If you want HEAT, make a fire.
Propane dryer!! Standard nat-gas dryer with a conversion.
Propane stove too.
What you doing for hot water?
And heat? (The Adirondacks can be chilly in July. Fireplace dies down just when you need it most, early morning.)
Yes, I have electric dryer (because it was here) and electric stove (my cook likes a certain glass-top). But propane for my hot-water. And propane for my back-up heat. And seriously thinking going to propane for my main heat. (Old oil systems are foul.)
For occasional weekends, you haul a 100 Pound propane bottle to the house. (the 20lb BBQ bottles are too marginal for a dryer load.) But for longer periods you want a truck to come to you. To make that a good deal for everybody, you want as MANY propane loads as is reasonable, to cover the ownership costs (your cash or added to the propane price) of a 200 pound tank.
In recent ice-storms, a neighbor 800 feet away through the woods had to run a generator for a week. The sound was real damm annoying. Not loud, trucks on the road are louder; but steady. And 800' for wire is costly. Moved to 100' away it would be 18dB louder. Yes a concrete (not board) bunker would help, but then there's the exhaust. You'll want to dig a deep pit and roof it, run the exhaust in there.
> Most of the time it would be running at about half load.
My household average electric load over the month is 1,064 Watts. I have not seen a peak load over 10,000W (including dryer/stove).
So the part-load efficiency is VERY important.
One nice thing about a Diesel is that its efficiency does not fall-off SO much at part load, not like throttle engines. It's not really stupid for truckers to leave their engines running all night to heat/cool/TV the sleeper. In very cold weather an idling Diesel won't stay warm.
But I don't know much more about Diesels except there IS a lot to know. Water in the filters stops them dead. Air in the lines is bad. The fuel goes bad (not as fast as gasoline, but Propane never goes bad). Arctic Vortex turns Diesel fuel to gum (mix kerosene).
Propane keeps better. And I know that a happy propane engine is VERY clean. But smaller sizes are spark/throttle engines, and the efficiency falls off bad at part-load. (There is a gas-fuel Diesel-- inhales an air/fuel-gas mix, then injects a micro-drop of oil-fuel to ignite it. I have only seen this technology in much bigger engines than you need. And you still have to keep fresh oil-fuel.)
I have considered a 5KW generator just to run lights, furnace, and either pump or microwave (no drying no stove). I figure I'd be going for gasoline every day, about $28/day. This is less electric than I get from the power company for $4/day. So on-site engine generation cost 7 times as much as you pay PSE&G/PECO.
A large part of that, for me, is the 4800W start-up of the furnace blower. I need that much engine, but only a minute a day (twenty 3-second bursts). With utility power I split that cost with 10,000 other customers who don't all burst at once. (I have thought about storage but it gets complicated and costly.)
Really.... look into stringing a wire. There's a breakover near 300 feet. Shorter, a 240V feed is practical. Much longer, the wire cost would be absurd, instead you put a transformer at the house and run distribution voltage on the poles. Transformers are expensive but the wire is MUCH cheaper. 2X voltage is 1/4 the conductor, and 2 conductors instead of 3. Typically you take even higher voltage, the conductor size is just about mechanical strength, losses vanish.
How can you live without internet?? (We'll miss you!) Or telephone? (TV?) Satellite is not attractive. DSL may not be available far out of town. Cellfone service gets spotty a few miles out of town; if you can place a call you still may not have practical data rates. I'm on cable-TV internet and back to POTS for talk, so my pole-line carries three services (power cable phone). The poles (and tree-clearance) are a significant part of bringing power in.
Don't forget small hydro. I have a seep on my property. With a long pipe and a mini turbine I could extract 50-100 Watts steady 48 weeks a year (900W in heavy rain, zero some weeks). With an actual stream you can extract kilowatts.
