Kimi Iszikala

YES I am interested, since 2017. Thought we would be building one in 2020/2021.
Here are some things holding us back:

. Status of our house build. It has taken years longer than anticipated.

. Not sure whether we will need it for heating our house more than a couple times a year, and if that is the case we would rather invest the time and money to build an outdoor RMH instead of one for our house. We are building an earthship-inspired tire bale home, and other folks who have similar houses have said that they only use their wood stove a couple times a year. Our house currently does get cold enough to need heat, but we will be enclosing the “porch” (like the greenhouse part of an earthship) and that will be our main winter heater, and we won’t really know what we are dealing with for temperature control until that is in.

. Building on permit — we want to get our occupancy permit as soon as possible (after living in a tiny pop up camper for 6 years), so we will be getting occupancy before glazing the porch//greenhouse. We also don’t want to battle for permitting the stove, and plan to put it in after having occupancy.

. Like many others, we are unsure about how to do it. I am just starting up my deep dig into RMH after 3-4 years of focusing elsewhere. One advantage we have over others with this hesitation is that over the last 6 years we have done so much other stuff that we had no idea how to do. My hub and I are both pretty handy with conventional building but little about our house is conventional. Through the years of this build, I find that we fret about the next mysterious unknown part of the build while executing the current tasks. It has caused a decent amount of our delay in getting this house done, because even though we are pretty confident by nature, we mull each new thing around and plan it one way, then another way, learn everything we can from others’ experiences, try to find someone local with experience to help, usually fail and have to do it ourselves, then find that once we get into it it really isn’t that bad. I am guessing this will be the case with RMH.

. Our delays have helped us in many ways. There are several parts of the house that I can look back on with relief that we didn’t do it the way we first thought of. If our house hadn’t been so delayed, we would have conventional septic. Our delays in building gave me the time to go round & round with the regulators until, by the time we were ready to plumb our septic, we had an approved permit for vermiculture septic, perhaps the first permit in the country. I think this delay has also helped us with RMH thinking. In 2017-2020 I was planning on a J-tube and bench between our sleeping and living areas. My hub was resistant because he loves fire and wants to see the fire. Now I think a batch box & bell would work so much better for our situation and location, and I hadn’t stumbled upon any of that info last time I was looking into it. I think we can make a wide tall bell that can make up much of the wall between those areas, and we can build the rest of the wall around it. And we can have our beautiful viewable fire.

So now we are in the mode of finishing up to get our occupancy permit (main hurdle: building the waterproof sloped shower floor on top of our road base underfloor to finalize our plumbing permit — the next thing that we have no experience in). We are probably at least a year and maybe more like 2 from building our RMH (if we decide we need one in our home), which is the perfect time to start diving in to research and planning for real, and the mulling-around phase of RMH thinking.

Right now we heat our construction space with a 30,000 btu propane unvented heater with controls 1-5, usually set at 1-2.5. That is with the house insulated and closed up, but without our greenhouse “furnace”. I think if we do build an RMH a 6” will suffice, even though using the calcs I found on one of the guru websites (don’t remember which at the moment) say we need a 9” based on external minimum temps. Our house performs really well with 6’ thick walls, and we are in NM with huge diurnal temp swings, so even though it can get down to 0F at the coldest, it isn’t often below freezing for a high.

I wonder how this all worked out? I see there are no updates after the initial year…

Hi Timothy,

We have just started using our water utility in the last few months.

We collect rainwater from our gutters.
Our roof has no overhanging branches, but we have a lot of fine dust.
Water enters our tanks through a basket filter under the downspouts.
We use a float & filter inside the tank to pull water from six inches below the surface.
In the house we have a 50 micron filter before the pump (which pretty much doesn't catch anything).
After the pressure tank the water goes through a 20 micron filter and 1 micron filter, then out to the rest of the house.
We have one faucet in the kitchen for drinking water; it has a 6-candle ceramic filter.

We had an Essential Rainwater Test done from Simple Labs on our non-drinking water.
It tested better than our state utility, state well average, and bottled water average on almost every measure.
It beats EPA regs for municipalities.
On stricter measures there are three areas to pay attention to, because we have detectable amounts of lead, and our cadmium and copper levels are slightly above those markers (but again, below requirements for municipalities). It is much better than the local well water, which has high levels of arsenic and uranium.

We also got quick test strips for coliform bacteria. We test with those periodically. If we have a big rain we test again. If we transfer water between tanks we test again. We also tested hot water separately to see if we were growing stuff in our mini tank heaters.

If we follow instructions, our water has always tested clean. We don't dump the test water when they say to, and after twice the alloted time, we sometimes show some coliform. So that means our coliform levels are below detected levels according to standard tests, but we do have some coliform and if we incubate a long time they show up.

