Towards a better tinyhouse

No one showed up. Oh well.

I don’t think people realize the potential here. The software, in my experience is quite amazing. It’s videoconferencing. You can talk to other people quite easily. You should at least try it out with your friends and family.

Think about what exactly this is here, a meeting can be held that is not just a meetup of people in your area, but ANYONE IN THE WORLD with an internet connection.

If you have nothing interesting to talk about, sorry, but the problem lies squarely with you. And yes it’s a problem, a failure to converge. Humans need to converge, to organize, in order to accomplish things, true fact.

It reminds me of a TEDTalk by Melinda Gates I saw a while ago, about implementing various medical interventions in developing countries – people need them and it’s a good thing, and the people know that perfectly well. But that is not enough. You still have to make them want it if they are going to take it, even for free.

I could maybe register a domain name, get some flashy stuff going on there, maybe spend too much money on some inferior software so it looks more “professional”. Maybe make a bunch of cons specific to various localities. Maybe that wouldn’t be enough, and I would have to keep trying more and more things.

Well, frankly I don’t have the time or money to do that, I’m afraid. I’ll continue hosting the con for a while longer, but maybe after 7 or 8 I’ll give up. I’ve done my part. If people don’t want it, that is your responsibility, I just can’t afford right now to do that much that it takes to make people want it.

If you haven’t done so yet, download and run Vsee. There’s no install to go through. When you run the program, it will prompt you to fill out a short form to sign up but you can enter anything you want, and there is no confirmation email or waiting.

Then simply use the ID below to call me:

GregorF

I will then add you to the meeting. If a number of people show up I will add other IDs you can call to the list.

Think of the IDs as names of different rooms.

There is also one tinychat room in case Vsee is not working out for some reason:
VirtualTinyHouseCon Tinychat room

This is something I have wanted to check for a while now. The info used for the graph is all very rough, but it gives the general idea anyway. A used car is cheaper by weight than the structure of a house (which excludes the foundation). In fact, you can get a brand new car for less by weight than a new house structure!

The price of the typical used car is just eyeballed from looking at the kijiji ads, but for sources of the rest of the info used, see links below.

Why does this matter? Well think about it for a second: Modern Car = extremely sophisticated, accurately made piece of machinery made from expensive materials. House = bunch of wood and junk kind of slapped together. Buildings should be very cheap on a weight to weight basis, right? If these things were anywhere near each other in cost on a weight to weight basis, that would be remarkable enough.

Indeed, the Tata Nano is an extraordinary car, but the principle here is still very sound. It’s still a freaking car, and extraordinary piece of manufactured stuff, sold at the usual profit margins etc. Also, as you can see, a cheap used normal car is still going to usually be cheaper than a used house structure.

Ladies and gentlebeans, this situation makes no sense. Clearly the housing and construction market is totally messed up, maybe because innovation has been deliberately prevented for probably more than a hundred years.

But wait – why not apply the lessons learned and technology used with cars to build housing? Oh wait wait, no no. That’s too much like innovation, can’t have that.

That’s exactly what prefab was and partly still is and today, even despite the government’s attempts to destroy the idea, it is cheaper and better. I have read several times that you can get a house that is exactly as good for 30% less. You’d think that would be something that the government would be trying to encourage or something. If you were silly enough to think the government is actually working for we, the people.

I’ll grant that you can probably save a lot of money by using plywood floors or something, but that doesn’t change things that much.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Building-Homes-Extensions-2333/House-weight.htm

http://forums.jlconline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24928

http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20030313_cabuilders.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Focus_%28North_America%29

http://www.ontariocontractors.com/buildcalc.htm minus 18,000 for the cost of the foundation

To eliminate echo for other users (which occurs when your microphone can hear your speakers), there are a number of options, one of which should be easy for almost anyone:

- Simply use a computer with Windows vista ro windows 7. The OSes have built in echo cancellation technology. Handy.

-Use earbuds (like for an Ipod, it does not need to have a microphone built in) or heaphones with your computer’s or webcam’s built in microphone.

- use a headset, those things with a microphone and headphones put together.

- simply turn your microphone off, just by clicking the microphone icon in Vsee. You will be able to hear everyone, but not speak by audio. You can still type in the text chat window.

Remember, download Vsee here. Just run it, there’s no install, and then just enter whatever you feel like in the very short signup screen. There is no waiting or confirmation email.

Well, it was more interesting than last time! 2Coyotes came, but no one else. We talked for about 50 minutes about a bunch of stuff.

