When someone from Discovery Trekking contacted me through this blog, asking if I thought there was a tiny house market for ultralight "camp" towels, it was a forehead-smacking moment for me. Duh. Why were my compact, quick-drying camp towels delegated to the camping bin, when they could be my compact, quick-drying tiny house towels, or at the very least my backup tiny house towels?

Discovery Trekking offered to send me one of their Ultralight towels to test for tiny house use. I asked for the biggest, almost 5 feet by 3 feet when stretched out. My first question—what size would such a large towel compress to?—was answered the moment I opened the package. They take up almost no space folded and could be compressed smaller with a rubber band. Once I unfolded the towel, I had a new question: Could a towel this light and thin actually dry me? After a test shower I had my answer: Yes.

So, the towel requires little room to store. (Now, I keep an extra bath towel on the side of a shelf in my medicine cabinet.) It can dry me completely, straight from the shower. And, best of all, it dries in a fraction of the time my traditional, fluffy bath towel dries. 

Maybe, I'll become a total convert and go ultralight with all our towels, but I still like the feel of a plush towel. Our "camp" towels, however, have earned permanent placement in the tiny house. Taking up almost no space, they're handy when the bath towel is wet or in the wash and when we have guests.

Now, I find myself wondering what other items in that camping bin might find their way into the tiny house. And I started thinking that the camp towel could do extra duty as a tablecloth, dish towel or beach coverup. Thanks, Discovery Trekking, for nudging me to think outside the camping box.

We love the toasty warmth our Kimberly wood stove throws off, but...it doesn't stay lit all night and it obviously doesn't continue burning when we're not here.

​For our first 18 months in the house, we relied on our DeLonghi portable radiant heater to augment the wood stove, even plugging in a second unit for the coldest days. We  kept the space heater(s) set at a base temp (between 64 and 70 degrees, depending on the last person to fiddle with the thermostat). While the heater is quiet, relatively efficient and effective, it takes up floor space and requires a cord. (Some of us have serious cord issues...) 

We continued looking for a more efficient, space-saving, cordless heat source. Thanks to other tiny house blogs like The Tiny Project, Tiny House Giant Journey and Jess and Tim's Tiny House, we knew to take a close look at the Envi convection heater. Its slim, wall-mounted design alone makes it a great tiny house fit—no floor space required! I also love that it blends in with our white walls. (If your walls aren't white, it can be painted.)

So, it's an obvious win-win when it comes to size and looks. But does it keep us warm?

The short answer: it certainly helps keep us warm. We chose to mount our Envi on the bathroom wall, a space the furthest away from our wood stove. Placing it in that walled space means it could never heat our entire tiny house. But we're impressed enough with the Envi's performance, that we're getting a second unit to mount in the main living space of the house. We think the two wall-mounted heaters will be sufficient to keep us at a base warm temp. Then we'll fire up the wood stove when we're here, and we want more heat. 

Some specs on the Envi:

• Low energy requirements  (475 watts; 3.95 Amps; 120 volts).
• One unit heats up to 130 square feet.
• Built-in thermostat.
• Corded and cordless models available.
• Space saver: wall-mounted and only two inches thick.
• Wallet-friendly pricing (less than $150).
• Quiet.
• Safe (even at its highest setting, it won't burn anyone).

Please click on the photos below for more details.

Sealing up our tiny house to keep rain and cold winds at bay seemed a no-brainer. But our "tight envelope" also means that moisture created inside the house doesn't have a way out unless we open a window or door. This is because one of our overlooked items was a ventilation system. Oops.

We looked at a thousand options: pricey HRVs (heat recovery ventilators), less-than-robust solar vent fans, bulky (read ugly) exhaust fans...and we didn't decide. And then we sort of forget to remember to figure out how we were going to deal with moisture in our tiny, well-sealed house.

Fast forward to winter. We cook with moisture-producing alcohol. We run water to wash our dishes. We take moisture-producing showers. We have moisture-producing bodies. You get the idea. As a result,  we have enough moisture in the air that condensation forms along the bottom of many of our windows on these sub-freezing days. (Today, with the outside temp at 12 degrees, ice crystals formed on the shaded windows.)

