How to heat your off grid home
Now you’ve picked a place to live, getting all settled in or maybe you’re planning to live off grid and you want to efficiently heat your home.
Well, this post will talk about the sources and fuel we’ve decided to use and how it has worked for us.
This is an honest opinion post and everything we will talk about are things we have done, tried and figured out already for ourselves.
I’ll tell you how you can think about different factors to figure out how you want to heat your home.
Take these as ideas and let this post lead you to your goals.
To figure out the best way to heat your home, you need to figure out the square footage of your house. This will allow you to determine the amount of BTU’s needed. Then you will know what heat source size you will need.
You need to think about where you live, how the climate is, where you will get fuel, how much it costs and how much you want to spend.
For us, we live in a wooded area, live off grid, and the temperatures drop below freezing for long periods of time so we decided the easiest and most efficient way is to use a wood stove and propane heater.
The propane heater is a convection heater sold by Mr. Heater. The model name is called “big buddy.”
It can be run on two one pound propane bottles. Making it very portable.
We run ours on a 30 pound propane tank with a 6 foot long hose and regulator .
We only use this heater when the wood stove is warming up. When you use this heater to just raise the temperature in the room. It is very efficient and a 30 pound tank lasts for months.
With this type of heater you will always want a carbon monoxide detector and proper ventilation.
Our favorite way to heat the tiny house is with our wood stove. We went with the cheapest stove. It’s really not a bad stove for the price we paid.
It’s small, doesn’t take up much room in our tiny house. Being small it’s also not too heavy so we can move it easily to clean or rearrange.
Again, when deciding your heat source think about factors. Think about the materials your home is made of. Learn all the options you can heat your home with. Like using a wood stove is dry and using a propane heater actually raises the humidity level.
I suggest doing your own research when you are trying to heat your home to get it just the way you want.
You also need to think about the fuel you will use.
For the wood stove we use cut wood found around our property from dead trees.
We use fire logs and blocks mainly. One type of fire log we use is called the envirolog.
These burn for about 3 hours. They are super easy to light and made from recycled materials that are eco-friendly.
We also use kiln-dried compressed saw dust blocks. These burn slower, from around 4-8 hours depending on how hot you burn your fire. It takes a little skill and practice to master these.
We figured out it is best to start a little twig or kinlin fire first, let them turn to hot coals and then put your block on.
We light both of these up for when we hang out in the house during the day when its freezing out. We like to light them before bed throughout the night too.
We don’t light them at the same time. We change it up here and there.
It is certainly work which ever way you choose to heat your home. We are constantly chopping wood, gathering our blocks, collecting kindling, emptying the ashes, stoking the stove and building fires.
But this is the type of work that is rewarding in the end. You are nice and toasty warm.
There’s also just something nice about a wood stove, it really sets a good cozy atmosphere.
I also find some ecotherapy in collecting, gathering, chopping and lighting fires. So the work is rewarding too!!
Thank you for reading. Feel free to leave a comment and tell us how you chose to heat your home. Tell us about the structure of your home and the climate you live in. We love hearing stories.
This post also contains affiliate links that leads you to the products we use everyday. If you buy from these links you give this website a small commission at no extra cost to you and you can be nice and warm in your tiny home.
Todawoods