The environment is important to me. Important enough that I earned two degrees in environmental science. Important enough that I will pursue a career in the environmental sector. And definitely important enough to shape my lifestyle around being green.
How will The Going Home fit in?
Tiny houses on wheels could be considered automatically eco-friendly simply because they are tiny, non-permanent structures. Compared to a normal house, they use and contain a tiny quantity of building materials. They are heated, cooled, and lit by a comparatively tiny quantity of energy. They can be towed away and the land returned to its original state in a matter of months. And by living in one, you can't help but live a less materialistic life--unless you're renting a storage unit in town or have outbuildings to house your toys!
The only necessarily anti-environmental aspect of tiny houses is that the vehicles required to tow them are greedy gas guzzlers. A newer Ford F250, for example, gets somewhere between 13 and 15 miles per gallon, and towing a big load like a tiny house will bump that figure way down; our Toyota Sienna normally gets 19-20 mpg, but while towing the empty trailer, it averaged just 9 mpg. Now, as long as you are parking your tiny house in one spot for a long period of time, the fossil fuel emissions associated with moving will be pretty minimal. Unless, of course, that big honkin' 13-mpg truck is also your daily driver! I hope to get away with just renting one when I need to move, while my daily driver will (fingers crossed...) be the 84-mpg Elio that I reserved as 25th birthday present to myself last year. (Heh, heh.)
But that's hardly the end of the tiny house environmental story. As I've mentioned before, one of the greatest things about
designing and/or building your own tiny house is that you can customize
it to match your personal tastes, preferences, priorities, and so forth. So beyond simply being tiny and not moving often, there are choices you may or may not make to reduce your tiny house's environmental footprint even more.
I'll be exploring those choices--and my approach to them--in a series of "The Going Green Home" blog posts. I'll post the links below as they come!
The Going Green Home - Part 2: Insulation
The Going Green Home - Part 3: Reclaimed Materials
What does it mean to "reserve" the Elio? Looks pretty neat from the website!
ReplyDeleteIt means I made a small down payment to get on the list of people who will be allowed to buy one before they're made publicly available...hopefully later this year!
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