Including the con, trying to figure out a way to cajole all you antisocial old goats into coming.

Bill preferred tinychat because there is some sort of bothersome setup required to use vsee on an mac. We tried the audio/video feature. It was fine for me, but it looks like I should get a headset to reduce the echo that bill was getting, or use the push to talk option (which oddly didn’t occur to me at the time) which would prevent the echo so long as I was not pushing the talk button, which should be the norm when someone else is talking. That would eliminate the sound of my typing too, which was an issue. Or tweaking the audio settings could help some, come to think of it, you want low microphone sensitivity and speaker volume on the echo producing side (mine), then increase the speaker volume on the side that has a headset to compensate. Or I could use a normal keyboard so I can type faster and not transmit audio at all. Using Vsee might help too.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You need a good communication platform, and then add people with something interesting to talk about (which I think tinyhouses definitely qualify as).

I have a blog post up in which I post the notes I took (and I’ve since done a fair bit more investigating, I should add those notes to the post later) on the different software options, finding and looking at maybe 20 options. If what I found is not enough, and maybe the hardware people tend to possess (e.g. lack of headphones and sound cards like mine that cannot filter out their own echo, though there are some that can) is not good enough, then the state of technology is not good enough at this point in history to hold a con like this.

Personally I think it is more than adequate though, to share ideas, experience, meet people, all that, really. Is that not the main attraction of a conference?

It continues to perplex me that of the probably much >20,000 people that read tinyhouse blogs, almost none are apparently interested in meeting others interested in the topic.

Anyway, remember, VirtualTinyHouseCon will be held again every Saturday, at 8 PM, so the next one is on Nov 27. It will probable be held like this time, primarily with Vsee, and with a backup tinychat room.

If you haven’t done so yet, download and runVsee. There’s no install to go through. When you run the program, it will prompt you to fill out a short form to sign up but you can enter anything you want, and there is no confirmation email or waiting.

Then simply enter one of the IDs below to call me:

GregorF
VTHCR2

I will then add you to the meeting.

Think of the IDs as names of different rooms.

There is also one tinychat room in case Vsee is not working out for some reaso:
VirtualTinyHouseCon Tinychat room

Okay. So some good news today! I looked into the possibility of building a reverso osmosis unit that can filter greywater to some degree. Reverse osmosis is good stuff. Looks like it is totes doable for $350-$700, depending how much you shop around for a good deal on the parts (and it seems to vary greatly) for the 70 liters a day needed. Increase that, but less than linearly, for more water, when you upsize the pump and the cost does not go up that fast, a 2x size membrane and pressure vessel is again not twice the cost.

Actually, you might be able to do this for even less with under the tap RO stuff. Tap water is apparently 500 ppm so that shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s probably not going to get you a very high recovery rate (unless you use several RO modules) and would be less energy efficient. Just use a bunch of the membranes, and actually using a CA membrane might be a little better because they can withstand chlorine, so that could help reduce growth of microbes. That I think would be a substantial concern, bacteria could grow on the surface of the RO membrane, thusly clogging it. Apparently an “osmotic backflush” can help to some degree with this sort of thing, though. You just turn the pump off for 15 minutes, and water goes from the clean side, backwards to the dirty side, lifting a bunch of dirt off in the process. Scaling might or might not be a problem, that would require further investigating.

Anyway, it goes like this:

Seawater salinity: 35,000 ppm, osmotic pressure: 27 atm (394 psi) (from the wikipedia article on osmosis)
Greywater: about 1000 PPM (from my notes) osmotic pressure: 0.77 atm (11 psi) (might be higher in a situation with water saving shower heads etc. but then lower again if you don’t put food or whatever down the drain).

If recovery rate is 50% then the salinity at exit is 2x so the average pressure diff across membrane is that much lower.
Example membrane: http://www.discountedwaterfilters.com/Filmtec-SW30-2514-Sea-Water-Reverse-Osmosis-Membrane-SW30-2514.htm
GPD: 150 gpd or Gallons Per Day
PSI: 800 PSI
Stabilized Rejection: 99.4 Rejection

Example Pressure vessel, surely you can get a much better price we only need 120 psi capable, which even an under the counter unit residential unit can handle, but it gives you an idea of what I’m talking about, I started looking into this under the assumption that I would need high pressure stuff, that is why I used this :

http://www.thepurchaseadvantage.com/page/TPA/CTGY/hcti_seawater_pressure_vessels

Okay, so that membrane only gets 150 gpd at a recovery rate (dirty water going in/clean water out) of 2%, which is just the test condition, not the expected operating condition. If you operate it at 50% level, basically think of this as a whole lot of RO elements in series, the dirty water goes through one, get a bit concentrated, then through the next one and is a bit more concentrated, and then the next one… anyway, by the time it gets out, it’s salinity (and therefore osmotic pressure, assuming the salt involved is the same salt, which if course it is) is twice as high.