Leave too much moisture in a house too long and you'll find mold. Seal up a house too tight without moving air and you build up carbon dioxide in the air. Obviously, we don't want either of those.

Long term, we plan to find an exhaust fan for the bathroom to deal with both moisture and any odors. Having an intake vent on the other end of the house would bring a little fresh air near our bed. It would also bring in cold on days like today. That's where having an HRV comes in. Essentially the warm air going out heats up the cold air coming in. The smallest, most efficient HRV we've found is the Lunos e2—but it comes with a high price tag ($1000+) and it requires thicker walls than we have. We have to keep looking for a ventilation system to manage our air quality.

In the meantime, we crack windows when we cook on our alcohol stove and after we shower. Anytime the temperature gets high enough, we open enough windows and doors to move air through the house. Plus, we have a carbon monoxide detector to monitor air quality and a thermometer/hygrometer that tells us how much water vapor is in our air.

To tackle the moisture issue, we started with a low-tech silica moisture absorber, specifically the Eva-Dry E-500 that had been recommended by another tiny house dweller. As far as we can tell, it has no significant impact on the humidity of our house. Yes, it has absorbed some moisture (the beads have turned from blue to pink, so it's time to plug it in and "renew" its absorbency), but it's designed to work in a small, enclosed space—not a 250-square-foot house. So, we bought a "petite" dehumidifier, also by Eva Dry, that pulls water out of the air and deposits it into a tank. This works; we can see the water collect in the tank after we turn the dehumidifier on and we can watch the humidity reading go down on our thermo hygrometer. Plus, the machine is relatively quiet and doesn't draw much electricity.

Before we plugged in the dehumidifier, our humidity readings were regularly around 55%. Too moist. Right now, with the dehumidifier running, we're at 46%. Ideally, with the weather this cold outside and the house between 65 and 70 degrees, we would be at 35%, according to what I've read. 

Keeping the house warm in this weather, brings us to another purchase: our DeLonghi radiant heater. Actually, it's plural now; we bought a second heater, so we could position them on both ends of the house to keep things reasonably warm (around 64 degrees). We like the DeLonghi because it's quiet and efficient; once we get the house at a base temperature, we can leave the heaters on the energy efficient setting that draws lower amps.

When the weather dips in the evening, we fire up our Kimberly wood stove. With the stove burning, temps easily reach 75 degrees inside the house. We can feed the fire less and tamp it down to stay closer to 70, but lately we haven't minded the extra heat. (One important air quality note: the Kimberly stove draws air from outside—via a pipe that runs down through the floor—so that oxygen in the house isn't depleted.) The wood stove offers an added benefit, as well: it helps with our moisture issues by drying the air. 

We searched big box hardware stores, lighting shops and a host of online retailers before we found ceiling fans that seemed a good fit for our tiny house. Most we'd seen were too large, many were the wrong style, some didn't rate well for efficiency. Finally, we came across the Modern Fan Company line on Lumens.com, and that's where we found our fans.

As the company itself puts it, Modern Fan Company (MFC) products "celebrate the modern idiom through mechanical simplification, geometric forms and contemporary finishes." MFC's founder, industrial designer Ron Rezak revolutioned traditional fan design by creating the first "rotor slots" that eliminated the need for heavy blade irons. In Rezek's sleek designs, blades fit into the rotor itself. According to Architectural Record, Rezek created "graceful designs for normally clunky fixtures” while promoting "sustainable design practices." Energy efficiency meets smart design.

We have three of MFC's Altus fans spaced down the length of the house. They're quiet, effective and efficient enough to run off our SolMan Classic solar generator without taxing it. We've managed to stay cool in the house on even the hottest of days.

Since my last blog introduced our kitchen, I thought I would say a little more about our oven/stove choice: The Origo 6000 non-pressurized, alcohol-burning marine stove by Dometic.

