jamius.com

I just ran across this short little video on how to make a micro=home. I love this concept. The thing costs around $100 to build and would be a place for a homeless person to crash. Of course, I am sure there are building codes that would make this illegal, but slap some wheels on it and call it a wagon and you are probably good to go. The only remaining problem would be a place for them to put it. If they find some remote public land and aren't bothering anyone, I say leave them the heck alone.

I would also like to see something like this in airports. It would be awesome to be able to rent a few hours in something like this to crash while waiting for a connecting flight. I believe I have heard of such things in Japan, but I have never actually seen one.

This is quite cool. I hadn't realized a shelter like this could be built quite this cheaply. It's much cooler than a tent.

I especially like the roofing material, as it would provide a lot of solar heat and light. Just need to figure out some inexpensive way to put up a "shade" as blinds would probably cost as much as the whole shelter.

I wonder if it could be scaled to something for around $300 that would be 2x or 3x the size. It could be a useful temporary shelter for someone who just bought some land and is working on say...a dome.

Heh, that's pretty neat. It reminds me of sorts of those capsule hotels they have over in Japan. And yes they look WAY cooler than a tent, unless your tent is a 10 man tent like ours is...lol.

I love the concept of the micro-home - I've gotten used to smaller houses anyway, and now the big houses look like places to dump money to me.

Only issue is living up here in the frozen white wastelands of the midwest, and winter. Something that small would be claustrophobic on long winter nights. Still, something on the order of say 600 square feet (a hair smaller than my apartment) would be doable.

One of the things that bugs me is the idea that we have homeless people. There is way too much empty land setting around doing nothing for us to have homelessness. When you could give someone a place to stay for around $100 and enable them to improve their situation by giving them things such as plant seeds and a place to grow them, it just doesn't seem reasonable to have homelessness. I have heard the federal government owns most of the land in the U.S. Why not just say here is some land and the basics you need to survive. We won't burden you with things such as building codes or anything. Take care of yourself and don't harm others and we will stay out of your way.

So now I'm starting to brainstorm about a miniature safe woodstove for a microhouse. Something you'd burn twigs in, maybe cardboard and such. Easily assembled out of cast iron plumbing parts and some concrete?

Requirements:
As safe as possible, so no really hot exterior surfaces.
Something you could fit into a very tiny space.
Some thermal mass (the concrete) since you couldn't fit a long-burning log inside. Maybe it would just be something you could run a short hot fire in when you get up in the morning, then it radiates heat for a while afterwards.
Enough top space to fit a cooking pan.

The only heater I have seen in a micro-home was a small stove made out of cans and a bowl, I believe. It burned vegetable oil. It didn't look that safe to me and didn't really have anything added to store the heat, like stones or such.

Micro homes don't often need much extra heat as the heat loss through a well insulated one shouldn't be a lot higher than the heat given off by a human being (220BTU/Hr)! A 5'x10'x8' space insulated to r20 with a 50degF difference in temp inside and out would lose 850BTU per hour.

630 BTU/HR = about two 100 watt light bulbs or 6 candles....