Actually Tiny
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04/13/2020
First outdoor shower of the year. A 4’x6.5’ solar collector hinges up off the southwest corner of the house forming the roof of this beautiful shower space (see previous posts) and feeding a 30 gallon tank on the inside of the house, which is also fed by the wood stove chimney pipe heat exchanger. The pair create an abundance of free, renewable hot water with no electric or propane inputs.
01/16/2020
Winter mornings in the tiny house.
Actually Tiny house kitchen remodel number 3 incorporates a built in open broom closet which breaks up the hard plane of the bathroom wall and adds an extra little storage shelf up top as well as a perfect spot for plants. I was starting to feel like maybe I need professional help for obsessing as much as I do but now that I see it all in place I’m so glad we went for it. With this last change we finally have all the storage we need without losing the wide open feel of the interior. The whole space feels different, better, dare I say complete?
I’m totally in love with the new Makita cordless track saw. In the short time I’ve owned it I’ve used it 10 times as much as I thought I would. The other day we installed a door in the big house in a finished frame that was out of square and couldn’t be changed. Every edge was a custom cut with the saw and installed it looks dead square. Yesterday I used it to cut inch and a half hard maple slabs for glue ups, and today I used to break down plywood, cut the corner out of a cabinet to fit over the wheel well, and also to cut the line that I scribed off the slightly out of plumb wall for the face of the built-in broom closet. It’s still slightly gutless compared to a Milwaukee tool, but it’s half the cost of the festool and seems reasonably well built.
-Brian
01/09/2020
Today’s installation of this 24 sq ft AET solar hot water collector adds a roof to our outdoor shower area and completes our hybrid solar and wood-fired hot water system.
This is a miniaturized version of a larger system that I lived with for 10 years off the grid. It uses a water jacketed stove pipe and a flat plate collector to passively thermosiphon hot water to a 28 gallon hot water heater tank that sits above our bathroom at the end of the house. The geometry of this setup takes careful planning, solid plumbing skills, and direct sun for at least half of the day, but with those requirements met it provides a huge amount of free hot water after the initial investment.
I decided to incorporate some selective shading on this one, using an oversized collector but also placing the collector slightly below the porch shade so it doesn’t produce hot water early in the day which should help to keep the house from overheating (from the hot tank inside) in the middle of summer.
To keep things simple and also due to a lack of availability of certain products, this is an open loop system so draining the panel on cold nights and a freeze protection valve as a back up protects the panel.
The feed and return lines are left deliberately uninsulated so they will bleed off heat if the system gets too hot. This is important when using ordinary water heaters as solar collector tanks because they aren’t designed for the high temperatures that can occur in a well insulated solar loop.
You would think that a system like this would leave you pi**ed off in the shower from time to time, but at least in the larger version this happened so rarely that we never even bothered to install an electric back up. It will be interesting to see how well it works in the tiny house. I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for a sunny afternoon to watch it work!
-Brian
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