Remember the rate of water flow across the membrane is proportional to the input pressure minus the osmotic pressure difference on the clean and dirty sides (I assume it’s 0 on the clean side). So obviously if the input pressure was 800 psi, and seawater is 394 psi you would never really be able to practically get a 50% recovery rate.

With 800 psi input with greywater though it is not a problem, going from 11 psi to 22 psi isn’t going to affect the flow rate much. But 800 psi pumps are relatively expensive (uh, I think, well pressure washers are pretty cheap, so maybe you could find a high pressure pump, would probably have to be a piston pump, that would open up interesting options for high recovery rates)

Also, the pressure drop across the membrane is much higher to begin with, so you would get that much more flow through it.

So to find out what sort of flow rate you would get with input osmotic pressure of A and output osmotic pressure of B and pump pressure of pp, and a flow constant of L (the flow rate decays exponentially with time as concentration goes up), so the initial flow rate is (pp-A)L, when is done flow rate is (pp-B)L so you would find what t is for those points and find integral between them and then divide by time difference to find average flow. But what is L, well at 394 psi input and 402 output and 800 input pump pressure (so (pp-a)=407 and (pp-b)=398) got flow of 150 gpd so just suppose L 150/400 gpd about or 0.375 gpd/psi.

So for us, at a pp of 120 and A of 11 and B of 22 (pp-A)=109 (pp-b)=98 or ~37.5 gpd. So if you only wanted 17.5 gpd you could get more than 50% recovery with this setup, actually maybe 80% or more.

An example pump (one issue is that most pumps are made for much much higher flow rates): http://www.freshwatersystems.com/p-1223-8800-series-booster-pump-24-vac-38-push-in.aspx?affiliateid=10050&qid=0&utm_source=Googlebase&utm_medium=Feed&utm_campaign=Product&utm_term=8852-2J03-B423

You still need to filter the water to get the particles out though, or they stick to the RO membrane (mind you I wonder if you could get around that with osmotic backwashing so you didn’t even need to particle filter it, but the particles might also physically clog the membrane element, as I don’t think they are made to pass particles very well, maybe you could find one that is, maybe a flat plate module).

This could be a great way to boost a rainwater collection system, greatly reducing the amount of rain water needed, or could be used in combination with an MBR (which provides low maintenance particle filtering and disposes of the wastewater that comes out of the RO unit). There are some things that can pass through an RO membrane, urea is one, but it gets probably almost all of the stuff, and urea isn’t harmful especially at these levels, and very improbable that anything else in the water is, I think. Obviously you can’t flush toxic stuff down on purpose but if you’re just showering, washing dishes, doing laundry, whatever went down the drain is probably something that you put on your skin in much larger quantities at some point, and probably already ingest some of (including laundry detergent, there is always some left on the clothes). Mobile Condo people, do you read me?

There is one thing that nags at me, which is that you have to really wonder why this is not done with those water recycling systems for sale in Australia. I have however read of it being done in cruise ships, and also that Marco Cremona guy in Malta used RO. Maybe it is maintenance issues or something, it seems like the main unknown here is the potential for membrane cloggage, but I think it is definitely worth trying. The Malta guy was a pro in RO system design, incidentally.

I’m still uncertain about this option, because when I called the city they said that RVs are not allowed on city lots, but it says right there in the zoning bylaw that they are, specifically referencing RVs in the relevant residential zoning areas. I need to call them again, I guess, I was actually calling about something else at the time so I didn’t ask for refs.

Anyway, the theory is that you are not allowed to “live in” or “inhabit” a trailer that is parked on the property. So suppose you have a willing homeowner who is willing to go along here. You could say that you live in a room in the house, and that the tinyhouse is just your studio.

I would need to look in more detail into the details of the enforcement in a situation like this. What sort of proof does the city need to be allowed to conclude you live in the tinyhouse? Are they allowed to go into the main house and check to see there is a room there that you are apparently using? That seems like it would be pretty draconian, basically invading someone’s home for a search operation when none of the stuff involved here even falls under the criminal code.

