Tiny pets and such

How do you have hundreds (maybe thousands or even millions) of pets when you live in a tiny space? Well you have very tiny pets of course. Here's a few of the critters in my house.

 Above are my two SCOBY's (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) that produce gallons of kombucha for me to drink. And there very well may be millions of little critters in those floating layers if I got out a microscope. But they all float nicely in the tops of two gallon jugs.

Then of course there are my pet worms. We've discussed them before. Hopefully they continue to multiply and will soon be in several kinds and stages of compost around here.

Then there's the tiny farming I can do. Like growing chia and alfalfa sprouts to eat. Above are chia sprouts after we ate most of them out of the dish. Below you can see them when they were just starting to sprout.

Below are alfalfa sprouts which grow well in a jar and don't need the open terra cotta dish like chia seeds. I can grow thousands of these little sprouts every week and and them to salads and other dishes. I'd like to get a few more herbs growing and maybe a few other things like ginger as well so I can buy less of my food from the grocery store. We'll see if I get around to starting all those kinds of things... But for now, my tiny house is full of lots of kinds of tiny life. And I like it that way.

Biggest current problem - Mold

I'm learning that despite living in a very dry climate, due to our extreme cold, there tends to be a lot of condensation that occurs. Especially when you live in a very well insulated house with very little square footage therefore little air movement. And when water condenses onto wood consistently, keeping it always a little damp, you very quickly get mold.

 I've now developed mold around almost all my windows. Even in this little place, I have 15 separate windows so there is a lot of space for this to occur. And on the thinner panel in the door. And along the baseboards in places where any item of furniture blocks the totally open flow of air.

The moisture come mostly from cooking in my case. With the propane heat and human breath probably being the next two largest producers.

I've now bleached all the mold spots to kill it, but between the moisture and the mold, there are already permanent stains as you can see in the photo below. Right now it seems to be staying under control since I've been trying to go around and wipe up condensation twice a day. As well as moving my small fan around the house to keep air moving in all the damp spots. And with the weather being unseasonably warm, I've also been keeping a lot of the windows open at least a crack to keep more air moving.

 All this helps. But I think the issue won't really go away until it's warm enough to keep the whole house wide open most of the time and not have condensation occurring. And I suspect the issue will return with winter. So I believe this will be a long term ongoing issue.

 I would certainly use composite window frames not wood if I had the design to do over again. It seems that having less windows but a few larger ones, without the little pane dividers would also help reduce the amount of edges where condensation could form. I'd also skip the thinner decretive panel in the door. The thicker parts do not form condensation. The metal hinges in the door conduct the cold well, forming condensation continually and dripping a steady stream of rust as you can see in the last photo. I don't know enough about building to know what could be done about that, other than maybe using a stainless steel hinge if such a thing even exists. I guess we'll see if I figure out a better way to stop/deal with this all this as time goes on.

Video Tour

I made a video tour of my house! Forgive the poor camera work, I've never posted a video before. But I think it does give you a fair idea of what my place looks like.

A little winter life

An easy way to add some new life to your house in the winter. I like to cut some willows (or any other small branches) and put them in a jar with water. Quite quickly, they grow roots and start to sprout little leaves and roots. It's nice sometimes to see new things growing when it's still very much winter outside!

Fox!

Just a minute ago as I was laying in bed typing replies to comments on this blog, a fox ran right by my open window! (The house is really warm from lots of cooking and I was cooling it down so I could sleep.) Pretty sweet part of where I live! I've seen his tracks around here before but never actually seen him.

(And no, that's not a photo I took. There is a pretty bright moon tonight, and he kicked on my motion sensor flood light, but I didn't get a photo.)

Worms are still alive!

I did a little digging yesterday, and looks like at least some of the worms in my toilet are doing well and are a healthy pink color. Now I'm curious to see how fast they reproduce and breakdown/condense all the matter composting in there.

Realities of Solar Power

Solar power. It's a great idea. I like the idea of being independent and free of the grid. I like that (once installed) it uses a free source of energy. I like that it's clean, quiet, and odor free. And I do not regret at all installing a solar system on my house.

But it does have a few issues. And these are some things you should know and think about if you are planning to live off grid either in your tiny house or otherwise. I knew pretty much nothing about solar power and living off grid when I drew up the plans for my house, but since then, while still no expert, I have learned a lot of things. Some of these may be pretty obvious, others, for me at least, were not. I am not an electrician so feel free to laugh at some of my descriptions or word choices. I'm just trying to write all this out in a way that makes some sense now to someone who didn't know anything about the subject a few months ago.

