There’s something about tiny houses that makes them tremendously appealing to people who are conservation-minded. They use up so much less space and material than a typical American McMansion, yet they still provide enough for a comfortable and dignified life.
Almost all tiny houses include space for a kitchen, a bathroom, a bed, some storage, and perhaps even a few small but essential household appliances. And that’s where things get tricky. Those appliances require a bit of electricity. It brings up the question: how do you power a tiny house?
How to Power a Tiny House?
You can power your tiny house with a combination of several of the following methods:
- Draw power from the local electrical utility grid, either with a fixed residential connection, or with RV-style curb hookups
- Rely on alternative energy sources, such as an array of photovoltaic solar panels, a wind turbine, or a micro-hydroelectric generator to draw energy directly from nature
- Use a gasoline-powered generator as a backup for rainy days and long nights
- Employ a residential battery system to supplement and regulate your energy sources
- Reduce your need for electricity by heating food and water with propane
- For emergencies, have a wood-burning digital device charger handy!
Let’s take a look at the different circumstances where each of these power sources would work best. After all, the way you use power depends mostly on the way you plan to use your tiny home itself!
Choosing Not to Use Electricity
One of the big questions that folks who are looking at building or buying a tiny house have to consider is how they’re going to run their preferred appliances, along with a few lights, some mobile devices, and whatever else we can’t live without in our modern world.
Living in a tiny house is about being sensible with our consumption of resources, but it doesn’t have to mean being cut off from the rest of the world; unless you want it to.
If the weather (or the house’s insulation) is good, and you have the appropriate mindset, you can definitely make a good living in a house with no source of electrical power. That is, after all, what all of humanity did for most of history. It’s like camping in a cabin.
Candles and fireplaces (if your house is stationary enough to include one) and extra blankets provide abundant light and heat, and a pleasing old-fashioned aesthetic.
They don’t run a coffee maker, though.
So if, like most people, your plan for your tiny house does still include the conveniences of modern life, there are four overlapping factors you’ll need to consider when determining how to power your tiny house.
You’ll need to think first about whether your tiny house is stationary or mobile, and then whether you want to go off-grid or not.
How to Power a Stationary Tiny House?
Whether on- or off-grid, tiny houses built in place on a property with a fixed foundation are probably the easiest kind to power from a technical standpoint. The setup is basically the same as it would be for any other kind of house.
What matters in this case is whether your house is located in an urban or a rural context. That’s because depending on the location, you’ll be faced with different laws about what kinds of power sources and connections you can choose from.
It’s extremely important to do diligent and careful research on this point. Otherwise, you could end up wasting time, effort, and funds on setups that aren’t permitted.
Legal Matters
In some localities, such as major cities and even entire states, you may be required by law to connect to the grid. Spur, Texas, reputedly the world’s first “Tiny House Town,” makes it exceptionally easy to live in a tiny house there, but they still require tiny house dwellers to use municipal utilities.
Most other towns and cities will require something like that. If you want to site a stationary tiny house in an urban or suburban environment, you should plan to power it using local utilities.
This kind of arrangement does not necessarily preclude you from drawing from available sources of alternative energy, but it may mean that you need a special setup to make it work.
As an example, in Nevada, you have to be on the grid, but you can use solar panels and an electrical inverter to run your meter backwards and sell power back to NV Energy for a credit. Similar grid-tied solar setups may be available in the location where you want to settle, depending on your local jurisdiction.
As far as a comprehensive list of alternative sources, the most common type, by far, is solar. In most urban and suburban environments, there isn’t much else available, though a small wind generator isn’t completely out of the question. Again, every locality is going to have different laws about what’s permitted and what’s not.
How to Power a Tiny House Using Solar Power?
When it comes to using solar on a tiny house in a tight urban setting, you’ll most likely use standard roof-mounted photovoltaic (PV) panels. These convert sunlight directly into electricity that you can use to run your house.
In rural settings, you can often get a lot more creative with this and other forms of alternative power. You’re also more likely in these areas to either be able or be forced to go off-grid.
Your off-grid options may include hooking your tiny home up to much larger or more advanced solar arrays. For example, rather than leaving the PV panels mounted on a south-facing roof, you could place them on rotating mounts in a sunny part of the property where they could follow the sun’s movement throughout the day.
In the next few years, as well, keep an eye on advances in solar tech. It may not be long before PV roof tiles, windows, and exterior walls are affordable, thanks to the development of thin-film PV cells that can be applied to a variety of surfaces.
Using Wind and Water to Power Your Tiny House
You may also have more wide open space or be located in a region with generally greater wind potential, in which case you could consider larger or multiple wind power generators.
If you plan to live near a year-round stream that has a sufficient drop in elevation within the property limits, you can also consider a run-of-the-river hydroelectric system. The right conditions can result in an extremely reliable power supply from hydroelectricity.
Some of these different kinds of alternative energy systems can be tied to the local electrical grid. Most likely, though, they’ll make more sense where the grid is not an option.
How to Power a Tiny House on Wheels?
If you’ve got wheels, you’ve got options. Having a tiny house that you can move with you means that you can plan to draw power from a variety of sources.
Since most mobile tiny houses are legally classified as recreational vehicles rather than as houses, they’re generally required to have RV-style utility hookups.
That means that along with having water and sewage lines, they’re able to draw power when you plug them in at campgrounds, RV parks, and other properties designed especially to service mobile tiny houses.
You can also design your tiny house to draw power from ordinary household outlets, so that you can plug the system in just about anywhere you find yourself. The wiring for that kind of dual capability would be slightly more complicated, relying on additional switches and circuit breakers.
The main consideration here actually has nothing to do with the power itself, but rather how long you can legally park your tiny house in a location where you would have to rely on extension cords and someone else’s residential power.
Both of those options are decidedly on-grid. You can also design your mobile tiny house to plug into all the same kinds of off-grid power sources described above. But there are also a few additional ways to supply your tiny home with the energy you need.
More Energy Sources that are Important for All Kinds of Tiny Houses
How do you power a tiny house when you’re off-grid and in a place where there’s nothing around for you to plug into? If you have a solar setup, what happens when it’s raining for days on end?
Below are some options for powering your tiny house that don’t include electricity:
Generators
In difficult situations, nothing beats the versatility of a good old-fashioned gas-powered generator. It’s not exactly “green,” but it will provide you the electricity you need in a pinch. Every tiny house should include at least a basic generator, just in case all else fails.
Batteries
Another important element to consider is whether to install a battery system. This applies most often in the case of using an off-grid solar system.
Batteries will store the extra energy you generate but don’t use immediately, and make it available to use during the night, and whenever else the sun isn’t shining. They can be a crucial part of an effective off-grid solar power setup.
Propane
Last, but not least, you can supplement your tiny house’s electrical supply by relying on propane gas for water heating and cooking. A simple standard propane tank is easy to store and connect to your home’s stovetop and water heater.
Propane gas is very cheap, cleaner than gasoline, and available almost everywhere, making it an excellent option for conserving electricity.
Back up Your Backups
Finally, if push really comes to shove, it might be a good idea to have invested in some of the devices available on the market for generating electricity via small wood-burning stoves.
Items like that can seem silly and quirky… until you’re sitting in the dark during a rainy season power outage and the gasoline has run out!
What Works Best for Your Tiny Home?
At the end of the day, this is the most important question to consider. How you power your tiny home should depend on the combination of factors surrounding where your home will be, and what kind of energy supply you need it to provide for you.
Not all options will work the same for every tiny house dweller, but there’s definitely one that will work for you!