Actually Tiny

Sound on! We are mostly absent from Actually Tiny this year as we focus on our other business, but I couldn’t help but take a moment to share a peek at our unique off-grid system.
This hybrid wood-fired/solar passive hot water system provides year around hot water for us with almost no electrical inputs.
This type of system is design, location, and climate zone specific, but here in the Pacific Northwest where something like this actually makes sense, it allows us to harvest heat from the woodstove that would normally just be going out the chimney and use it to knock out the second highest energy load in most houses, the hot water heater.
Small woodstoves can be a carbon disaster or at least reach carbon parity with other common fuel sources depending on the overall energy efficiency of the structure. Using solar whenever possible for cooking, heating, and hot water, combined with stove pipe heat recovery and cooking on the stove top helps to make small stove ownership as energy/carbon responsible as it can be.
Safety note: PLEASE do not try to reproduce this system based on what you see here. I promise that at some point I will put up an online course on how to design and build these types of systems safely and effectively.