Starting a new thread to post lots of pics and commentary. Not sure why I started the first one in survival but I’ll let it die.

It’s small. Maybe “tiny”. And it’s no work of art, but it will be pretty nice on the inside.   Shower surround and counters will be copper.  Prob have some slatwall or something for rifles.  
The first group of pics are of the original “shed” build. It’s 40’x12’ under roof with a porch that’s 8’ on one side and 16’ on the other.  
The company that builds it normally constructs it in a factory and delivers by truck.  Due to the mountain two track logging road, they charged me an extra $3k to build on site.  A crew of 3 Mexicans built it in 4 days start to finish for the basic structure.  I also paid extra for 1’ on center floor joists and 8’ instead of 6’ walls and the insulated wall and ceiling panels (dunno if that was wise or not). Actually their standard shed is 28’ long so the extra 8’ inside and 4’ of deck was additional $ too.  















And we stained the deck and painted it ourselves.





Next set of pics are of the temporary solar panel rack I built out of 2x4 and 1100gal rainwater collection tank and the electrical box. Being surrounded by national forest, the last thing I want is an electrical malfunction or lithium battery fire to burn down the forest or my cabin for that matter, so I elected to build a thermal barrier (aka cinder block box) between my battery bank and cabin to keep any potential fire from spreading by directing the heat mostly up.  The concrete base for the box and the tank were hand poured.  

The solar panels are 450w renogy.  There are two rows of 3, with each row attached to a victron smartsolar mppt 150/100.  As far as sizing, I tried to find a good mix that keeps the VOC of the three panels well below 150v and the output amps to battery below 100a @14.6v.












The downspout drops onto a leaf catcher and there’s a 7” filter inside the tank below it.  

There’s a 2’ 2”dia pipe inside the tank with an up angle on it to basically pump water from above without disturbing any sediment in the bottom 3-4” of the tank.  Outside is a valve to turn the tank off.  And a t joint.  The second valve will go to a hose I’ll run down the mountain for drainage, overflow etc.  and the straight section will go to a pump, which will feed a pressure tank.  



Inside the concrete box are two main switches.  One allows me to disconnect all loads from the batteries.  The other allows me to disconnect all chargers from the battery.  

You can also see the ten 106a sok lifepo batteries each with a post fuse at 125a.  And they’re all connected to a 1000a bus bar.   The solar mppt chargers are mounted on the wall and I have room to add two more if needed.  Although it’s not connected yet you can also see the aims inverter which does 12v in to both 120v and 240vac split phase.   The reason for 240ac split phase is to run the incinerator toilet which will pull around 2000w per “flush”.   There is no septic.

Above the bus bars is a victron 1000a smartshunt.  







Below are some readings from the victron app that Bluetooth connects to all the components.   You can see the 3x 450w at the time of the screenshot we’re putting out more than their nominal max of 1350w in series and putting 96a into the batteries. This is good since the panels are covered in sawdust and construction dirt.  Only one row of solar panels is connected.  When I connect both, the output will double so I should be putting 180a or so into the 10 batteries in full Sun.  

The history graph shows a cloudy day where watts drops and runs back up as clouds roll across.  




A few more pics from this week as the tongue in groove walls and ceiling are almost complete and windows are framed in.   Will have both dc and ac outlets.   Lights and ceiling fans are DC as well as fridge and other appliances.   Dc outlets will be mostly USB-C for charging phone and laptop and hardwire connections for ham radio and a car stereo.  Also a weboost antenna and a few other things like the water pump and water heater.  





the rail near the ceiling in this pic is intended for indirect lighting.  i'm going to run strip lights above and below it to light the ceiling and walls.  i'll also run strip lights along both sides of the ceiling/wall junction for more recessed lighting.



More to come….

Curiously watching as my neighbors attempted the same and were evicted by the county because they didn't have running water inside nor a usable inside toilet. County wouldn't accept the fact there was water stored on the property in an IBC tote or that that they were using a bag type camping bucket toilet.

