How does it feel to go from this…
To this?
Pretty darn good! A few weeks ago, THIMBY realized her second crucial stage of development: actually serving as a tiny home. One of THIMBY’s team members, Brett Webster, moved into THIMBY at the end of January, after weeks of hard work transitioning THIMBY from a demonstration home to a functioning structure capable of safely and comfortably storing a graduate student plus pared-down belongings. Well, really after a year of planning, designing, engineering, and building the tiny house from a trailer bed to a 210 sq. ft., off-grid tiny house with solar panels, a Tesla battery, and a home greywater filtration system.
Over the past two months, the 24/7 frenzy of work parties, all-nighters, and super-human efforts needed to get the house ready for the SMUD competition has been replaced by steady progress towards getting the house ready for a resident. Meaning, coats of shellac for waterproofing the windows, waterproofing the bathroom plywood, insulating the toilet box and building the sealed lid, building extra shelving units, and integrating the carbon filter into the planter box filtration loop. THIMBY no longer exists as a competition stunt, but is now a true “living lab” for testing out residential water and energy technologies with an actual resident.
The challenges and joys of tiny living have already presented themselves in obvious ways early into the living experiment. What could be better than biking home from campus, along the Bay Trail, to your own self-built tiny home, cooking dinner on an induction stovetop with lights and radiant floor heating all powered by solar panels and a super-efficient heat pump? And then… it rains for two weeks straight so the battery dies and the house needs to be plugged into the grid to come back on, and you need 240V power, and you can’t shower with hot water because the energy control system fell off the shelf when you moved the ladder to get up to the loft…
Speaking of showers, because the greywater filtration system is currently plumbed so that greywater is filtered through a layered planter box, activated carbon filter, and UV light before re-collecting in a filtered tank, which is the cold water supply to the shower, you have to be really careful what you put down the sink or shower drains. Raw meat? Questionable. Blood? Probably ok, but worrisome at first. We’re testing out greywater filtration removal rates — for turbidity, BOD, COD, E. Coli, nitrates, etc. — in a Berkeley water quality lab, and will continue to gather data this spring on water quality and energy balance.
The first few weeks in THIMBY have proved how collaborative and flexible you have to be to pioneer the off-grid variant of tiny living. Calling up team members and friends to help with critical repairs, and settling in slowly by unpacking some things and moving anything non-essential to storage, are necessary and unavoidable parts of the experience. But, in the midst of thinking critically about sustainable living, it’s nice to realize you can still have 8 people over — to discuss the next variant of water treatment systems, or just share beers and grill out on the porch with the sun setting over Richmond Bay.
