Starting a Tiny House Build, Have a few questions...?

Hi all,

I'll be building a tiny house starting soon. I have a good grip on the construction and carpentry side as my uncle is helping design it.

I don't know about greywater systems. I'd like to have a tank in the floor with a spigot on the side of the house to water the garden with, but am unsure how big it should be and how to gauge if it's full.

I'm going to do the wiring EMF protected, but how would I go about this? Do I need to wrap the conduit in tinfoil (lol)?

Also I will be doing a compost toilet - my current low budget plan is to use a 5 gal bucket and have a small electric fan pulling the fumes outside. Other ideas? I know there are many nicer options but for now with minimal money, it'll do...

For those who have built a tiny house already, what do you regret doing/not doing? What's a must-have? I'm not going to put a washer/dryer in it, probably keep it in a shed for now. I'll have a propane stove and full oven, indoor shower, and outdoor shower.

Thanks!!

I haven't built a tiny house yet, but I've built lots of regular houses and I currently live tiny within a larger home. One thing I did with my bedroom was to make it absurdly small. Like I can touch both walls at the same time with my elbows small. I don't expect anyone to be as extreme as I am, but I think it's a great idea for people looking to downsize to not only try living that way, but push the boundaries beyond your comfort zone temporarily, one at a time. See how that works and try to think of ways to make the best of it if you were forced to minimize that much.

This can be applied to greywater. You could try taking the trap off of a sink and put a bucket down to catch and measure your water usage. Play around with alternatives to get that measurement as small as possible. I'd imagine a tank made for an RV would be easy to source and cheaper than going custom built, especially if it is something like a used fresh water tank. Surely they must have some sort of level indicator with a float or some other mechanism. Alternatively you could look into getting an Arduino and a sensor. they are really cheap, robust, use little energy, and you could add all sorts of sensors and controls for things if you are into that stuff. I don't know about the storage aspect, if it needs to be filtered of solids or used relatively quickly so it doesn't get gunked up and cause clogging issues. Perhaps some sort of drip irrigation could be used so it is always slowly draining and not stagnant if you have to leave in a hurry for a while.

I'm not really sure about the EMF part, I guess it very much depends on your reasoning. Protecting yourself from EMF and protecting your equipment from EMF damage would require completely different planning. Trying to protect both in an effective manner is going to require huge amounts of knowledge, otherwise you could get it 95% right and be effectively unprotected, which is both useless and wasteful. If you want to use conduit, you might as well get electrometallic tubing (EMT) instead of buying plastic and trying to wrap it. I'd strongly advise just using metallic clad (MC) cable as it is flexible and much easier to work with. Bending conduit is heavy on math and a bit of art. One of the top paying jobs an electrician can get is bending big conduit, as a mistake on large tubing is very costly. The people who are aces at it can make absurd amounts of money because it is very difficult and few people can do it consistently without many mistakes.

If going low voltage DC, you might be able to just buy some shielded cable like shielded ethernet cable and just combine multiple conductors for more current draw. The twisted pairs inside the shielding further confine any EMF from being generated as well as help to block outside EMF. This would be great for lighting or powering small stuff like phones and laptops, small fans and whatnot. Appropriate sized conductors in MC cable would work for larger DC loads. It would be beneficial in many ways to keep the power source as close to your largest low voltage loads as possible, which isn't going to be an issue with high voltage in a tiny home given the short distances between components.

I've always liked the idea of having some solar (or other renewable energy) lighting inside. Even if it is just a very small setup that isn't much more than a glorified night light. After falling and breaking major bones last year from running around in the dark, I immediately installed some low voltage lighting that I undervolted to use very little energy and provide light for safety. I wouldn't recommend anyone climb around with broken bones like I did, but I love the cheap effective lighting so I'm never in the dark and I have loads of backup power when the grid goes down. Even if you aren't interested in this idea, you might want to run cables you think you may need, or have some sort of conduit, chase, or access panels for future upgrades or repairs.

Learn, practice, and build. There's loads of help here and lots of great YouTube channels out there for inspiration. Good luck!

Grayson Shadow wrote:
I don't know about greywater systems. I'd like to have a tank in the floor with a spigot on the side of the house to water the garden with, but am unsure how big it should be and how to gauge if it's full.

Regarding greywater, the advice I've encountered is to not store it for any length of time. Basically, straight from the drain into pipes, soaker hoses, or mulch pits in the garden. The microbes and solids that are safe going down the drain can quickly evolve into problems when stored in a tank. In a way, you're storing the water in the soil instead, where oxygen and biodiversity can help balance/digest/dissipate these issues.

I have not tested this, but my experience cleaning sink drains makes me believe it. I've also abandoned the idea of using greywater with commercial drip-irrigation, as these apparently clog very easily.

I do store rain water though. I don't have any gauge, just an overflow pipe so it can't overfill. When they're empty, I find out because no more water comes out

For now, that suits my needs because I'm just watering the garden, and I have city water when I run out. If you need to keep a closer watch on the level, a cheap idea is to add a clear vertical pipe to the system, taller than the tank and possibly open at the top to let air escape. The water level on this pipe will rise and fall to match your tank. You could even add markings to this pipe representing certain amounts. This has to be lined up with the tank, so it's not going to allow remote viewing, but it's a cheap trick.