There is an older house on the property that they are in the process of restoring and they wanted to live on site to save money. This is way out in the sticks where there is no city water and everyone is on a well. There is only 3 residences in the area including mine.

The county here wants a permit drawn on anything more than 200 sq ft and permanently attached to the ground also. Their building was not attached to the ground.

I guess the code inspector got his panties in wad one day when he was checking on the restoration.

I double and triple checked.  No building codes at all in my county.  If I connect to the electric grid, which I’m not going to do, then everything needs to be to code.  

There is a state permit required for septic and wells but I’m not doing either.

Got a great start. Look forward to updates.

Subscribed!

If not too nosey, what's your budget?

Feel free to tell me to MMOB.

around $80k for everything above the dirt.   some of the below are budget, some are what i paid.   hopefully i can take a credit portion of the electrical on taxes due to the solar stuff.   by my math, it's about $253/sqft which is about the going rate for construction of normal size houses in this area

shed23200
10 sok batteries5400
2700w renogy panels2963
victron smartshunt 1000a212
paint and stain460
bluesea 1000a busbars408
victron smartsolar 150/1001017
sunstar 16cf fridge2400
labor13500
24" gas cooktop290
cinderella comfort +4300
water heater recpro rv550
aims picoglf40w12v240vs1356
weboost destination rv650
sink500
faucet500
lighting1000
shower5000 (copper)
flooring2000
walls, ceiling, insulaton5000 (tongue in groove)
cabinets and counter2000
stereo amp speakers600
DC battery cables956
plumbing1000
1100 norwesco tank1700
concrete battery box and tank pad2000
planar 8d heater1111
fuse blocks394
fuses127
misc electrical500

Thanks! Looking forward to the thread.

@taliv the only thing I would do is add two things a wrap around porch to increase outdoor space and twenty feet of shade cloth fabric with gravel covering it as a fire barrier. With today’s water filtration technology you could build a pond and install a concrete settlement tank and chlorination system and still be cheaper than drilling a well. I would also look at a perk test for your grey water discharge just in case the state gets picky.

Thanks for the tip on fire prevention.  I’ll look into that for sure.  I have also been looking at fire suppression systems from another arfcom thread.  

The cabin sits on about a half acre clearing and half of that is in shade due to the tall trees south of it. I’m pretty much saving all the sunlight I can for solar panels if I need them.  
The rest of my 80ac is all shade except for a clearing I made at the bottom of the mountain for a 60x40 garage.  

I’m building a little pavilion in the woods too for my shooting range.  Lots of nice shady spots to chill.  I’ll post pics of it too later on

I decided to skip the well because I’d prob have to drill way over 1000’ and the electric draw from pumping 1000’ is really expensive in terms of how much more battery and solar I’d need

Ceiling is done! And here’s a pic of the shooting range.  The flat spot in first pic will be a small pavilion maybe 17x20 or so with a little storage room for targets and paint and such.  Will start it when cabin is complete. Second pic is some pistol targets. Dueling tree is About 25 yards from rtv

Are you going to go with sliding barn style doors to save space? The tongue and groove is looking good. Are you going stain it or clear coat it?

yes, sliding door for the bathroom.  sliding library style ladders for the loft too so i can push it out of the way

undecided on stain.  it's so light that during the day the whole cabin is lit up just by the natural light from the few windows.  i don't want to have to burn electricity during the day for lights so i'll keep the wood light whatever i do.

i'm trying to figure out a floor right now.  really wanted a nice hardwood but thinking for low maintenance i'll do a waterproof vinyl.  the woman wants grey wood floor but i think that would look weird.  maybe it would look good with the copper countertops and shower.  idk

We chose Slate tile for our floor because on the farm it showed less dirt. Our tongue and groove we just satin clear coat with three sanding’s. But we broke up our pine with eastern cedar.