In the US you guys have the, what is it, fourth amendment (okay that’s probably wrong), but here the government can actually do that sort of thing under some circumstances in canada. Even if they were allowed to, though, you could set up a room with a hammock and a dresser and just call it a day. The homeowner can still use the room for their purposes, and you can say that is where you sleep. Unless the bastards can come at night and find you committing the heinous crime of not sleeping in an approved location. I remember reading that inspections were limited to 9 am to 8 pm, though maybe that wouldn’t apply… have to check.

However a homeowner might be willing to go for this sort of thing, if I owned a house and was looking for some extra cash, I might try it. If worse comes to worse and it doesn’t work out you can clear out one of the rooms in your house and your renter could be actually living there while they find somewhere else (obviously tell them the whole story before they even come to view the place and be sure they are getting a fair price, considering these details), then after they move sell the tinyhouse. Sometimes there is no fine for the first time you break a zoning regulation. Actually, the law here says you can store 2 trailers on your property, so as long as the neighbors are not harmed by it….

As a tinyhouse owner looking for a place to put the tinyhouse, though, you’d have to check into all that stuff, get the court records out for similar cases and stuff and find out what the story is, I guess. Might be useable, might not. There are a lot of other variables too, and an extra one like the risk of political problems could be the log that breaks the camel’s back and makes it not worthwhile….

Okay, this has relatively little to do with tinyhouses, but a bit.

If you think dried food has to taste poor, you’ve never tried freeze dried food. It’s actually quite amazing the sort of fidelity with which the fresh taste is preserved. I recommend buying some from a camping store to try it if you don’t believe me.

But it’s way too darn expensive. Freeze dried food is 3, 4 or more times the price of fresh food.

So what we want is a way to make our own. Once we have a freeze drying machine we can dry all kinds of stuff, including prepared entrees, meats, maybe some soup for delicious and healthy powdered soup, all kinds of stuff. This post inspired by one of the news from serenity valley videos from the Laptop And A Rifle blog, in which he notes that he doesn’t like dried food.

Okay:

So basically take a pressure cooker, that will be our vacuum chamber. I’ve tried using an aluminum pressure cooker as a vacuum chamber before and it worked perfectly. Just put some silicone oil, which you can buy at the pharmacy as lip balm, around the rubber seal.

Then I recommend food grade RTV silicone sealant as sealant and glue for the rest of the sealing and gluing in this project. It is used in making aquariums, but I had bought mine at an electronics store, active electronics. Look on the back and there are numbers referring to various standards, one of them is one for use in food-contact applications, so you know it doesn’t contain anything too toxic. You might want to clean surfaces off with acetone before applying.

In case you didn’t have a look at the freeze drying article, basically you want to remove the air, then keep the pressure below a certain level, and radiant heat gets to the food, causing the water to sublimate out of the food and it’s dry. The water has to go somewhere obviously, and you’ll see below that it is going to condense in a separate area.

The first step is to set the valves to the right positions and turn on the main pump(I remember seeing a cheaper one on nextag for $62). This puts enough water through the aspirator pumps, drawing out air. The aspirators can be the inexpensive plastic ones for $2 each, and you might want 15 or more of them because they don’t pump very much (100 ml/sec at 1.2 atmosphere input water pressure iirc). It could take 5 minutes or more to pump down adequately, I don’t know exactly. In case it is not clear, the pumps are inside the chamber, the water goes in, the air and water comes out as a single stream. They can continue pumping down to a suitable pressure because the working fluid is antifreezified water at a low temp. You might want a very small container of pure water inside the drying chamber to provide some water vapor to flush out the air a bit better, maybe there is no need.

When it’s pumped down, you would flip the valves quickly, turning to dry mode, and maybe turn the throttle valve down.

Okay, a tupperware container, indicated by the green line in the figure, is where the water vapor will travel and collect. It will collect here because the cooling coil has some water+antifreeze mixture at the appropriate temperature flowing through it, somewhere fairly well below 0 deg C . The cooling coil can just be a piece of copper or stainless steel tubing. You can buy copper tubing at hardware stores in the plumbing section, it is used for the last few feet of plumbing under sinks and to toilets so is quite common. Use a mini pipe cutter to cut it.