First, think about what are your particular reasons for wanting to go off grid? To save money on utilities? Depending on the expense of the system you choose, how long you expect to use it/stay in one place, and the cost of power through your local utility, this may or may not add up to savings over time. To save the earth and be more green? Great, but think about the power used to produce each part of your solar system and what will happen to all those parts when they eventually wear out. Batteries for instance are very large, expensive, and there is no real good way to dispose of them once they reach the end of their life. You local power plant may actually be greener in the long run. To become more self reliant and free of dependance on or regulation by others? Probably nothing else will replace this reason very well. Because you live somewhere that has no access to the grid and you still want the (major) convenience of using many things powered by electricity? Not much else will solve this one either. The last two and primarily that very last one are the main reasons I am off grid. But they are all things to think about depending on what motivates you.

Then consider the other possible ways to have power and be off grid. You could also produce power via a gas generator, windmill, or water powered turbine. These each have their own pros and cons as well. Gas generators require gas and the time and expense involved to obtain it and are noisy and smelly. But they can be relatively cheep to purchase initially and easy to set up and move. Windmills require some serious construction and obviously a steady supply of wind in their particular location. They however then are pretty quiet and require no consistent operating costs. A turbine needs a steady supply of water that doesn't dry up, freeze up, or get clogged up with sediment. But if you have that, they run around the clock and are also free of ongoing fuel costs. Depending on your location and what's available, you may want to think about one or more of these options.

So now you've decided for whatever reason or combination of reasons that you do indeed want a solar installation. First you need to figure out how much power you actually use. So you need to know how much electricity every single item uses, as well as about how much of the time that item is actually turned on. This needs to include everything that takes any electricity at all. The obvious things tend to be air conditioning, fridges/freezers, lights, heaters, water pumps, cooking (depending on what method you use), etc. Less obvious things can include the heater or stove that is propane and still requires electricity to ignite, run a fan, power an internal clock and such. Or the "ghost" draw from things like a TV that may use a little power all the time, even when the power is turned off. Calculating up this list can be a bit complicated. More on that later.

Unless you want to install a large and very expensive system, you might want to consider how important high power use items like a cable TV box, toaster, coffee maker, vacuum, curling iron, clothes dryer, microwave, blender, hair dryer, etc are to you and possibly forgo them completely. Not that you can't have those things, you just need to plan for items like that pushing the power requirements way up and decide if each one is worth it to you. Some of those items use a lot of power the whole time they are on, but they are not on very long. I.E. a microwave or hair dryer. Others use much less power at any one time, but run a lot, such as a fridge or freezer. Either situation becomes a large power draw.

Do you want to run everything in your house on AC power or DC power? Or some combination of both. The best I understand the way this works is that one is a steady stream of current coming through your lines (DC) like a faucet that is turned on. The other is an intermittent pulse of power (AC), more like a lawn sprinkler. Either one is very capable of powering things, but they are totally different and the item being used has to be designed for the power type you are using. If you plug something designed for one thing into the other kind of power you will destroy it. (Maybe explosions, sparks, smoke, melting wires, and other general fun included.) The basic advantages of DC are that it requires less work to turn the power you have created via your solar panels into this, and it's a bit more efficient. It's also more dangerous (which is why everything in your on the grid house uses AC instead), there are many less cool things that are set up to use DC power, and they are often more expensive than their equivalent set up for AC. AC has basically all the opposites of those. It takes more work to turn the power you are generating into AC, and is less efficient. But it is safer, most things are designed to work with it, and they are often less expensive than a comparable item designed for DC power.

Solar power works when the sun is shining, not at night, not (or very little) when it's raining, snowing, cloudy, etc. Every day seems to include a night, and many days, depending on your location also include one of those other weather conditions. Also it helps if the sun hits your solar panels directly. When the sun in low in the sky, (all winter if you live very far north like me) behind a tree, or otherwise indirect or partially blocked, the power output is greatly reduced. All these things need to be considered when trying to figure out how much power you can actually produce.

Next, to have power all the other hours of the day when the sun is not shining, you'll need a battery bank of some kind to store the power you've generated. And you will have to have a charge controler to safely add the power coming in from your solar panels to your battery bank. When calculating how much power things you want to use will need, be aware that your power in your battery bank is going to be measured in DC amps. Almost everything you use is going to be powered in AC amps. And a rough calculation is to multiply the number of AC amps something uses by 11 (plus a little, it's 11.04 really) to find the number of DC amps you'd need to power it.

Next, pay attention to how many amps the solar panels you are looking at can produce. My 4 - 100 watt panels can put out, in perfect conditions like a totally clear day with the sun directly overhead and no shade or dirt on the panels, 5.29 amps each per hour. That means that total, again in perfect conditions, my set up can produce 21.16 amps of DC power per hour.  That's about 2 AC amps per hour. Not very much. And like mentioned above, there are very few hours in most days where you will have these perfect conditions, if at all. These calculations are rough and ignoring details like line drop (the power you loose as electricity travels through a wire), loss while converting from one kind of power to another, and loss during storage. But they should help you get a general idea without making the calculations too complicated.

