It sounds like you’re on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.
We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.
RV-style toilet for occasional guests
composting toilet for us (only urine goes to the holding tank)
clean grey water (most laundry, most personal hygiene, most dishwater) goes on our raspberries and fruit trees.
We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.
We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.
Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.
Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.
Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It’s just raw lake water.
Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we’re quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn’t ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we’ve only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.
My plans for this year are:
Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I’ll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a
Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it’ll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.
Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.
It sounds like you’re on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.
We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.
We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.
We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.
Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.
Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.
Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It’s just raw lake water.
Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we’re quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn’t ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we’ve only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.
My plans for this year are:
Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I’ll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a
Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it’ll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.