I built doors from the cedar but after twenty years they developed some cracks. If you do cedar for doors your better off doing barn style vs panel style. I wanted to do Hickory cabinets but I couldn’t get it to dry straight enough so we did oak that my cousin had on hand.

That looks awesome! I like the cedar. The wood in mine is fir.

More work on electrical system today.  Ceiling fans operational.  I’m glad I decided not to spend $4000 on a DC AC system.  Totally unneeded

Look at bamboo flooring. Easy to put down and care for, and sturdy. The moisture barrier/foam roll works well too.

Yeah I like bamboo…

Got the big 4/0 cabling for DC from the electrical box outside to inside the cabin in place and tightened down all the connections.  Wire management is hopeless but electrically that’s some tier1 components properly fused.  Hopefully it will be fairly maintenance free.

Also got a couple DC ceiling fans in place. And put several USB-C 65w ports built in around the cabin for charging laptops phones and misc other stuff.

Tomorrow I hope to get the AC started and the recessed LED strip lights


]

Really taking shape!

Cool project OP.

Nice.  Like the way you didn't skimp on wire and homed all the batteries to bus bars vs daisy chaining and ending up with imbalances.

thanks, that's why cable management is such a trainwreck.   i went to considerable length (no pun intended) to make sure all the cables were the same length so that the batteries would stay balanced

right now i'm trying to figure out the best place to put the victron battery sense as well.  it's that little blue square on the far left battery.  it senses temp and voltage directly from the battery terminals and sends it via bluetooth to the smartshunt and both mppt chargers.    in theory, it makes it so that voltage drop from cables in between the battery and chargers doesn't affect the charging, and if the temp on the battery is too cold or too hot, it stops charging.   but...  since i can only measure up to two batteries and i actually have ten in the bank, should i connect it to the bus bar? or one battery?   i can see pros and cons for each.  i have a question into victron support, so will be interesting to hear what they say.

Really love how the micro recessed strip lights are looking




Did some electrical benchmarking on the DC side now that stuff is getting hooked up

At 12v DC

Each ceiling fan takes 1.1 a (2 fans)
Each strip of lights on max takes 6a (4 strips)
The weboost is pulling 1 a and took me from 1 to 4-5 bars!

So at night in winter when it gets dark at 5 if I’m running all of that environmental stuff, I’m pulling 27.2 a so 6 hours would be about 163ah or 16% of my battery
but i'm glad i put a variable switch on the lights, because they're a bit bright, so i'll prob run them around half power.  i tested half power and it was about 3a, so moving linearly as expected.   And 1 hour of full sun the next morning will put 180ah back into the battery, so looking great so far.

You have obviously put a lot of thought into your electrical setup.  It sounds like your planning is really paying off.

Awesome project, very well thought out. In to follow along for the ride!

And I even built a smaller version of it in my overlanding camper first and have been running it a few years.  



This is the electrical layout for my camper.   I draw the diagram and attached it to camper door so I could refer to it as needed.  


The differences are
10 SOK batteries instead of 3 green ones
1000a bus bar instead of 600a
2 victron 150/100 mppt instead 100/30 solar, an AC to DC charger and a DC to DC charger
1000a smart shunt instead of 500a
4000w inverter that does 240 split phase instead of a 2000w inverter
And 6x 450w renogy panels instead of 3x 160w

Otherwise I tried to keep everything the same, partly cause I know it works and partly because of parts commonality

Here’s a pic of my 11’ camper and a gratuitous sunrise pic from this weekend.  

Here’s a pic of the inside the cabin DC bus bars.  Pos and neg on different sides of a stud to help prevent anything accidentally touching them.   4/0 wire goes down and out to the concrete box.  The next wire up goes to the main fuse box that runs the lights and fans and ham radio and stereo and weboost etc.  the next wire up runs the Amish made 12v DC fridge.

