Off-Grid Living in Erving, Massachusetts

I've been digging through Erving, Massachusetts's zoning bylaw and town health pages to sort out what's actually possible if you want to live off-grid there. Here's where things stand, with the caveat that I'm reporting on what the Town of Erving and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts publish, not offering legal advice.

Zoning first. Erving is a zoned town, with a bylaw adopted by Town Meeting (most recently updated 2023) and hosted on eCode360. The bylaw works off a Use Regulation Schedule: anything not explicitly listed as allowed in a district is treated as prohibited. That's important for off-gridders because it means you can't just buy raw land and park a tent, van, or unpermitted cabin on it and call it home. The bylaw also caps you at one principal dwelling per lot unless you get separate authorization, so multi-structure homesteads (like a main cabin plus a guest yurt) need to go through the Planning Board.

Dwellings and tiny homes fall under that same use-schedule logic. I did not find an Erving-specific tiny-house or RV occupancy bylaw beyond the one-dwelling-per-lot rule, so if that's your plan, call the Planning Board before you commit.

Building permits run on the Massachusetts State Building Code (780 CMR), which Erving enforces locally through its Building Inspector. The town's own bylaw language for solar installations, for instance, explicitly requires a building permit before construction, which tells me the town is not shy about requiring permits for infrastructure generally.

Septic and greywater are governed by the state's Title 5 (310 CMR 15.000), administered by MassDEP but enforced locally by Erving's Board of Health. I found no Erving-specific composting toilet or greywater ordinance, so the state baseline, which treats greywater as wastewater needing an approved soil absorption system, is what applies until the Board of Health tells you otherwise.

Rainwater harvesting has no local bylaw that I could locate. Outdoor use is generally fine statewide; indoor potable use gets legally murkier, so I'd confirm specifics with the town before designing a system around it.

Wells are permitted, and Erving's Board of Health specifically monitors shared wells and springs not already under MassDEP's jurisdiction, so plan on them being part of the approval loop.

Going off-grid on utilities (solar, batteries) is legal in Erving but permit-gated. The bylaw allows accessory energy storage by right in all districts after site plan approval, with larger systems needing a special permit in certain districts, and everything has to meet NFPA 855 plus state fire, electrical, and building codes.

Bottom line: Erving isn't hostile to off-grid living, but almost everything (dwellings, septic, energy storage) runs through a local permit process layered on top of state code.