10 Years Living Off-Grid in a Tiny House with Clever Systems & Design Features – FULL TOUR

To be off-grid living means resilience. It's not for everyone, but it fills me with hope that there's other ways of living. My name is Kenton Zervin. I'm a permaculture and tiny house instructor. I'm living here in my off-grid tiny house with my partner, Destiny, our little cat, Mr. Mosby, and our dog, Oscar. And it's been about 10 years living in the house. So this house is designed to be fully off-grid. There is 2000 liters of water on board the house. There is eight lead carbon batteries, a three kilowatt solar system, a hyper-efficient combi boiler system for heating water and heating the space. We've got a little mini wood stove in the back corner, and we also have a solar water heating system. I designed the house to be passive solar with all really efficient windows and a lot of south-facing windows. So I have R34 walls, R8 windows, and an HRV system to make sure we get fresh air in without losing the heat. All of this to reduce our propane use. So it's about $300 a year for us to heat this place and heat our water and cook. So from perspective like our impact, I love this house is using less building materials. It has less ongoing costs and environmental impact. It allows us to spend more of our money and our time outside the house doing the things we want to do both for recreation but also for our life and career. So I would say that this is an empowering house. So I actually led the design and build of this house. I can't take all the credit. I had plenty of trades people who weighed in and helped along the way. So the house took about eight months to build. My tiny house is on a trailer. It is technically an RV. So the house is 28 feet long and it's 10 and a half feet on the exterior. On the interior of the house from plywood wall to plywood wall it's eight feet wide. It's hard to say the true cost of the house because I wasn't counting my time. I wasn't paying myself. I also had many people who contributed but I did track all of the costs that I put in and it's sitting at $88,000 Canadian for materials and some of the labor. And welcome to the tiny house! So this is the outside of the house. There's a lot of things to share and show. There's a massive solar array on the front of the house, which includes the evacuated solar tubes here. So this does hot water heating, get basically free hot water from the sun. So they're a glass tube with all the air sucked out of it, so it's like a thermos. Inside, though, they have a black film and this little copper line in the middle, which has a refrigerant running through it. So the sun gets in, warms the refrigerant, which is moved up and down the line, into the header. In the header, there's a glycol line that takes the heat out of the refrigerant, and it goes into the house into a hot water tank. So it's kind of crazy because it's a triple heat transfer. So you're using free energy from the sun to preheat your water. During the summer, we get 80 liters of hot water, and shoulder seasons, you got a good temperature bump. In the wintertime, you get maybe 10 degrees extra Celsius out of the water. Then there's the three kilowatt solar system panels that all can fold on top of the roof and against the wall, and they're all adjustable. So I've got the ones on the roof on a really cool system that we custom designed and built. It uses telescoping. It basically has two metal tubes that you can slide in and out of each other to adjust the height, and you can bolt whatever you want onto it. So I can change the angle, so in the winter time they're more facing the sun that's just lower the horizon, or in the summer time I can tilt them back and now I get more solar gain. And I can also flop the whole thing down on the roof into travel mode, so that way it doesn't affect my max height on the road. And this beautiful kind of seating area which is right outside the house. This is a couch system we built so this is all recycled wood minus the little bit of plywood on the back of it. All pallets so we deconstructed pallets put it back together and this is kind of nice because in the evening it's such a gorgeous spot you have this beautiful view of the creek and the farm and the mountains. When you live off grid it's always nice to have backups for everything so the other day you can't beat a generator. If for whatever reason our power supply drops, then we can always come out here and turn this thing on. It's a Honda EU3000. Reliable, quiet, easy to turn over. So you have a crank on it, but you can also just literally hit the on switch, pull the choke. Dog. And there you go. In the dead of winter, if we're using certain things that have a high electrical draw, like the toaster, then it's a good time to turn on the generator. But otherwise, we don't really use it. It's just here for peace of mind. Inside this box is our batteries. So I used to have lead-acid batteries, the ones I bought like 10 years ago, but they're more maintenance and work. I'm really happy now to have switched to lead-carbon ones. There's all the Lead carbon batteries. A lot of these batteries are really heavy but they last a long time. They can operate in minus 40 degrees Celsius no problem. They've got a really good charge capacity. When you're living