I have maxi fuses for the 8ga wire and regular fuses on 10 and 12 ga wire.  And everything is crimped with the 10 ton wire squisher in the floor

The rest of the studs on the bus bar will go to
- a light force light bar which I’m going to put outside for exterior lighting
- the plumbing stuff (rv water heater, water pump)
- diesel air heater (just needs a small amount of juice)
And that leaves me two studs for misc loads I haven’t yet considered

The screenshot of the smart shunt was taken with fridge on initial startup, max fans and lights and weeboost.  Fridge by itself was 8.5a draw then I turned the other stuff on and it adds up correctly to within an amp of what I expected.  Solar is turned off so as not to skew results.  When I turned one series of solar panels on the -18 went to a + number as the mppt is pushing more than 18a into the batteries even though it’s raining.

Won't be long and y'all will be moving in.

Which water heater did you go with?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B084GWQLSP?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

Slick. My RV has a Truma. Ill never have a tank again.

Outstanding work on the electrical. Well the whole cabin build.

hit a snag on my DC power ports for laptops.
i got this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B3WVFKN1?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
and unfortunately, even though it says 65w pd, i think it requires the input voltage to be 2v higher than output.  so if i'm pushing about 13v to the outlet, it will probably do 5v and 9v PD standards but won't hit the 14v.   i'm only seeing it pull less than 2a and closer to 1a when charging my iphone using a fast charging cable.  and i still see it pulling 1a charging my dell laptop, which identifies it as a "slower charger".  

i'm not saying it's trash, but definitely not what i expected.

now this may be what I expected, or not
https://www.amazon.com/Charger-WOTOBEUS-Charging-Cigarette-S21Ultra/dp/B09GJTF54Z

it claims to be able to do up to 120w and is definitely designed for 12v cigarette lighter adapter. it even claims to do PPS. however, it says it takes 12-24v so maybe it will convert my 12v input to 20v output, or maybe it will just stop at 9v too.  

and i admit the changing LED to indicate the output voltage is pretty cool, but the slick form factor isn't helping as i'm trying to mount it into a wood wall.  i don't really want to have to mount a cigarette lighter socket into the wall and then just plug stuff like this in, but it may wind up being the path of least resistance

any suggestions on how i can power laptops and phones would be much appreciated.

Could you use an inverter to give you 120v in certain spaces?

If you put down vinyl floor do not restrict air flow under the cabin.

Moisture will be absorbed by your subfloor and it will rot within 4 year.

Sincerely,

-Guy who tells people not to block airflow under their cabin but they do it anyway and I deny their warranty.

I repeat, every time you put a vinyl floor down and put trailer skirting or wood around the outside edge of the building your subfloor absorbs moisture because the moisture has nowhere to go. It gets moldy and soft. You’ll call and blame the people who built the building, they won’t do anything. You’ll fix it yourself at a great expense.

i have the cabin wired for 110v ac outlets and 12v dc outlets.  and i have a 4000w 120/240 split phase inverter that runs off 12v input.  my goal was to have everything DC to avoid the inverter tax (energy loss of converting from dc to ac which i assume is around 10%).

as i mentioned, the reason i have this particular inverter is the incinerator toilet runs off 240 split phase at 2000w.   since that is a load that's only incurred when "flushing" the toilet, i was hoping to put the inverter into a standby mode.     according to the manual, it runs at 50w with no load and 21w in standby mode.  at 50w that's basically 100ah per day totally wasted.  at 21w, it cuts down to 42ah per day doing nothing.   that's 4-10% of my 1000ah battery.    Unfortunately, it seems it takes a 100w load to take it out of standby.    because the toilet starts with some low draw motors before getting to the 2000w burn phase, the toilet itself would never kick on the inverter, so one of my contractors suggested putting a 100w light bulb in the bathroom, so turning on the light would kick on the inverter, then leaving it on until it's done with the fan cool down.

all that's a long winded explanation for why it turns out i'm probably just going to leave the inverter on and eat the 100w penalty.  so yeah, i could run AC loads whenever, but i'd still prefer not to.

thanks for the tip!   i was thinking about putting some insulation under the floor.  are you saying just don't use vinyl?  if i just use regular hardwood, will it have the same problem?   TN in the forest is super humid.  definitely want to avoid mold

That makes sense.