The antifreeze mix on the outside of the coil is for the purpose of interfacing this coil to the atmosphere inside the drying chamber. If there was no antifreeze fluid, water would deposit as a solid on the cooling coil, causing problems, with the antifreeze the coil cools the antifreeze, and the water vapor condenses at the surface of the antifreeze pool, then mixes with it, staying liquid. When I say antifreeze it could be sugar-water or maybe polypropylene glycol + water or something else suitable. For the coolant it can be alcohol if that would be practical, but inside the chamber you don’t want to use a solute that would increase the vapor pressure of the antifreeze.

The coil is shaped so that it breaks through the surface of the pool no matter what level the pool is at, so convection can always occur adequately in the pool. If at any time it was completely covered with water, an inversion layer would form i.e. the water above the coil would be hoter than what is below, therefore less dense and more buoyant, and would stay on top. That would be bad because the heat would have to be conducted through this still layer of water to get to the coil and be pumped away, which would be very slow compared to this way of doing it.

The hat shaped thing there is just to try to prevent radiant heat from getting in your pool of antifreeze. Just a sort of hat made from Al foil would do, but leave lots of room for water vapor to get by, because at these low vapor densities some room is needed.

The pink stuff indicates some insulation, again to reduce the amount of unwanted heat entering the antifreeze pool, could be made from a sheet some expanded polystyrene stuff, cut a ring or 2 out of it and stack them, then put a layer of foam beneath them, and the tupperware container inside the rings and glues everything together (might as well use the rtv sealant).

Then you got some shelving to put the food on, then a suitable vacuum gauge (ebay, make sure you get one that works in the appropriate pressure range, not those automotive ones, I got one for $16 once and simple ones are not inherently expensive, they are aneroid and very cheap to make (google that term)). You can use fittings to make the connections between the outside of the drying chamber and the inside, but when I did that thing to using a pressure cooker as a vacuum chamber last time, I used flex copper tubing from the hardware store, and 5/8 inch PVC tubing fits over that about right.

The coolant obviously needs to come and go somewhere fairly below 0 deg C, so a bucket of anti-freeze ice water, maybe sugar or alcohol-ice water would do fine. It takes about 10 kg of ice to remove 1 kg of water from the food. However this whole thing is still much, much more energy efficient than hot air drying. Plus you can dry protein containing and other stuff without bacterial growth being a problem, and there are a bunch of other perks too: Tastes way better, shape of food does not have to be a sheet, no oxidative browning, might be faster and need less food prep

The rate of food drying will mostly be determined by how fast energy can get into the food. Unfortunately freeze dried food is probably a pretty good insulator, so the middle of a piece might take some time to dry. A heating coil around the outside of the chamber or putting the chamber in the sun would help, add some mirrors for better effect. The food also should be arranged with this in mind, the source of heat is radiant heat from the walls of the chamber, food that receives little heat would take longer to dry. So maybe experiment with chopping the food into smaller pieces and see if that speeds things up.

Radiant heat from the walls of the chamber is by far the most predominant way heat is transferred to the food, almost none gets transferred in by convection because with the gas pressure and therefore density at one seventieth of atmopheric you would need gas velocities 70 times as high for the same amount of heat transfer rate, and that means 70 squared as much kinetic energy which is hard to provide…. You could however heat up the chamber with an electric heating coil of some sort or something to try to inject some extra power there.

A food safety note: if there is a leak in the chamber, allowing the air pressure to get too high, the temperature of the food could now rise above freezing, so bacteria could be a problem. Gotta seal it fairly well. Also, like with all food drying techniques, you need to verify that the food is dried all the way through before putting in storage.

The food temperature of food which still contains water (and we don’t have to worry about the dry stuff) was previously more or less locked to whatever temperature results in the vapor pressure of the water in the food being the same as the vapor pressure of the antifreeze in the cooling chamber. If the vapor pressure of the (frozen) water in the food was higher, vapor would escape and preferentially travel to the cooling chamber. Which is the sublimation, and condensation, which transfers heat from the food to the antifreeze area quite effectively. This sort of effect is used in so-called heat pipes usually with liquid methanol rather than frozen water (googlable term).

I guess this system has the additional perk that any flavor compounds that do escape the food would be trapped in the antifreeze, so you can taste it to see what you’re missing out on. Or you could use this to produce flavor extracts for molecular gastronomy or something.

If anyone builds this, please let me know.

edit: I was just wondering what the water removal rate would be, and it looks like from the stefan-boltzman law, if you take the amount of heat radiated by the walls of the chamber (293 deg K) and the 273 deg k (0 deg c sinc eit is frozen, it might be a bit colder than that actually) then you get a difference of about 102 watts per sq meter. Of course that is for a blackbody but just as a rough estimate.

