13
votes
Building a tiny house on wheels - 500 days in 75 minutes
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- Title
- TINY HOUSE ON WHEELS - 500 Days in 75 Minutes
- Authors
- Drew Builds Stuff
- Duration
- 1:17:17
- Published
- Jul 26 2025
This is an incredible achievement - not just the quality of the finishes, but the overall design. It's absolutely gorgeous.
Nonetheless, it's not exactly affordable housing. I'm guestimating ~450 livable sq. ft., which brings the material cost in at approx. $210 USD/sq. ft. That's about twice the average for residential construction. My next wild guess is that Drew put in about $150,000 worth of labor (his own, family/friends, and that donated by skilled tradespeople) over those 500 days.
I'm also trying to figure out whether there's any conceivable way to make this work with solar. It's probably workable if there's no mobility requirement, at which point you're buying land and could use a septic field or composting toilet.
Yeah, even $144k for just the materials isn't exactly what I would call "affordable" for housing either, especially considering the square footage and slightly unconventional amenities. He did admit that he went overboard on some of the materials though, like the windows he picked (which were were $16k alone), paying extra for all that knot-free cedar, the quartz countertops, a $6k incineration toilet, etc. So if he was trying to do it for as little as possible he easily could have cut the material costs by a fair amount. It wouldn't have looked nearly as pretty though. :P
Solar probably wouldn't be that hard to add to it, and I'm honestly surprised he didn't do that to begin with since he already has experience with mobile solar panel installations. See his solar "car" build, and his e-bike solar camper.
You could probably store a solar array and bring it out as needed. Maybe make one that folds down the side and is motorized? Otherwise one that clicks together and sits on the ground and plugs into your battery (I haven’t watched yet, hopefully it has a large battery).
Taking away some of the more luxurious/niche items (like the incinerating toilet) he went with, I think one could get away with some of the larger "battery generators" (that are just really big batteries) and their compatible solar panel kits. I know Jackery and Ecoflow are always available and the larger models have capacities that start coming up on the first gen Tesla Powerwalls. The better panel kids are usually rated for 220W each in ideal conditions and you can link multiple of these battery + panel kits up. These are heavily marketed towards RVs, I have one of the more modest sized kits because our electrical infrastructure in my neighborhood is prone to extended outages.
Could one recover some energy with wind if the house is always on the move, or would you not get out more than you would put in?
I cannot focus long enough to watch (definitely got distracted numerous times), but curious: how is it powered and how does the plumbing work?
He intends for it to be parked at a semi-permanent location so it's just hardwired power via an external 50amp RV plug. For plumbing he has an electric water heater, outdoor water tank with a pump/filtration system, and a standard RV grey water outlet which he can just expel into a sewer inlet or septic tank. And he doesn't need to worry about sewage because he installed a propane incineration toilet.
The toilet is burning the poop with propane. I had no idea that was a thing. Sounds like a pretty stupid waste of energy.
For heating, he installed a minisplit with a peak of 1100 Watts, but he supposes it usually runs at 400-500 Watts.
Power and water isn't really mentioned, but the house sits in the parents' backyard, so I assume it's provided from their house.