Spectacular FLOATING HOME is Self-Built & Off-Grid

[Music] [Applause] when I was thinking about what I wanted my life to look like over the next number of years I wanted to be as close to the water as I could so afloat home became a you know a really viable option for me I sail actively and have a boat in the marina here it's also just gorgeous in the morning getting up and having a coffee and looking out we have ducks that come and visit us folks are paddling by and it was just a an appealing lifestyle that I felt I could make work it's completely independent from the grid so so aside from being tied to the dock it's it's independent from power and and sewer and water I designed and built the the entire float home the only contractors I brought in were the electricians and gas fitters so built everything I started thinking about it four years ago I spent a year planning looking into the feasibility of it and then I started building it three years ago just in my spare time around work and life and everything else so I chip away at it in evenings and weekends when I can and it's still a work in progress I started by building a barge so the barge is 16 feet wide 40 feet long and 3 feet deep and I built it from for independent watertight boxes basically that were all framed up out of locally harvested cedar and then she's thin plywood and then finished off with four layers of really heavy woven roving and chopped strand mat fiberglass and then coated in epoxy so it provides a real robust strong platform for me to build upon and that's all decked over and sealed up and then I just started framing up and building the house on top of that the house itself is 14 feet wide by 34 feet long on the main floor and then 12 feet by 24 on the second floor so there's about 700 square feet of heated living space and then there's some storage down inside the hull so when you walk in you're in the main living area which there's a sofa here and kitchen and then I have a bathroom over here with the shower vanity and composting toilet it's unfinished at the moment but it's it's in progress and then there's two good-sized bedrooms upstairs there I think about thirteen by fourteen each so good sized bedrooms upstairs there's no deck access upstairs I didn't want to put a door in because of often in the winters we get quite a bit of wind and a door is just another place for air to be leaking through so we access the upper deck from out on the floor deck out now at the front door here and then there's full 360-degree access upstairs from there ultimately there will not be a ladder here it will be a alternating step space-saving set of stairs built out of fir down under the sofa here is a sealed off battery bank and there's seven hundred and forty amp hours of batteries and they're powered by currently I've got four hundred watts of solar panels up on the roof and we'll be expanding upon that as as time goes by it's not wired with household wiring it's wired as a yacht or boat wiring which is multi stranded tinned against corrosion wiring that you would find in in boats that wasn't a requirement but it was something that I knew would help me get insurance and and being able to have it fully insured was definitely a high priority with the project my primary source of heat is a pellet stove the pellet stove has a hopper in the back of it so that holds a full bag so about 50 pounds of pellets and that will last me about a week I put a ton so 2,000 pounds of pellets they come in 50-pound bags down in the hall and I went through 14 bags last winter so it's pretty efficient I have almost two winters worth of meat left on board here the amount of waste is is so minimal it might be you know a quarter cup of ash after a week of use you can get these so there they're set the thermostat mine is is the simplest that you can get where there's just you can set the settings right there and you can turn it on high or low so there's access right there and there's there's some pellets and then I do have a secondary propane bulkhead furnace that is is used as a backup source of heat so outside in a locker I have 260 pound propane tanks so they heat the furnace I'll be mounting this here I'm just have these frames here where I'm going to be tiling behind the furnace and the pellet stove so the the LP system feeds the furnace and then a small range that came from an RV and then I also have gas lights one down here and one in each of the bedrooms which are there more is just a convenience if I come back oh no after a weekend it's a little cool in here we can turn those on and they they warm things up pretty quickly as well last year I think I spent about $700 on propane and pellets and I ended up with 2/3 of the pellets leftover so my heating costs through the year or pretty minimal on a monthly basis for safety each room has carbon monoxide detectors and then down in the hall I have explosive gas detectors as well for propane because propane is heavier than air and if it's going to leak anywhere it will leak down into the hole I've got a Halon system so there's a 7-pound canister right here so if this reaches 135 degrees Fahrenheit it it will extinguish flames within a 16 foot radius so all my heating appliances are quite close to that [Music] part of the reason that I wanted to live down here was you know I'm able to walk to most of the services and shops and stores in town but it's a long walk which is fine when the weather is like it is now but in November and rains coming sideways and that you know it's a you just have to be ready for