The Fun Box! Solar, wind and human powered luxury living

If you want to learn how to build the best tiny house I would start on this page here , its the best tiny house we have seen - 

How to build tiny houses on Wheels for cold climates

And on the other side of the coin… we aren’t really big fans of tiny houses for a number of reasons, all of which you can read about here –

The problems with tiny houses in cold climates

Please don’t take this as a criticism, it’s the reality of tiny houses should realize from the get-go. There is an inherent design flaw when trying to categorize tiny houses as eco-friendly and sustainable, and that is that they are usually on wheels. We think the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of a tiny house is to put it on a slab on grade or at least helical piers instead of wheels, and keep your home at home!

The other problems with the wheels, is that by having a house bounce down a highway it puts a lot of stress on the air barrier as well as joints and junctions that you rely on to keep water out.

But assuming you are planning to put wheels on it, there are a few ways you can greatly improve the performance. First I would avoid using any insulation or air barrier products that aren’t flexible, and another really important feature for any tiny house in a cold climate would be to increase the insulation levels. Too often walls are built thin to maximise space, and without enough insulation they instantly become among the lower performing homes. Read here about choosing the best insulation. 

Have a look over those pages first and we can help you here with a bit of design ideas to maximize the performance of your build. And a couple of questions – will it be used in a cold climate? Will it have wheels and do you plan to mostly be mobile or stationary?

A wind turbine on top of an RV or a Tiny House rolling down the highway will definitely spin, but it is unlikely that the amount of energy you generate would be as much as the added gas you use because of the increased drag, so the smart money would be on a net loss of energy. It amounts to using one source of energy to generate another, like if you were to plug in a fan and use electricity to make a wind turbine spin to generate electricity.  So no, we would not recommend putting a wind turbine on top of an RV. And the Power pod wind turbine is certainly cute looking, but not functional. Our engineer dissected it and it simply cannot produce anywhere close to the spectacular claims the makers say it will. You may be best to just stick with solar.