Really, it is a balance and almost a personality choice. Like, I have a friend planning to more to our state, and her primary criterion is to live close to a hospital, just in case, so she is looking in the city. We, on the other hand, live 40 minutes from the closest (lousy) hospital. 2 hours from a city hospital, and several states away from a hospital we would have a huge amount of faith in. Are you someone who lets your kids play outside for hours without checking in? Are you someone who won't drive on the highway? I'm not judging either way; we all have our lifestyle choices and safety criteria and comfort levels. None of them have to make sense to others (except maybe to those we live with, at least to some extent!) I know in some areas (big cats!) I probably look like an over-protective fearful person, and in others (job security) I might seem cavalier and reckless. It also depends hugely on who is doing the observing, and what their own measures are.

Luckily my hub & I are on the same page with water. We are careful enough to want the testing, and to try to know as much as we can about our water quality. We are careful enough to ceramic filter our drinking water (even though our testing shows that we don't really have to... because of course a test is only a snapshot). We are relaxed enough to decide we don't need to bleach our water or use UV or reverse osmosis, etc. because we both have the same calculation of cost/benefit and it just doesn't seem necessary. And if we do end up with some weird brain-eating amoeba or something, I think we will feel that we made clear-eyed decisions and took calculated risks, etc., and it is what it is...

The main difference is that when you are on a utility you take similar risks but can stay blissfully ignorant of them and when you get a brain-eating amoeba you can get mad at the utility or the state or whoever, but when you are on your own and you get a brain-eating amoeba you don't have anyone else to blame.

You are doing the right thing, to think this through, and gather info from others. Know that you will not find a consensus response (obvious already), but hopefully going through the exercise will help you figure out what your needs and wants and comfort levels are when it comes to setting up your system.

Have fun with it!

...I forgot to mention that I am at 7200' in dry New Mexico, if that makes any difference...

If my background fits your needs, I'd like to test recipes.

I grew up baking bread with my mom. As an adult I did some but much less bread-baking. As a working mom I resorted to bread machine baking.

I have not used sourdough but as a retiree I have wanted to start for years. We are building a house, and a couple months ago we finally completed a working kitchen after 5 years with an ovenless outdoor kitchen, so the timing is good!

Does your book start with the starter making part, or assume that the baker is already a starter parent?

I just have access to flours and grains from the grocery store and co-op.

I have a countertop combi steam oven.

In any case, good luck with your very cool project!

Hi Rico,

Thank you for your kind words!

The blog posts on the worm septic are linked at the bottom of the plumbing post. There is also worm septic info in our site's FAQ and Resources pages.
That's all we have so far.

3 months after our final inspection we will take our first effluent sample in for testing; that is probably when we will update.

We did peek in the other (warm) day before our first flush to find the worms happy and wiggling about just under the surface. The timing should be good for them, since we are slowly starting up as the weather slowly warms!

I just posted another update on our tire bale house build.
This one is on plumbing... which we have been working on for years. We still aren't done, but we have running water in the house now, so I figured it was time to pull the trigger and post!

https://www.brownkawa.com/post/plumb-tuckered-out

We will be trying to live off of rainwater catchment in our 10-inches-per-year dryland environment. The post shows our whole-house utility & filtration, embedding waste pipe in a road base subfloor, splitting greywater and rainwater, using point-of-use mini tank heaters with thermostatic valves, running hose bibs through 6' thick tire bale walls...

It has not been a joy. But it is progress, and THAT is always a joy!

Not yet covered in the blog is that we are having initial challenges with our filtration system throttling our pressure. So I will probably be digging around elsewhere on this forum as we work through that...

Anyway, I hope the post is useful to someone.

We bought our solar components from AltE in 2020.
I was eager to get it installed so we could get the higher tax rebate before it was phased out.
The materials   sat in our storage container for years because building has taken way longer than we anticipated.
AltE went out of business.
The tax rebate was reinstated higher than before.
New Mexico changed its regs so that homeowners can no longer get a permit to install their own solar. (!!?!!)

Our solar installation was completed and approved last December.

Here is our blog post about the solar and electrical installation on our off-grid tire-bale house:
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/electrifying

If you have a cubic meter enclosure full of bedding, and if you feed them & keep them moist enough, worms should do fine in your area through the winter. I don't have a ton of experience (yet), but we are counting on that for our worm septic system. We are in zone 6, and worm septic systems like ours have been successful in colder temps. Our design was prototyped in Massachusetts and thrived for at least 20 years; not sure if it is still going.

Here's an article discussing worm farming in the winter; it is what we are banking on!

Happy Worms All Winter Long!

We got our knit aluminet 70% shade cloth from Gothic Arch Greenhouses four years ago but from a quick glance at their website it looks like maybe they don't carry it any more...?

We couldn't survive in the greenhouse without it, and neither could our trees...