I went to my cabin project yesterday and found an eerie sight- a grass fire had blown through the area and scorched all 60 of my acres.  Through some foresight and a TON of luck, my cabin build was completely unscathed.

One of the trail cams captured the action until the Herd360 solar pack burned up.


Fire in the background-
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Fire at the doorstep-
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The time stamps are accurate.

Here's a pic I took yesterday-
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Clearly, I got exceedingly lucky.  Some of that luck was self made by keeping all flammable materials away from the cabin and not allowing heavy foliage build up.

Beyond those 2 things- what can I do to help keep fire at bay?

No helpful input, but cool cabin and cool that you had the cams...

Short of digging a moat or a large gravel circle around your cabin, not sure there is much more you can do.

Glad your cabin was un-torched!!!

Maybe enclose the crawl space around the cabin and deck with sheet metal. That will prevent leaves from getting underneath and protect the exposed wood from fire. Could also place some concrete pavers around the bottom of the steps. Other than that, it looks pretty good.

That is on the long term radar, but I think it may get advanced.

Since the hill got burned off, maybe I can make use of these rocks.
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Those two things are big ones. I live in the forest and have studied this topic a lot, we had a very
large fire get within a couple miles a few years ago and it scared the hell out of me.

After "firewise"-ing the property, the next big thing is fire suppression, which most pratically means
water and a sprinklers -- unattended complicates it but it can still be done. Since you have such a
small area to cover (the cabin and maybe 20-30 feet out) and it's already relatively vegetation free,
a pretty small system work work fine. There's a study of some fires in Minnesota that showed putting
down the equivalent of an inch of rain immediately prior to the fire resulted in essentially a 100% save
rate (anything that wasn't saved had a system failure.) They had about 50 cabins with systems and
48 made it, 2 lost due to system failures.

The other big thing is the building itself, making sure there's no way embers can center eaves and
get things going. It looks like you have some pretty fireproof materials there so that's a plus.

Your area is so small a few lawn sprinklers, a pressure pump and a modest water tank would probably
get the job done.

On the bright side, it looks like the easy stuff got burned off -- you might want to consider scheduled
controlled burns with the fire dept on standby around your cabin as well. No fuel, no fire.

Is there a way to do this unattended, without an internet connection or cell signal I assume on OP's behalf?
There are several consumer water controls available if you have internet, but I haven't seen the same for cell.  
Sacrificial burning things in the brush that trigger the system might work but would be so prone to false triggers.  Heat or smoke detector?  But I guess if you don't have a water connection, you're only losing the small local tank to a false alarm, not running 100k gallons down the drain.

What is your cladding?  

Hardy Board and Hardy Plank have held up well in fire Hardie Board Article  

You may consider straw bale construction also.  

Eliminate Gutters, have longer eves.  Gutters catch small flammable plant life (when it is dry) and embers.

They aren't cheap, but there are optical flame detectors (Honeywell makes them) that use UV and IR to
discriminate flame. For something unattended I think some kind of sacrificial sensor would probably make
more sense, could be as simple as a microswitch held closed with some thread that goes through bushes --
if you had a couple for redundancy it'd work fine.

My opinion?

Get rid of the trees within falling distance of the house. Not a problem now but later? I’ve seen dead limbs way up catch an ember and burn/fall during wildfires.

Noncombustible siding around the bottom. Get that sealed off so it can’t get underneath.

Extend the noncombustible zone with concrete, pavers, or gravel that you keep a ground clear herbicide in. Even a few feet makes a big difference.

Ideally the deck would be noncombustible and have the noncombustible zone around it too. I’ve seen embers catch in weird places. Since that’s already built just make sure the safe zone extends out from any exposed wood.

ETA: I can’t see in the pics but make sure there are no gaps between the siding and the roof line. Open soffits and eaves are asking for a problem.

Add a metal mesh that is fairly small to any attic vents. You don't want embers getting inside.

Thanks guys!