Tiny House Systems

In addition to learning the nuts and bolts (no, really, literal nuts and bolts) of putting a Tiny House together, I'm also having to make a lot of decisions about what systems we will have in our Tiny House. It's a little intimidating to make these choices because each one will have a big impact on our Tiny House lifestyle. The three biggest systems I've had to figure out so far are electric, heating and plumbing. Each one of these is complex enough to merit multiple posts of it's own (I'll write those later) but for right now I want to go over, in big brush strokes, what I'm thinking of for our Tiny House.

The first big choice we had to make was whether our Tiny House was going to be on-grid or off-grid as this would end up affecting lots of other decisions. Fortunately, our answer was relatively straight forward (even if it will cause challenges down the road): the North Stonington property has no improvements (no electricity, no well, no septic), and we don't know when we'll have the funds available to have them (and a proper driveway) installed. Thus, our Tiny House will have to be able to function without these things. Once we knew that, the rest fell into place.

For electricity, we will be living off solar panels and a battery bank. In order to minimize the cost (and space used by) these elements,we'll be choosing appliances which minimize electrical consumption- this rules out using electricity to produce heat.

To heat our home, we've decided to get a wood stove. A lot of people feel that this is a very dangerous decision, but I just can't get behind that thinking. Maybe I'm just desensitized to it because I grew up in a home that was heated exclusively by a wood stove, but I feel really comfortable with this choice. An added benefit to heating with a wood stove is that the model we're looking at also has an accessory thermoelectric generator that we'll be able to use in the winter to augment our solar panels.

For our other heating needs, we'll be using propane. Many natural gas ovens easily convert to LP use, and we'll be getting one of those. We'll also be using an on demand tankless water heater which runs on propane. I think that we'll probably be able to get by using a propane cylinder small enough to fit into the back seat of the car so that we can take it to the fill station ourselves rather than have to have a gas truck come up the (as of yet not-extant) driveway and fill it for us.

How will we get water to heat in our tankless propane powered water heater without a well you ask? We'll be using a rainwater catchment system for our shower and dishes with an on board 60 gallon water tank, and a series of 50 gallon drums outside the Tine House. We'll purchase drinking water and keep it in the fridge to avoid having to super-duper filter our rain water and to avoid having to drink room temp/warm water all the time. As far as dealing with our dirty water: we're going to implement a french drain system to deal with our grey water and we'll be using a composting toilet to avoid black water all together.

I hope to write more detailed posts about each of these choices later on in the process, but, for now, that's the rough outline of the systems we'll be using in our Tiny House.