Off-grid float cabin: retirement tiny dream home in BC wilderness

clean and I discovered Kyle river on a camping trip and on a fluke we rented a little tin boat up the lake and saw our first float cabin fell in love and then went searching welcome to hole-in-the-wall cabin number three on Powell Lake the third cabin that our friend John built it's a constructed on Cedar Law float cedar logs are very large as well as very buoyant in the water and they tend not to waterlogged too fast over time in fact our log float originally was a helicopter landing pad for a local logging company John tore the logs apart put them back together and built our cabin on the wall is a traditional area for float cabin since the mill was built at the beginning of the 19th century because of our steep granite walls glacial cut it's very hard to find flat land to build on plus the logging was very transient going from place to place so the logical solution was to build their homes and their workshops on floats and told them everywhere they went Wayne and I paid $30,000 for our cabin in 2001 our rationale was at the time $30,000 was around somewhere around 20 25,000 us that that would be about the same as taking a fancy cruise so for the investment even if it didn't work out it would be a good investment when we first bought our cabins one of the first things I wanted to do was to have a garden it as you can see floating on a lake makes that a bit challenging this is my float garden what we did was build a strong cedar log float and then on top of that build a deck and foreign raised beds so now you can see that I have a vegetable garden I can grow things like asparagus carrots potatoes tomatoes just about anything you can grow in a regular garden on shore living off the grid in a 675 square foot water access only flow cabin is a bit unique but for Wayne and I it's perfect as for solar power you can see there's panels everywhere some of them individual some of them meant to power the cabin in general take a look over here that's the Gemini my writer's retreat I go in there with a little laptop and I got a power panel to charge my battery in my laptop and when I'm not in there writing books we could hook that up to the main grid right around here I'll show you the grid this is the control center it doesn't look like much bunch of switches that I don't understand but we can change the power from my writers retreat the Gemini to the cabin we use two six volt golf cart batteries hook together in series to provide a 12-volt battery and then in parallel with other sets of two to give you as much energy as you need off the grid it's important to keep the weight off the float so we have a floating woodshed for those long winter months Wayne and I sometimes call ourselves city folk that's the life we had before coming to live on pala Lake Marg and I moved in on a part-time basis still teaching in Los Angeles for me and Margie a educational administrator down there and then in 2005 I scooted from school and early retirement in order to live here for the rest of my life that's how much I liked it in addition to heat our wood stove helps provide us with power generation through our thermoelectric generator this is an experimental model that gives us a trickle charge on our batteries in the winter living off the grid it makes for a very simple life I know how much electricity I have I have just enough to get lights and charge batteries and run computers and a cell phone to keep a voice link with my mother who lives in town up the stairs is our loft bedroom just all the things I don't need is what I think about when I'm up here I don't need a lot of light I don't need a lot of electricity accommodations are small but we have everything that we need we have a nice big double bed made from two twins a lot easier to get up here I need a little propane to cook with propane makes things like stoves and refrigerators easy we get our water directly from the lake a pipe goes down below the cabin and we draw the water as much water as you need now because the water goes back to the lake we want to be very careful and we use only biodegradable items as well as make sure we wipe and clean everything before it actually goes into the sink our newest room is a bathroom earlier this year we decided to replace our out house with a in-house composting toilet at the top is the toilet at the bottom is the compost bin inside the toilet is looking down into the the composting section and it's a drum when you are done using the toilet you just add a scoop of mulch to help the composting process pull up the handle and give it about 6 rotations there really is no odor one of the reasons that there is no odor is we have a fan going it's at the back of the toilet and it runs all the time helping to suck the air up through the exhaust pipe through the roof we chose the off-the-grid model but we do have a solar panel and a battery dedicated to the fan the rest of the process doesn't involve electricity when the drum becomes fairly full there's a process for turning it backwards and letting the compost fall into the tray you leave it in the tray for a couple more weeks and then it's ready to take out and put in either ornamental garden or even the forest to get to the top of our cliff where our old outhouse and my potato garden are you have to go up four flights of stairs this is my hillside potato patch it's one of the few things that I can grow up here but the critters don't seem to bother and I call this my double-barreled watering system because it has two 55-gallon barrels with a tarp to collect rainwater so as it rains the barrels fill feed the hose and through gravity I'm able to water the potato garden with my float garden and the pots on the deck I can grow some great things to eat during the summer months without this floating garden though it'd be almost impossible the potatoes up on the hill or about the only thing I can grow on shore that the critters won't eat but the floating garden is on a pulley system you can see the ropes in the water so when I'm not working on it I can pull it out to that bloom well away from any land critters the only thing I have to really worry about there are the Canada geese who have been known to stop by for a mid-morning snack you can see my solar panel there that runs my water pump to water the garden so that I can water my garden with a hose just like I was in town wayne does work he's an author and I also write I'm a consultant that writes grants for a school district so we find that we can mix our lifestyle here up off the grid with a business that matches the kinds of time that we want to have as an offer what better place to write look what we don't have I don't see any internet I don't see any TV I don't see the distractions you have where are you going like so that's what makes writing I think so unique at remote location kind of like on Walden Pond well here's on a lake you you do need the internet occasionally but it's it's there in town a boat ride away in the winter we're pretty remote it's really peaceful there's a lot of beauty in all the different seasons but most people don't the Midway for the summer months of in and methylating they even bring their television their internet with them satellite technologies and that's something we've chosen not to do radio serves its purpose so I'm not totally without comforts of home I guess you could say that I'm with all the comforts of living in the middle of nature we're in the city we find we don't really enjoy the seasons and enjoy the weather as much as we do up here sitting inside the cabin we can also watch the weather around us looking through our glass doors like looking through a picture window into a television set that's always changing clouds passing by rain pelting on the lake there's nothing better than a warm fire on a winter day watching a storm outside it isn't a day that goes by that something different happens they are swimming by in the lake geese waking up on the logs loons crying in the water fish jumping and there's just so much way to go guy way to go we're in the city we find disruptions we don't have time for each other the way to do it the common plus we don't have time to enjoy nature that's all around us there's so many things that we can do in the outdoors that living in a small cabin doesn't seem to be small at all

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,568,464

Rating: 4.8326855 out of 5

Keywords: tiny home, small home, small space, floating home, float cabin, home size, shelter, crafted home, back to the land, simplicity, simple living, powell lake, british columbia, margy lutz, wayne lutz, powell river books, writers retreat, solar power, photovoltaics, renewable power, off grid, off the grid, wind power, thermoelectric power, greywater, composting toilet, composting

Id: 4suoDPC0ip8

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/bytemovies]

Surprising that they get enough power from solar to run a fridge, lights and fans and such.

[u/TheWalrusCometh]

Some of this doesn't quite make sense to me. The guy is apparently educated enough to be an education administrator and they had enough money to consider $30-40k a "nice cruise" (you could do a round-the-world cruise for that). So they've got money.

But yet...

They went through the effort of a thermoelectric generator, but couldn't be bothered to build a proper solar array or proper array of batteries? Anyways it would seem they could have smartly invested in a better power setup instead of just some cobbled together stuff.

Not to mention having to haul in propane constantly isn't what I'd consider off-grid.

Not really house related, but I rather doubt the woman working as a "consultant" in any real capacity if she's got to get in the boat and go all the way into town to send/receive emails.