off grid, this is one of the most expensive parts of your system. People think the solar panels are going to cost you a lot. No, they're actually not that much. It's the batteries that are going to cost you a lot. So I believe it was seven thousand dollars for those batteries. It was not cheap but that gives me a lot of peace of mind of power and resilience and they're made for Canada. So because we live off grid, We have a propane tank. So this is called a propane pig. It's refilled like once a year, ish. That does our backup water heating and it also does our backup house heating. If we want to, we could almost not use this at all. But I love, love, love that the house is on a thermostat and an automatic temperature control that I can see from my phone anywhere where I'm in the world. This allows us to travel and we get to live off grid. With peace of mind that the house is perfectly okay and not going to like freeze or anything. There's the HRV unit you can see here that goes to the bathroom. So that's constantly breathing out the moisture air from the bathroom, but maintaining our retention of our heat. Up high, we have an actual baseboard heater that's been enclosed in just some metal flashing. And what that is, is an emergency heat loop. So if the solar thermal system ever overheats, this opens up and dumps the heat outside. Safety mechanism so on the this side of the house we have the exhaust system for the wood stove now if you can Always run your exhaust straight up and out these two extra elbows of bending and then going to the wall and then bending again Again, Causes draft issues and so I have to force a draft sometimes um, when starting the wood stove to make sure that it drafts really well So welcome to the tiny house. The house can be divided into I guess five spaces. So there is a rec loft or office loft above the bathroom, there's the bedroom and then the kitchen below, and then the main space in the middle is the main living area with a couch, table, and the stair system with all of its storage. The total square footage of the house is 260 square feet. For the main floor plan it's an extra 100 square feet with the loft above the bathroom And the loft above the kitchen. So coming over to the bathroom first. This is a door system that is not just a ladder, not just a door, but also a mirror. There's a mirror on the back. Now it's kind of custom because I cheated. You're supposed to use a hardware system that's meant to carry a bunch of weight. We didn't do that. So instead I put a piece of angle iron at the bottom and when you slide it, it pinches on the angle iron. So once it's there it is locked in position and now it's possible for someone to climb the ladder and none of the weight is on it so i can stand on this and i can actually roll the wheel still and this way you never blow out the wheels with the maximum weight so that's kind of cool for Thank you all for... not having to spend five six hundred dollars on hardware I spent eighty dollars on this hardware instead So that gets you into the bathroom. The bathroom is the hardest place to show because it's so much in such a small space. Not only is there a combi boiler system, there's also a composting toilet. It's the Nature's Head composting toilet. I'm on the fence about how much I like it. Every composting toilet has its pros and cons. So that handles the number ones and number twos. Otherwise the house has a grey water system. So we have the wash machine, shower and kitchen sink going out to that The rest of the bathroom here on this side is the utility system so there's all the stuff for the electrical system, personal kind of cosmetic stuff, washing machine which is on a stand so we can get a kitty litter box underneath it so that's a lot of things just in this half of the bathroom. My philosophy is this is a place to function, get in and get out. Not doing yoga in here. There's a medicine cabinet underneath the window. The shower system is something I built. It's all tiled. This is actually RV silicone grout, so it's flexible and lightweight. On this little section here, we actually have the clothes system. We have a insta-hanger here, which allows us to hang things. We hang things on here. There's also this clothesline, so that pulls across the whole bathroom and clips in over here. So that allows us to hang dry everything right here in the bathroom. So the bathroom is indeed a place of function. And I just love this heated towel rack. And most of my clothes go here in the wall. So the Combi Boiler is an amazing piece of technology. Not only is it incredibly efficient with its propane use, but it does two jobs in one. It does space heating, so it heats up a line that goes to the heated towel rack and baseboard heaters in the middle of the house, allowing me to heat the house automatically on a thermostat. It also has a water heating loop. So if the sun didn't heat up the water enough, it uses propane to bump the temperature to whatever I'm asking for in the shower, washing machine, and sink. So this is the loft above the bathroom and it's my personal office. Normally I don't keep these lights on because it's kind of a pot light right in the face, but I love having this LED light strip behind my head and it even has a dimmer switch so you can turn up and down the