November 18, 2017 Electricity

The tiny home cabin has been near completion for a few months now. No real reason to devote too much attention to it since we are stuck in our house with puppies (stuck really nice). But the puppy thing is coming to a close in about two weeks and we need to get our little cabin finished and moved so that we can begin the next step. Yesterday I figured a way to get electricity from our house into the tiny home so that we could test the thing I built, and maybe have heat and lights.

The electrical system was finished a long time ago,
before the exterior walls, insulation and interior walls were put in.
This is the Kitchen area, behind it the Bathroom.

I am not much of an electrician, but can do most small stuff so I figured I could wire a small house. It turned out I was right, but not without reservations. The first thing I needed was a box to get the power from the pole outside into the cabin. I bought a kit I found at Home Depot which was a generator thing to get power from a generator into a trailer, but it turned out not to be the right thing. So I spent an extraordinary amount of time standing in the isle at Home Depot looking at little power distribution boxes. I picked the smallest one they had, usually intended for putting in a basement circuit sub-panel. The rest was pretty easy: Romex wire, switches, outlets, and finding outlet boxes that weren't too deep to fit into our shallow walls. I even picked out a few outlets with USB charging ports. My only real concern was getting the power into the wall from outside, but the generator kit had a small box with an outlet designed to get 220 volt power from a generator, and our pole had 220 volt power, so easy-peasy.

I took the generator kit back to Home Depot and bought the outlet box all on its own, along with some heavy wire to get the power from the outlet and into the distribution panel. Then we began building the outside walls and roof. Then the interior. I didn't test the electrical system because the house is 110 volts and my outlet was for 220 volts. Instead I used extension cords dragged through the window. But Fall came suddenly, puppies came soon after, and we had to put off moving the cabin to the Farm. So the project sat a little while. waiting for a higher priority. We chipped away at it occasionally, when there was time after work.

This picture is the last time anyone has seen
the inside of the cabin. 

As Winter comes in the cold and early dark made it hard to work on the Cabin's finishing touches. So I began thinking about a work around to get power into the cabin in our driveway and extend our work day a bit. Yesterday I figured it out and now we have power.

First things first. I knew that a 220 volt circuit is really just two independant 110 volt lines merged together. I know this from the scant experience I gained working as a contractor and handyman through the years. None of the stuff I have in the cabin is 220 volt (though we will eventually have a 220 volt electrical clothes dryer and we toyed with the idea of an electrical range cooker for a bit).  The water heater,and everything else is high efficiency 110 volt stuff.

So when I visualized the electrical system I thought that what we were really doing was taking two 110 volt lines, merging them in a box to create one 220 volt line, and then splitting them back in to 110 volt power running to outlets and lights and stuff. So I ask myself: why not just take a 110 volt line, and wire it straight into the two 110 volt lines in the little box? It would still make 220 volts, but at fifteen amps. My thinking was that we would have 110 volt power, but not as much of it. So we couldn't run everything at one time. But we might have at least some light, and some heat.

I bought a outdoorsy plug, wired it into a bit of Romex, and tied the one plug into the two wires of the 220 volt system in the outside box with some big wire nuts. Then I plugged the outdoorsy plug into a heavy duty extension cord and it worked. We have heat and lights enough to work the project in the Winter.

We bought the cabin's only heat source at Costco for $99
It gives off enough heat for about 800 square feet.
It also gives off fireplace light and sits on the wall.
The television will hang over it.

The Camp Creekside Cabin Project has been going on for ten months, but is nearing the day when we move it to the Farm and it becomes our temporary home. The place is a bit rough, but also a ready to handle most of what we will need to survive the period between moving onto Camp Creekside and building what will become Creekside Farm.

The Cabin heats well, but slowly. But the remote control for the fireplace heater has a remote thermostat built into it, so we will leave the heat on low and only need to make s shorter jump to 68 degrees when we are in the cabin. The walls, roof, and floor are adequately insulated, so other heat coming from the stove, light bulbs, and warm bodies will contribute to the coziness of the place. Also, the heat helps to keep the place dry, and Oregon is not at all dry three months of the year.

We're planning to move the Cabin to the Farm in about three weeks. Then we can begin building the place in earnest on weekends evenings and during weekdays devoted to farming. Eventually we will make another of these tiny homes to contain a real bedroom, laundry, and a large closet. This will sit side by side and we will open the side of the Cabin to pair the two, making it a larger, but still quite tiny, home. The home will stay until we build the farmhouse. More to follow. . .

The first public viewing of our living room.
It will also be the bedroom for the time being.

This is the kitchen area.
I still have to put in the shelving and buy the appliances.
Under the counter we will use a large rolling tool box from Home Depot.

Note: last night at three in the morning I woke up remembering that I had not flipped the break to turn the water heater off. The water is off, but the heater is full, so probably no harm was done to it.