D Nikolls

That comes out to around 1000 gallons per minute if these ditches are running 24/7.

If I was putting in a bunch of ditches for that sort of flow, I would buy or have made a v-bucket for an excavator. A bit of googling suggests around an 18" flat bottom, and then slope the sides at 45*. Make it as big as your excacator can easily handle, no need to go full depth but the flexibility is good. Google thinks 1.2 feet deep is a minimum ditches depth for a shallow slope ditch to handle this flow..

I've done a ditch that handles maybe 2-3x this much water in storms with a 50" cleanup bucket on a 150 size excavator, from the side, eyeballing for slope; it works fine, but the ditch shape is not as good as a v-bucket would give you, and it takes more care to achieve an acceptable shape. You can also just dig an overly wide square-sided ditch and let the sides slump; again the v-bucket will do a better job.

In my soil the 150 was a great size for this, a 120 would have been plenty good, and my 3.3 ton mini can do the same job, slowly. If our heavy clay hardpan was close enough to the surface to hit while ditching, the 150 would be frustratingly slow and the mini absolutely futile. If I had to ditch in the hardpan I would consider a 200 to be absolute minimum.. so, consider your ground before investing in that bucket.

John Weiland wrote:

Chandrapal Mehula wrote: ....3. Stop at the BMS or inverter low-voltage cutoff, or at about 2.9 to 3.0 V per cell if you are watching individual cells. Don't push below that..

Thanks for all of the excellent and helpful responses.  One question about the statement clipped above:  Won't the BMS automatically stop discharging at the low voltage cutoff? In other words, won't this prohibit me from pushing discharge below that voltage limit even if I wanted to?  Thanks!....

A correctly functioning BMS will, yes. Relying on the inverter alone might let you draw one weaker cell way too low, though.

Phil Stevens wrote:I'd put the ball design in the category of "cost effective, works great if you make it a monthly or quarterly habit to check the drain and blow it out if it's got schmutz in it" and also add the caveat that one reason they're popular here is the mild climate. In most of the North Island it just doesn't get cold enough to freeze one of these things...and if it's full of water on a night that is that cold, the rain stopped a long time ago and you should have checked the drain. Another motivating factor for keeping on top of this is that a blocked drain means it's not diverting and you're getting bird poop, pollen, and who knows what in your tanks.

Rainwater harvesting is not a set and forget system, in my experience. Gutters need to be cleared, screens washed, valves inspected, and tanks vacuumed out from time to time. If you're used to outsourcing all the operational overhead to the municipal water works, then providing your own supply requires a shift in mindset and a reasonable maintenance schedule.

I agree that they are usable, but I wouldn't use them again in most circumstances. I would invest the money in another storage tank, and set up the collection to be manually switched between a dirty tank, clean tanks, and discharge. In the dry season if tanks are low, I would rather collect all the water. In the wet season I don't see any need for a first flush unless it has been dry for a while, plus missing the occasional bit of water in the wet season is not a problem.

I think, in my current climate, that this would be more effective than the ball style. If the Graf/Wisy style works well, it should be very low maintenance while providing some degree of automatic first flush.. we will see.



Some aspects of off grid living involve more labour.. but not all such labour is necessary. For example, I heat with wood, in a good stove with a perfectly straight insulated doublewall chimney.

A friend uses an older and much more affordable stove, and a terrifying arrangement of single wall pipe, including a long run of nearly horizontal pipe, to avoid going out the roof.

Not only does this stove eat a lot more wood, he needs to clean that flue every week or two, or burn the place down. It works, but the extra labour is due to the design choices, not inherent to wood heating.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

dan brier wrote:... I think what i care about most is long slow and efficient burns.

From what i’ve researched so far:
- burn time seems to be the big factor. You want something that burns atleast 8 hours so you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. ...

I love wood stoves. But realistically, I don't think you're going to get an 8-hour efficient burn from a wood stove that fits in a small space. There are only so many BTUs in a piece of wood, even in the really dense stuff like oak.

The only true 8+ hour burn I have ever seen with solid fuel was a coal-fired chick brooder stove. My father would bank an active fire with huge lumps of solid coal and damp it way down for the night. Never lost a brood. Peep peep peep!

We could get coals at 9 hours in the Jotul 602 with careful management and decent wood..  but we did this maybe 3x in 3 years of full-time living in the tinyhouse with it. It was rarely cold enough to aim for this, just too much heat. The tinyhouse would be cool in the morning with a modest evening fire.. in cold weather we would run a morning fire and an evening fire.

I really don't think a non-catalytic stove small enought to work in a tinyhouse will do a longer burn without putting out way too much heat. The catalytic version of the 602 ought to be better at low/slow burning..  I don't know of a similarly small catalytic stove that's really aimed at long burn times. Might be something better I've never heard of, but I don't trust catalysts not to clog on alder ash, so not too informed on options.

I really hate those ball style first flush diverters.

The idea is neat, but you need a sizable first flush reservoir for it to be a meaningful amount on even a medium sized roof. Worse, in my experience the little drain thingie at the bottom clogs up despite having a nice fine screen at the entrance point.. then it  stays full and no diversion happens until you clean it out. Then it clogs again.. rinse and repeat..

Then things freeze and the damn thing explodes. Then no rainwater collection happens.

Then you say a lot of VERY rude words, startling the cat and annoying your wife,  and buy a different system. In my case a Graf Optimax Pro, there's also the Wisy Vortex, among other options. Both are STUPID, like surely you are joking, expensive. I found a deal on Ebay or would have tried DIYing with these 2 as inspiration.

That's as far as I've gotten, can't report on how well the Graf works as it's not installed yet.

I looked at about a zillion tiny and small woodstoves for my tinyhouse..