brightness. This is an awesome spot for me to be comfortable, do my work on my computer, and I've got a musical instrument up here so it's my my hand pan that I've been teaching myself how to play which is kind of fun. But yeah, very functional space. Great to have that extra space in a tiny house. So this is the third major space of the tiny house is the living room. So we've got this storage stair system. I'm actually really proud of this storage and stair system because it has a waterfall edge. So I cut all the pieces so that the wood grain matches. And it also is happening up in the lofts where it hits the walls on either side. It was kind of an artistic choice. I used to be a high school art teacher. I've got this attention to detail. On things like that I can get a little obsessed. It's got all sorts of stuff in it. It's got paper recycling, it's got plastic and cardboard and paper recycling, got the animal food, got clothes and extra like storage for that, got the coats in there, got extra clothes storage for Destiny, and then on this side you can see we have Mr Mosby who's having a little nap. He is absolutely precious. He loves the tiny house. Now, there's a lot that's in this space otherwise here, so let's see if Mr. Mosby will allow me to. Move him a little bit because I mean it's a little messy underneath, but it's still good to show how you can use every single inch So there's a a storage system in here with a bench. So I put things that kind of need to stay out of the way There's a tool kit in here and the projector system for having movie nights some extra storage for some clothes This is my worm bin Indoor year-round composting using worms. They never want to leave as long as you put food in there for them office supplies and then board games. I also have a small collection up here in the cabinets. This is all a bunch of nerdy board game stuff. So that's all the storage in there, but aside from that, I can remove the stuff off the bench, lift the table and pull it out, and the legs drop down, and it's a freestanding table system, where you can seat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and if you want, another person on this side, 7. I've had 8, but it's obviously a little tight. But that's cool that you can actually seat that many people indoors for some entertainment. The couch is this beautiful custom piece of work. It's got storage built into the back of it. It's got water storage built into it. This is my rack. I've got all of my stuff for doing my landscape designs for clients in here. That's hers. She's got a book that she's reading, and we just have a space that we can each put up our own things. So coming in from the living room, we're into the kitchen. Now the kitchen is pretty luxurious for a tiny house. There is a five burner full oven stove with a little island on the side with plenty of little storage spots inside of it. On this side, this is the main cabinet space, so of course you've got all the silverware and utensils. We've got the kind of like old cupboard system with a big pull-out tray system, so that's where a lot of the foodstuffs goes. We've got the counter, which is plenty of prep space just unto itself, coffee maker and tea and toaster and all that jazz. This is the higher counter space. It's actually built over a water tank. It's a little nicer for me for chopping. I'm being a little bit higher up. But as you can see, we've got a little tiny wood stove in the corner that can heat up the whole house. So that's a cubic mini Grizzly model wood stove made here in Canada. We've got the... Inlet for getting access to filling the water. So this water tank is huge. It's about 1500 liters And you get access to it just by pulling this thing up. By the way, this countertop is called deck tin It's fireproof and scratch proof, but you can spin this valve off And inside is 1500 liters of water. So that allows me to easily fill it, easily see what's in there, easily get access to clean. So we just run the hose through the window for filling it. I live just outside Kelowna in the interior of British Columbia. So in the wintertime that does mean having to constantly put the hose back away so it doesn't freeze. A little bit of a hassle. Lots of dry storage. Our little modem for our wi-fi. We've got just some extra drinking water. This is the storage system for the dishes which also is right by the HRV. So this allows the moisture to kind of get sucked out of the house. By the way HRV stands for heat recovery ventilator. You're getting your heat back but you're getting fresh air. And then a double basin sink. So this is kind of nice for having two spots to be able to wash your dishes and have a spot to dump your dishes maybe. I did something really cool here. I am all about saving water. So notice right now the kitchen sink is on but no water is coming out. And that's because I wanted to put a kick plate in. So you actually kick down here and it turns the water on. You can set the temperature to wherever you want, and then you're washing dishes, washing your hands, it's more hygienic, but you also save your water. This is an apartment-sized fridge, so it's kind of nice. It's always packed full. It'd be nice to honestly even have a bigger fridge, but it does the job. So yeah the kitchen has a lot in it. It's quite a luxurious