The surface are of concern would be the total of the surface area of the food that intercepts the full light (so after accounting for shading). I guess you could approximate that by thinking about dividing the inner wall of the chamber into a grid and seeing how much light that is coming from each area of the grid gets intercepted. Or you could just approximate the mass of the food as a convex polygon shape and add up the surface area of the polygon, since the incident light on the surface of each polygon face would be uniform, I think, the cross section of a light emitting plate appears to have the same intensity so matter which angle it is viewed from, so if you think about looking through a hole in the polygon face outwards, towards the chamber wall, it would be a uniform 180 degrees view of uniform radiation emitting surface so matter where in the chamber the plate was located. So if it is not shaded the intensity at a surface in the chamber is always the same. We know what it is right at the surface of the inner wall of the chamber so we know what it is everywhere.

So obviously to want to space out the food to be dried close to the walls and try not to have any of the food shaded much, and if the 42 liter chamber was a sphere it would have an internal surface area of 0.58 square meters. So the maximum amount in kg of water that could be removed per hour if the food was at 0 deg c and room temp was 20 deg c would be 102W*0.58m2/92Wh+636Wh=0.081

92.5+636 is the number of Wh needed to melt then vaporize a liter of water
oh. hm so only 80 ml per hour max. Well that’s 2 liters per day. It’s useable. To increase it you would increase the temperature differential (and the food would be colder than 0, it should be about the temperature of the coolant which could be -18) either with the coolant or adding heat in some way heating the walls of the chamber or with a heating coil inside the chamber to increase the surface area involved and/or if electric coils using higher temps.

Obviously putting a tinyhouse in a garage is not perfect, but I think this could be an immediately doable option. Tinyhouse builders take note. I think this could be a real avenue to market tinyhouses, especially to homeowners that want to rent them out as micro apartments.

In my city, and many others, building an accessory apartment inside an existing house is actually entirely legal, and you don’t even need a permit. I have checked this. I have even lived in one for a while, a converted garage. And there are quite a number of them on the rental housing market, which you can see by looking on kijiji.

But a tinyhouse sans trailer chassis that could either be simply placed in a garage, so it has to fit through the door, or easily assembled inside (apparently the door height is 6 feet to 7 feet but the typical head space in a garage is 12 feet) could be more practical. Or maybe just modify the garage door. It could easily be removed later and sold to someone else, and I think this would be a real perk to homeowners considering it. I know someone who rents out their basement, and they were quite hesitant to do so, even though the basement was already converted. Investing money that could not be recovered on such an iffy project would have been out of the question. You don’t know ahead of time if you’re going to like having a stranger around, potentially with pets, or smoking or parties or whatever.

It could have excellent financial properties, and by simply placing the house on rubber blocks, excellent sound isolation from the rest of the building, which is highly desirable so you both get your privacy. Also, the hot water, heating and ventilation system and laundry could easily be separate.

If it was a no-trailer type, it would be cheaper and would surely fall under the definition of accessory apartment once installed. It would also have excellent financial properties, I would think, with relatively low capital cost. Maybe you could argue that it was not part of the house, reducing the tax burden.

A trailer tinyhouse is, what 14.5 feet max including the trailer, which probably raises you a foot and a half I would think, so the house after being assembled inside the garage has to be just a bit shorter than a regular trailered tinyhouse. You could save a bunch of money on the exterior siding which doesn’t have to be pretty, and roof, which won’t be subject to rain or snow, too. Just some sanded plywood sheathing and some urethane seems like an adequate finish.

For a tinyhouse owner looking for a place to put a tinyhouse it doesn’t look as cheery, though.

If you were a tinyhouse owner looking for a place, you’d probably have to settle for a poor view out the window, whereas a homeowner could just install some windows in the garage wall. Plumbing connections could be a problem, would have to find a homeowner that would be willing to work with you on that. Maybe you would have to get them brought to a termination inside the garage by a plumber and split the cost with the homeowner. And a house that needed to be assembled in the garage could be a real barrier, making it hard to leave if you felt like it… or you need to find a way to slide a short, long house into a garage.

Ventilation would require that the garage door be left open a bit, and maybe a fresh air intake tube be sticking out. And to get in and out you have to open the whole garage door, but that’s not so bad.

The upside is that there are garages everywhere, so you might have a good choice of location if interested homeowners are reasonably common. It would be cheaper than a normal apartment, and still retain a few of the other perks that come with tinyhouses.