Mine is about 8.5x28, with an extra large loft overhanging a bit at the front; it's several feet above legal road height.

It has 2x4 walls insulated with rockwool, with an additional layer of 1.5" rockwool on the outside under the siding. Ceilings are insulated in the R50-60 range.


I ended up passing on the tiny stoves due to lack of cooktop space, short burn time, and hassle factory of cutting short firewood. The cubic mini options, sardine, Salamander Hobbit, Dwarf 5Kw.. and surely some I have now forgotten, all share a cute squareish design meant for small spaces. And all have, to varying degrees, the same downside.

I bought a Jotul 602, the last version BEFORE they added a catalytic system to it, and we were really happy with it.

We installed it along a wall, wih the stove door beside the front door, so it was quite space efficient. Double heat shielding on the wall let us keep it close to the wall.
It has a rear flue option, which we used, so it has a ton of space on top for high and low temp cooking. There is a tpund insert on the front top designed for high heat transfer, which provides a serious temperature difference vs the rear. We found it quite practical to manage the heat and very rarely needed to open the windows due to overheating.


My one real complaint is creosote buildup in the chimney. Chimney is top of the line ICC Excel stainless doublewall, but the stove in my opinion should have a 5" chimney. Mine is 6", as I could not find 5" anywhere at the time. The stove includes a 5-6" adapter to use at the flu connection, and the retailer and documentation from Jotul both supported use of 6".

In practice the stove, especially if not looking to burn it hard, doesn't always make enough heat for that chimney, hence creosote..  cleaning once a year is pushing it for the level of buildup. Hell, my Pacific Energy Summit LE in the big house uses 6", and that stove has a firebox of 3 cubic feet vs the .82 of the 602...

We like the 602 so much that I bought a used one for future need, particularly given the switch to catalytic on the new model which we do not want, but next time I will strive mightily to use 5" chimney.


An option I will consider next build is the stoves from flame innovation: https://flameinnovation.com/

They look well designed to address some of the issues with the classic tiny stoves.. but I wish they had a rear flue option.

Jesse Mulalley wrote:Hi Permies,

I came up with a novel way to frame small structures using wood studs. Please check out my video and let me know what  you think. All feedback, good and bad is appreciated.

https://youtu.be/xGdf5lWwdtk?si=2rGZltcuw9DHtDv1

Definitely novel; personally, my first thought is that I see an awful lot of lumber there.

I tend to build to dimensions that are pretty efficient for standard dimensional lumber. Increments of 8ft, or at least 2ft. Even with a building that needs to be a somewhat awkward size like the 18x10 chicken coop that I am currently building, there is really not much waste if you are careful about your cuts.

Effectively, your system is aiming to buy time with extra wood, to enable standardized lumber cuts and faster erection in the field?

Once I am done with the framing, batt insulation drops right in. What method of insulation do you favour for your system? Are the various spaces sized for standard batts?

Once I am done with the sheathing, the seams get taped. Do you intend to use a continuously adhered WRB instead of taped seams under tyvek, to address the greater number of seams in the OSB?

Are you are losing an extra joist worth of headroom, if I am understanding your joist arrangement correctly? Or doing all your walls with 10ft studs?

John Weiland wrote:Thanks, David!   Can you tell me why this is not done routinely for LiFePO4 batteries?  Granted, a bluetooth version would be able to give you an estimate based on the battery management system display, but wouldn't one want to be able to 'real-world' test that capacity.  And even if the discharge curve for Li is flatter than that for legacy lead-acid tech, if one was detecting a 'fully discharged' status well before the amp-hour rating on the battery, this would indicate where power deficiencies may be located.  Finally, it seems from some videos out there that comparing LiFePO4 battery specs often involves validating the advertised Ah rating and so this often is done, albeit with shop electrical control units that appear more expensive and sophisticated than I wanted to deal with. Thanks for insights here....

I expect it is skipped because it requires some gear and some work..

For me, I am relying on my shunt and Victron Cerbo to do a reasonable job of monitoring energy consumption; if I find that voltage is nearing the low voltage cutoff and the amp-hours consumed since last full charge are not ballpark of what I am expecting, I will investigate individual batteries in the parallel bank.

I do load test and roughly capacity test the budget LiFePO4 batteries I use before putting them in service, but this is a bit of pain as I don't have a spare inverter or a high power DC load available at this time, so it requires installing the new battery as the sole power source, running it down to the inverter cutoff point with space heaters, and then seeing how many amp-hours (from the Victron charge controllers) it takes to reach full charge. Then if all good reconnect the other batteries..


To be honest I rarely look at any of this in the summer half of the year.. it tends to just work, tons of wasted power. Fall is time to check on it before the dark returns..

Poplar is a great tree for hugelcultur use, as it decays into soil very quickly, and pretty poor firewood. The types we have here are very prone to suckering and making a whole bunch more cottonwood right where you don't want it if thet are buried even slightly alive, so definitely let it sit on the ground a good while before building a hugelcultur from it..

My 65hp loader with a PTO chipper with hydraulic feed will barely eat 6" alder and cottonwood. I try to draw the line around 5" as it gets damned slow as it nears max practical capacity. I don't think it would do 6" oak period. So no, a corded chipper absolutely will not eat those sizes, not even close. You need a commercial sized unit with ideally something like an 80-100HP motor on it.

Unless I am trying to maximize the chip pile I would generally buck up wood down to 3-4", it's good firewood. Hugels are a good way to use branches up, chipping is time and diesel intensive.. take care to let the wood age long enough that you are not having it sprout and make more trees where you don't want them.


I would really suggest seeking out some books specific to your local environment. Ben Falk is in Vermont, his stuff might be a decent starting point; not sure about someone more local.

You have a large enough area, depending on the shape, that a clearing will get you some decent light despite the maples to the south..