Are you worried about water tank freezing?

The tank, no.  It’s 1100 gal and fairly flexible plastic.  I think it would expand a bit and be fine.

However, It looks like I’m building a little 30” box on the outside wall of the cabin to house the pressure tank, instant water heater and water pump.  So I will need to figure out a way to keep those from freezing.   One option is to use https://www.heatingelementsplus.com/heat-trace-cable/12-24-volt-self-regulating-cable/3-w-ft-self-regulating-heat-cable-fluoropolymer-jacket-12-24v.html

Another is to divert a bit of the diesel air heater output but I don’t really want to do that because mostly I want to heat with wood stove.

I was joking about running the flue from the toilet through the water box.  Flush the toilet and 30 min of heat from burning turds would thaw it out lol.  

I haven’t figured it out yet though

ost

Any way to keep the tank pump and water heater inside? Build it into a cabinet or make a bench over the top or something? Would keep it warm and would look better than having it hanging off of the outside

Cabin is looking awesome, nice work!

putting the pressure tank, pump and water heater inside was plan A.  i was planning to build them into the closet in the loft.  my contractors convinced me i'd have a lot more room if i moved them outside.  they want to cut a hole in the wall so air from inside the cabin can flow into the attached box.   i'm not worried about aesthetics because it's on the back side of cabin with an ugly water tank, antenna tower, concrete box, etc.  you won't be able to see it from the front.   but we will have to figure out how to keep it all from freezing

Really nice

What kind of winter temps do you have to deal with? Well insulated with mild temps shouldn't take too much, the on demand unit might kick off enough residual heat to keep it warm enough

i don't have official data, but it snowed a few inches maybe 4 times last year.  prob at least a dozen days with temps below freezing.  nothing below 0 last year.  it rarely goes more than a day or two without getting back above freezing.  that's why i don't think it stays cold long enough to freeze the tank, but definitely the pipes and water heater and probably the pressure tank

Could you rig an old school incandescent bulb in there? If it’s well insulated those give off enough heat to keep things above freezing. Maybe set it so that only goes on if temps in the box hit 40 or something.

We used to do similar up north in the winter for pump houses, and that was much colder/longer than here in the south.

Great cabin build and trailer!

If it is a small space and well insulated this could work well. Personally, if I was going to have a box attached to the back anyways I'd be tempted to add a little more space/capacity to toss other stuff in there that you'd prefer to keep from freezing.

Got the AC turned on!!!  I was sweating this a little because I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to AC but things worked perfectly.  The 4000w inverter takes 12v in and puts out 120v to all the outlets and 240v split phase to the toilet through the breaker box.  We used outlet testers which lit up saying they were wired correctly and then we ran some saws to test the load.  Ran a saw pulling 800w for a couple min.  Worked great.  So now we can shut off the generator we’ve been using for construction.  




This is the box that’s going to hold the pressure tank, pump and water heater plumbing.  We must have got between 2-3” of rain this week because my 1100g tank has about 700g in it so I’m very happy about that.  We’re supposed to get 1.5” tomorrow which should fill it up so I went ahead and plumbed the overflow.  Need to grab a hose and pipe it down the mountain.  



Here’s the bathroom door we built.  Turned out pretty nice I think.


Fridge lights and fans have been running all week.  Power draw is as anticipated.

Looks great!

Indirect led lights are coming along.  In the last pic you can see the rails that go down each side of ceiling in center of cabin and the light strip for the loft / bedroom.  First pic is over the table.