Heating

How do you heat a small Tiny Home? It doesn't require a wood stove. That would be overkill. We have one electrical plug in from the barn nearby, and we use it for heat and cooking in the winter. We have this 1500W electric heater, and it increases the temperature of the room from 0 degrees C. to 20 in 1 hour. This tiny electric heater is all we use. It's a bit noisy, but it doesn't take long to heat the room and then we turn it off. When I spend the night, I change the setting to the lowest and let it come on when it's cold. The heater doesn't tell me what this temperature is, but I've found it to be around 16 degrees. So during the night, even when it's -20 C. it only goes on once or twice during the night. Apparently it costs around 21 cents per hour to run a 1500W heater.

I recently spent 24 hours in the Tiny Home for 24 hours during a cold -20 cold snap. During this time, I ran the heater for approximately 5 hours during the 24 hr period. During the day, the passive solar heat brought the temperature up to 30 degrees C. and I actually had to crack the door open just to cool it down. So for 24 hrs it cost around $1 to heat the home to keep it between 18-28 degrees. That's warmer than I keep my house in the city!

I wish I could tell you that I used the solar panels to run this stove, but that wasn't possible. And that's another post...