I just finished one year at Terraformation. I learned a lot about reforestation, carbon credit markets, and native ecosystems. There is one non-obvious topic I learned about: how to build an off-grid home.
Build is a strong word. This post is not focused on doing-it-yourself, rather on assembly from multiple partners. I got to work with key pieces of an off grid project: Shelter, Power, Water, and Waste. I'll cover these areas. I’ve yet to purchase and develop land myself, so I won’t cover land acquisition, permitting, and preparation.
I didn’t build an off-grid home at Terraformation, but their products are off-grid seed labs. There's good overlap and I’m sharing what I’ve learned with future James, who will one day build his own off-grid retreat.
Shelter
This is the biggest cost for any project. Conventionally, we’d think of hiring an architect to draw up a plan, engineers to scope the land, and builders to bring materials on-site. I think it’s easier to compress a few of those steps and work with a prefabricated home builder. What does prefab mean? This means most construction is completed off-site in a centralized manufacturing facility. The partially completed structure is delivered to the property and installed. Usually, the last 10% of a prefab build is completed on-site (i.e. completing electrical wiring, foundation, and fitting pieces together).
Building a new home in the Bay Area or Los Angeles runs in the $400-600 per square foot range for a perfectly flat lot. In more remote places, costs don’t actually get cheaper because labor often needs to travel to the build site. In South Lake Tahoe, quotes for interior remodeling run around $300 per square foot. Imagine what it would cost to build from scratch! On top of this, build cost is a moving target due to contractor or material delays. Prefab comes with natural advantages in cost and time due to how the homes are built. Two modernized prefab home builders (Connect Homes and Cover) run in the range of $200-400 per square foot, with much faster build times. In the case of Cover, they promise a fixed price, which is unheard of in the construction world.
How should we compare prefab home builders? Both Connect Homes and Cover are based in Los Angeles—no surprise as housing is a major issue in California. Both companies use similar models: they do 90% of a home build in their factories in LA and then ship to site for installation and configuration. Each takes a “lego block” approach to building. They choose the size of the smallest piece and use that as the building block for the rest of the structure.
The key difference between the two companies is the size of lego blocks. Connect Homes uses the structure of a shipping container, roughly 8x40’ as their smallest lego block. Cover uses a panelized wall to create even smaller lego blocks, compact enough to fit inside a shipping container or in a truck. Their pieces don’t need a crane to lift on-site. The difference between the two comes down to installation, customizability, and shipping cost.
The nature of shipping cost means Connect Homes will cost more to ship. Their lego blocks are large, similar to customized shipping containers and as a result, shippers charge extra for having to deal with containers that are slightly customized and different from the majority of the containers that they own. As an example, we were quoted nearly $20,000 to ship a Connect Home module from San Bernardino, California to Kona, Hawaii. Cover has an advantage in shipping cost: the products can be placed on a truck or inside shipping containers–so they don’t look different from other eCommerce goods and come with better shipping rates.
In terms of customizability, Connect Homes allows for two story buildings (even higher if they wanted to), because of their steel beam structure. At the time being, Cover only builds a single story, but I suspect this is a limitation of resources and engineering effort. Both companies will allow for customization at the design level, but since Cover uses smaller lego blocks, more customizations are possible.
Hopefully this gives you some idea on how to think about tradeoffs between different structure types and prefabricated home builders. There are many more out there, but these considerations will allow you to compare providers. I’m excited to see how the prefab space develops. We’ll see building costs come down even further as some of these companies grow (Connect and Cover are early stage startups), but if I were doing a project today, I would go with a prefab as it’s already a 10x improvement over the incumbent.
Power
To power our seed banks, we used solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and a backup generator. Coincidentally, our seed banks used what an average home in California consumes in electricity per day (roughly 20 kWh). Our system came with 24 solar panels rated 365W each (REC), 16 kWh battery capacity (Blue Ion), and a 5.5 kWh gasoline powered generator (Honda). This was built for a region with tons of sun, but if you’re in an area with less sun, you’ll need a larger solar array. Solar and battery installers are ubiquitous enough at this point that providers will scope the exact system you need based on your location.
What’s the right way to think about trade-offs within the power system? We'll start with the largest cost component, the battery.
The range of battery cost is as wide as the quality. Given cost of maintenance or replacing a battery in a remote area, I think it makes sense to invest in a high quality battery that will last 10+ years. An important battery terminology to understand is cycle count. Cycle count is the number of times a battery can be discharged in its lifetime. A cycle count of 1,000 means a battery can be used and recharged 1,000 times before end of life. A threshold always accompanies a cycle count, for example: 2000 cycles to 50%. This means it can be drained to 50% battery level and recharged fully for 2000 cycles. When it drops below the threshold level, the cycle count also goes down. So, you want batteries with high cycle counts and an ability to discharge to a low percentage (batteries cannot go to 0%, since you need to leave some juice to turn on the system). Most residential home batteries have low cycle count and high thresholds. The reason is simple: residential homes tied to the grid only drain the battery in blackout situations and therefore batteries are not often cycled. It’s important to specify to your solar and battery partner that you are building off-grid, because that changes which models to pick.
Solar panel technology is straightforward and the contractors will size the system for you. You may want self-cleaning panels if you are in an area that doesn’t get too much wind to blow off the debris and dust, but 3xx Watt panels are recommended at this point in time.
With any solar panel and battery system, you will need a back-up generator. The sun doesn’t always shine and you don’t want to be left to the whims of the weather. Always be prepared. A generator running off diesel or some other carbon fuel is a requirement for any solar panel system, preferably one with an autostart function, detecting when your batteries are about to fall below a dangerous threshold (i.e. 20%) and automatically kick start the generator to either charge the battery up to a certain level (i.e. 35%) so that you can survive the night until the panels are pulling energy again to power the home and charge the battery.
Water & Waste
Water for human use comes in a few ways: pumping from a source, water catchment, or water storage. The location, rainfall, and proximity to water determines the most efficient water solution. In all cases, there will be some type of filtration, usually through reverse osmosis. Regardless of how you source water, storage is the most cost effective way to have more water on hand. This also provides water redundancy (always be prepared).
An interesting company called Source happens to have the perfect solution for off-grid situations: Hydropanels. Their panels use solar to create a differential in the humidity to condense water from air, which is then filtered. They literally pull water out of thin air. The best part? These solutions are standalone and don’t need to plug into a water source, which makes them a perfect fit for off-grid needs. Based on my discussion with them: each hydro panel costs $2,000 and 2 Hydropanels produce 6 Liters of water per day (equivalent to a 12 case of 500mL water bottles). It’s less efficient in colder climates (where you have less of a water concern), but the variance between dry and humid places is only 10%, provided there is enough sun (the company is based in Phoenix).
Since you won’t be ordering from Amazon Prime too much, most waste will be compostable. The 7 foot compostable toilets from Phoenix are the favorites we used: easy setup, low maintenance to the tune of once a year, and works with or without water. Since requirements in waste can drive water needs, water and waste considerations should be handled in tandem.
I did not spend much time around water systems for other uses: washing hands and dishes, showers, and flushing the toilet, so I’ll refrain from commenting. There are a ton of people detailing their off-grid systems on YouTube, such as this grey water system that reuses water from laundry to landscaping. This is a critical rabbit hole for any off-grid home.
Upon writing this, I realize how little I know about off-grid. Recycling water systems, land preparation, and permitting process are just a few things that I have huge gaps in. This is a starting point and I hope to follow-up this post in the not-too-distant future with further learnings!