Description

Once you’ve created/purchased your tiny house, and found a place to park, the next challenge will be your utility connections. If you can legally connect to an existing grid, you’re in luck, but this can come with hefty connection fees and in many places, you will need to create your own grid (by installing your own well and septic system). Most counties have strict rules governing wells and septic that make the installation expensive. In some places the well and septic can cost as much as the land. Once you invest, you are “tied” to the land and become reluctant to return to a gypsy life. Even in center-city locations, short term access to parking on undeveloped land can carry a hefty cost for connection and in-ground pipe systems. This design is intended to answer many of these challenges.

I am proposing the creation of a small utility unit with 10 days storage of all of the consumable utility products for a tiny house: fresh water, grey water, black water and propane. This unit would include solar-powered pumps, would be parked near a tiny house and then be serviced weekly by a local porta-pottie company. I am currently looking for investors to take this idea to the prototype stage with the hope of selling it to a porta-pottie company, who would build the units, secure the permits as an extension of their existing permits, and least the units to tiny house owners in their service area.

Consider a large developer with extensive urban property, waiting for approval of his plans by local government. His property would commonly sit unoccupied for 3-5 years while he is waiting. Access to temporary, portable utilities would allow him to offer his land to a tiny house community on a short-term basis. When the planning approvals are completed, he is likely to have another new parcel nearby, and he could move the community to the new site. The ability to occupy and utilize the vacant land would be the developer’s offering to the neighborhood, and the occupancy of vacant land would prevent misuse by a random transient population.