So I have a generator as a backup to my solar system. This does require buying gas. And having a charger that takes the power the generator produces and safely stores it in the batteries. My charger can add at the max, 25 amps of DC power per hour to my battery bank. So right now I'm running it every other day for at least 5ish hours to top off my batteries and make up the extra power I need beyond the ability of the weather and my solar panels. It's a very efficient and small generator, running almost 10 hours on less than a gallon of gas so this isn't too expensive. Especially with the current low gas prices.

My battery bank currently consists of 5 - 155 amp hour batteries wires in parallel. Meaning they are all connected to basically act as a single big battery. That gives me the ability to store 775 amp hours of DC energy. Which gives me just over 68 amp hours of AC power stored. Again not very much. And batteries like this don't last very long at all if you run them down to 0%. In fact, they last longest if kept around 80% or above. So try to size your battery bank so you'll never use more than 20% of it in any one day whatever your power needs are. I use somewhere between 10-15% of mine each day. Also, remember that to turn the power coming out of your battery bank into the AC power you will probably want to use, you'll need an inverter as well.

The amount of power I have stored would usually last me around 6 days if I ran my batteries from 100% to 0%. The items I choose to have that require electricity are as follows, roughly in order of the amount of power they use. Refrigerator/freezer (small and efficient), water pump, lights (all LED), internet router, laptop and phone charging, ignition in my propane oven, bathroom and hood vet fans, ignition and fan running of my now secondary propane heater, epilator, and a kitchen aid mixer which is used only rarely.

So as you can see, I've kept my electrical needs fairly low and my system is working very well for me. And right now, my system is coming in around just under $4000 total. With all the labor having been supplied by a very good friend or myself so not counted into that figure. When I have time, I want to write out a detailed accounting of this as well as more details on each piece of my particular system. Hopefully for now though, that all makes some sense to you if you are learning about installing a solar system. And maybe raises some things you haven't thought about yet. Let me know if you have any questions!

What would I do differently - #2

Now I've lived here for just over three months. And I have a few more things I've thought of for this list. (If you are interested in the first list, check it out here.) Now again, none of this means that I am unhappy with my house or do not like living here, but there are a few things I'd do differently. And while everyone has different needs for their home, I'd be happy for someone else to be able to think about these things before they build theirs.

1. - I'd use composite windows. I think they are less expensive and more durable than wood. But mainly they would be water resistant. And controlling moisture in a space this small where I cook so much is an ongoing battle. Some of my window frames are tending to stay damp all the time and beginning to show some signs of mold. So that's a pretty big one that I would change. And may have to change at some point depending on how the wood that I have holds up.

2. - I'd have skipped the post on the corner of the porch. I should have mentioned this in the first post since it actually came off in the first few hours after the house arrived and had remained gone. I just forgot about it earlier. With a smallish door, the corner post prevents you from moving any large objects in and out. You can't angle anything to get around a corner as you come in the door. It's cute and homey, but highly impractical in my experience. Like I said, it's not there and I have no plans to put it back.

3. I would have lowered the bookshelves along the base of the ceiling. The shelves are wide enough for most books, but due to how close they are to the angle of the roof, most books can't sit on them because it pushes anything sitting there out too far. I'd have made them level with the base of the beams supporting the loft rather than the top. Then pretty much every book I own (and lots of other things) would be able to sit comfortably on the shelves. I will probably move them lower sometime I'm free and have a friend to help me.

4. I might have installed a few more lights, one in the reading nook corner, one right over my mirror in the bathroom, and one in the corner by my sink and fridge. It can be just a little dim in each of those areas. I've solved this pretty easily with a few battery powered LED lights. But, I'd take the time to run wiring to more permanent lights there if I was doing it again. 

Just a few more things you might want to consider as you plan your own house layout and design.!

My skirting's melting

Since it was already snowing when I got my house parked and moved in, I decided to wait to do any kind of skirting till spring. And for a while my snow skirting worked. It piled up quickly and the snow the roof shed just added to it. For a while the base of my house was totally sealed.

 But now we've been having a totally crazy winter and it's been really warm for here. I know the whole east coast has been getting hammered, but we've had almost no snow in 6ish weeks and it's been above freezing much of the time. And my skirting is melting out. I guess it's not too big a deal since it's warm anyway, and if it does ever snow again this winter, I can patch it up with the new snow. I guess if you are going to use snow as your skirting, I'd recommend living in an area that gets snow that particular year. We normally average 450 inches, but this winter it's not happening. Oh well, as long as it doesn't snow for all of May and June I'll be happy.

At the beginning of this month, this is what my skirting looked like.

Now it's looking like this and getting worse.