it it's the mindset that you have it's okay I don't mind it the challenges are everything that I consume I have to carry down here and I have to carry away so it really forces you to monitor or be aware of what you're consuming I don't have a garbage pickup that comes to the end of the driveway and takes everything away and makes it disappear anything yet I use for heat whether it's the pellets or propane I have to go get it and I have to bring it back down here so it just forces an awareness of consumption the [Music] float home is insulated with spray foam spray foam was the most expensive and I was hesitant about it but I ended up going with that and I'm really glad that I did it provides the vapor barrier and since I'm out here at the end of the dock and in the winter we get quite a bit of wind it really keeps the house nice and tight I've got about our 30 and the walls are 40 in the ceilings but in addition to that it locks the whole structure together so when I am rocking around there's no racking or twisting creaking the whole home does move but it moves all as one unit so for my water and utility systems I pull water from the lake I'm a checked with the province about getting a water license and and because it's not land-based it's not required so I pull water from about 25 feet down and I'm I'm fairly far out into the lake here where there's a lot of current going by we're basically a river and there's a huge volume of water going by so the water gets pulled in it gets strained at its entry point and then goes through sediment filter from there it also feeds a five-stage reverse osmosis water filtration system that feeds the water for drinking and cooking in that there's nothing dumped overboard on the float home my gray water system is self-contained it goes through a series of filtrations which is then pumped up to the flower boxes and and evaporation takes care of it from that point there's a grease trap under the kitchen that collects any any grease or food waste that goes down the sink from there it goes into a 50-pound container that has screened and cleaned woodchips in it maple wood chips and a microbial community is set up there that provides initial treatment from there the gray water flows into another 50 pounds of activated charcoal and from the activated charcoal it flows into a sump which pumps up all the gray water from that point that's been treated into piping that's in the softening which then comes down and feeds the planter boxes and hanging baskets and window baskets that have all the flowers in so the the mulch and the soil and the flowers provide the final treatment and then evaporation takes it from there 40 gallons a day that's the maximum that I'd possibly be able to process with the flowers at the heat of summer time for the wintertime when things are too cold for evaporation to be working but I take waste heat from the pellet stove to evaporate my gray water into water vapor we have a loop that cycles through the burn box and the pellet stove which then goes into a sump that the gray water is pumped into and is heated and evaporated off in that way and then for black waste I have a composting toilet which has been up and running for about a year now and is working quite successfully [Music] so my motivation for building it I had a house about 20 minutes outside of town which was wonderful when my kids were younger living out in the forest but as they got older and their activities in town forced us to be going back and forth a lot more it was becoming more of a challenge and then as a single parent it was just a lot taking care of a house a yard plowing shoveling mowing and I just was feeling like the house was owning me I wasn't owning the house I just felt like it was limiting the lifestyle that I wanted to have and the expense of it was was overwhelming so the one thing that I felt that I could choose to do was was find a way to reduce my housing costs and I thought about living aboard a boat but with a couple of kids that were heading into the teen years that didn't seem really practical and I was in Vancouver walking docks and I saw some float homes and I thought wow I I can do that so that's what got me started thinking about the project one was to reduce my housing expenses and I knew that if I built it myself I could keep the cost down I figured I could build it in a way that used as much local materials as I could find I also felt that I wanted to get a lifestyle that reduced my footprint and set that example for my kids I wanted to show them that it was possible to have a really great quality of life but not perhaps in a traditional way and this was what I settled upon [Music] please share this video if you liked it also be sure to subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 3,751,076

Keywords: float, home, floathome, floating, house, boat, houseboat, micro, cabin, water, greywater, evaporation, grey, black, DIY, build, barge, plywood, fiberglass, fibreglass, Exploring Alternatives, 4 season, year round, living, lifestyle, boat life, dock, marina, heat, pellet, stove, propane, fireplace, safety, sailing, sailor, BC, Canada, flotation, self, built, family, kids, father, lake, solar, power, off, grid, off-grid, composting, toilet, tank, evaporate, flowers, planter, boxes, sump, plumbing, pump, winter, liveaboard, tiny, tour, sustainable

Id: F-71kVK5HcA

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/omnilynx]

I'd like to see a floating home that's on the grid.

[u/Indiesol]

So well thought out. What a lovely place to live.