kitchen for a tiny house. The one thing I would change is I think I'd put a dishwasher right here and that'd be the one thing I would change. So this is the stairs coming up to the bedroom loft. This is actually one of my favorite spots in the house. This space right here is such a nice spot to sit. You get up in the morning, you look out the window, you got this gorgeous view out there. You can sit here, have your coffee, read your book, write your journal. You got this little ledge. It's just a nice spot. And then you're into the rest of the bedroom. So it's pretty self-explainable. There's just a queen-size mattress. And then that whole back wall is all storage. So it all is pop, click, open magnet doors. As you can see this is kind of a cozy spot to be. It's just enough headroom. I designed the whole house around my height. I'm 6'4". I fit in all spaces of the house. But this is the magnet system you can see for the doors and there's even extra storage in these as well. They also open up so that's kind of cool. So yeah there's there's a ton of storage hidden in the house and this is a pretty functional space for a bedroom. Okay so let's show you the rest of the yard now. So we've got this gorgeous terrace. So people around the world have used terraces as a way to do agriculture. Not only does it present more flat land which makes it more accessible and easier to maintain, but it actually changes the relationship with water. Water sinks in instead of runs off. So all that I did is I took trees that ...trees that had dropped on the property, topped them so they're flat... And then filled in some good soil between them, creating these beautiful, you know, walkways that are low maintenance, allowing me to get my reach full in to do my gardening and weeding. And this is all strawberries and some amaranth and some lettuce that's gone to seed, a few other things. I built this thing entirely for free. Free wood, got these off Facebook Marketplace, free strawberries. Even the soil came from the spot on the property, it was free. I love teaching people landscaping and how to change their impact with their environment and improve their property and grow food and this is probably one of my most recommended techniques for doing it on the cheap. So I do grow my own food on site but honestly not that much because of how much I travel and how much I'm doing that work already. I tend not to manage the garden as much as I want to. And then we have another functional space over here and this is our compost system. I just took the cutoffs from the logs from the terraces and then I put them faced on some scrap wood that I had from pallets and made a three bay composting system. So what the worms can't eat, I throw it in here because nothing is waste. Everything's a resource. Again we love to repurpose stuff, this deck was made with pallets as the base so there's all these pallets underneath there about 16 of them and then we got bought some boards to put on top of it to make nice decking. You can see Destiny doing her office work over there it's a beautiful spot to be doing some office work but uh we don't own the land so it's nice to have all of this as stuff that's pretty easy to take back down again and move to our forever home when we buy our own land. So the tiny house has moved I think three times now. Moving the house is a pain in the butt. I have a solar system to fold down, I have water to drain, I have to basically pack up the house. I also like to, for safety's sake, just remove as much weight from the house as possible. We're pretty close to our weight limit. This is an alternative home, it's technically an RV. A tiny house for me is a fantastic housing model, It's not for everyone for every stage of life and to be honest tiny homes are fraught with legal issues. This is stuff that I teach in my course just to help people understand the jargon around like what's an RV, what's a manufactured home, what's a park model. These all have different pros and cons. So I actually wear a few different hats for work. I run an online school called Attainable Sustainable Academy. We have retreats around the world on permaculture. We also have my tiny house workshop on there, which is an online course. And we built a state-of-the-art tiny house that people can enter to win the house. And we started a YouTube channel about building this free house that we get to give away. I also run my own business, kind of helping people one-on-one. I do consulting, I do speaking. There are so many pros to living in a tiny house. I would say the number one pro is it enables you to pursue different things with your life. I've always planned for this house to be what I call a transition home, kind of like a leapfrogging, where it's like I could afford to build it without getting into debt. What's nice is now I can invest in my business and the ability to generate my own revenue streams. And then I can save up that money for the forever land. Then I can save up again and then build up the forever home. The whole process without getting into much debt and always feeling like I've got options. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it. You can also follow Kenton on his YouTube channel and we'll put links to his websites in the description of this video. Thanks for watching.