Toilet Worms update

Worms again. (For the first part of this discussion see my post here.) So my first batch of worms seemed to arrive healthy and happy. However, two days after adding them to my toilet, I couldn't find a live worm in there.

 I contacted the company, not to complain, as the worms they shipped seemed to arrive just fine, but to ask if they had any info or thoughts on what may have killed the worms so I could do something different in the future. They got right back to me and said they had already put a new batch of worms in the mail because they guarantee live delivery which was very nice of them since I clearly said the worms had arrived alive and in good health. They also suggested that the temps could have been too hot or cold (which I don't think was a problem since my toilet is in my climate controlled house) or that there may have been too much solid waste in proportion to filler material like toilet paper and peat moss. This may have been the problem, so I did add more peat moss before adding the new batch of worms. 

The new batch arrived and I added them to my toilet yesterday. As of today, they still seem alive and healthy, so we'll see how it works this time around. More updates as things progress....

A "Lived In" Tiny House

One thing I have heard several times is that many of you appreciate seeing a tiny house actually being lived in, not just photos of it looking like a showroom. Well I do actually live in mine. And I do actually like keeping everything neat and tidy. But life does happen and things don't always stay that way. Here are some of the messiest shots I have of my house. Or at least the ones that show activities going on in my house during day to day life. Like getting ready for dinner above. Or hanging out with my friend Seth (who due to a back injury doesn't do much typical sitting right now ;) and watching fishing clips on youtube.

There's sometimes food cooling on my porch along with the snow shovels, grill, and ski polls that reside there most of the time.

Working out can happen. The loft edge seems to work for doing pull ups if you are strong enough. And there is usually food on the stove.

Hanging out on the couch while browsing the internet, and making plans for the backpacking and fishing trips this summer.

Items get dropped on the chair or floor when I come home sometimes and the sink drainer seems to have dishes piled up most of the time thanks to cooking a lot.

Some construction projects happen and the house gets totally disorganized, tools are everywhere, and sawdust covers the floor. 

More dishes and dish washing, and just the random coats, laptops, and cameras laying around. Just in case you thought my house always looked perfect, you are now disillusioned. Though I do really find having much clutter around stressful, so most of the time my place really is tidy. ;)

New backup heater

Especially after the weekend when my heater when out, it seemed like a backup heater would be a good plan, especially in my climate. On the recommendation of the gentleman who fixed my heater, I purchased this model. It's a Camco Wave 6 radiant heater. It burns propane, but without a flame. I don't know enough about the catalytic process to tell you more than that. But we installed it on my wall yesterday and it seems to be working quite well.

 It does not use any electricity, a serious advantage over my other heater. And the radiant heat, while not quite so even as the other heater, feels really nice. Kinda like the feeling of sitting in front of a wood stove. My little brown chair is right across the room and sitting in it to read with my feet propped in front of this is really nice!

 Left on medium, it kept my house at 65 all night long with the outside temp around 7 degrees. And since it does not use any electricity, this kept my other heater from kicking on and therefore my house used very little power in the last day. I think this is going to be a very good thing for my off grid setup. As I still have the other one, they can also back each other up and I'm much less likely to spend a weekend without heat. We'll see if it changes with longer term use, but so far I am really liking this little thing.

Podcast

I just participated in my first podcast interview ever! It'll be up sometime in March and I'll link to it as soon as it's available for listening. We'll be one of the first three guests on a new podcast dedicated to tiny houses.

Couch Covers

After hoping that letting the fabric and the foam cushions sit near each other for a while (months) would somehow result in the covers sewing themselves, I finally decided that was not working. I can sew. I grew up sewing all my own clothing. And I hate sewing. I genuinely enjoy many household chores like cooking and don't mind many of the others. But sewing I have never enjoyed. However, after getting tired of looking at the ugly shade of green foam sitting there and getting a quote that someone else would sew them for me for about $400, I decided I'd better just do it. 

Thanks to a friend letting me use his sewing machine and a few evening of work, they are finally completed. Not the most professional job I know, but I am satisfied with the way they turned out. There are zippers in each one so the covers can be removed for washing or to replace the foam eventually. 

I am now much happier with the appearance of my couch for sure!

Tiny House camping

My excuse for not writing much here for a bit is a camping trip a little south of here. While we are having an unseasonably warm winter in the mountains where I live, just a few hours away in the desert, it was really warm last week. Like tee shirt and shorts and a sunburn warm. Very nice. We got to take my new-to-me van on it's first camping trip and while I still like backpacking more, it's pretty sweet for car camping. So this is my tinier house while on the road. 

For the middle of February, this is crazy warm!

And we got to see lots of stuff like this...

Not having to carry everything on your back does allow some touches to a breakfast that would be too heavy for a backpacking trip. We enjoyed the sunshine, the area, and the comfy camping and plan on getting that van out on a lot more trips soon.