First, though, it's worth talking about what we didn't go with. Many tiny housers choose to heat water and cook with propane, especially when they're generating solar power for other energy needs. Keeping those two energy-sucking activities off a solar setup is a good idea. But we're trying to move away from fossil fuels, and we support anti-fracking efforts. Plus, poorly vented propane setups can be a major health hazard.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is a clean-burning fuel with no toxic byproducts. It's a renewable fuel, easily available and safe to transport. If we ever got enterprising enough, we could even make our own alcohol. Another bonus: An alcohol fire can easily be put out with water--and, with no gas lines or canisters and nothing under pressure, there's never a risk of leaks or explosions.

We were introduced to alcohol-burning stoves at the tiny house conference we attended last April. We ate cookies fresh out of one oven (thanks, Kelly Ross!) and drank steaming coffee prepared on someone else's stove. We had first-hand testimonials that they worked. And now we can add our endorsement: we've made our own coffee, done our own baking, cooked our own chili, etc. Though we had read complaints about how long it takes to heat up an alcohol oven and boil water on an alcohol stove, that hasn't been our experience. It may take a little longer than a traditional stove/over, but, hey, we're not in such a hurry these days.

This stove suits tiny house living. It's compact. (Adorably so, one of us would say.) Its stainless steel surfaces are a cinch to keep clean. And, with no electronics, people report using these stoves for years and years without a hitch. 

The mechanics: each burner has a reusable canister, which gets filled with 40 ounces of denatured alcohol and will burn for 4-10 hours, depending on how high the heat. The oven has its own canister. Wool inside the canisters hold the alcohol so securely, you can even turn one over without the alcohol dripping out. It's the vapor of the alcohol that burns after lighting, and, to keep the alcohol from evaporating when we're not cooking, we have rubber discs that sit atop the openings. 

In sum: The Origo 6000 is efficient, clean-burning and attractive. It's also expensive (more than $1500!), but it's an investment we're happy with.

As we work to tread a little more lightly on the planet, we don't want to consume more resources than we need and don't want to produce more waste than we have to. With this in mind, fossil fuels clearly aren't a good choice for energy production. We've wanted to move to renewable energy sources but had a steep learning curve to get ourselves where we wanted to be.

So, we took a short cut. Instead of trying to design our own solar configuration, buy all the components and connect them into a functioning system, we went for the plug-and-play approach. Yes, it cost more initially to buy a system we could set up and have running in an hour. But we avoided underbuying and overbuying; we avoided compatibility issues; and we avoided a slew of other novice errors and a whole lot of second-guessing.

Which is a long way of announcing that we have solar power fueling the batteries that run our fans and lights, charge our computer and phones, keep our fridge humming and power our tools--with more energy loads to come. Our SolMan Classic from SolSolutions of California is a portable solar generator that's an all-in-one, integrated system we can place far from the trees that shade our tiny house and we can easily move throughout the day to track the sun. No noise, no fumes, no fuel, no additional costs, no maintenance required.

All the working parts of the SolMan Classic come encased in a weatherproof unit that sits behind the solar panels. The unit can be moved easily thanks to two heavy-duty wheels.

Here are some specs (for those of you to whom this means something):
·      Three Kyocera 140-watt PV panels.
·     Three, 110-amp hour Firefly deep-cycle, sealed-gel/AGM batteries with 3000 usable watt hours of battery storage capacity.
·      Blue Sky Solar Boost 2000E MPPT charge controller.
·      AIMS Global 1500-watt pure sine wave inverter/charger.
·      Output: 12 volts DC or 120 volts AC.
·      Digital meter for AC volts/amps/watts and cumulative watt/hours used.

Paying more than $5000 for our solar unit wasn't a decision we took lightly. It's a big chunk of our total house investment. It's not a way to save money; we could stay connected to the grid for years before our SolMan pays for itself. But when it comes to sustainability, this feels like a smart investment for our collective future.

Learn more about SolSolutions and their line of clean, off-grid products here. See our new "sun deck" here.

When we sold our bikes the summer of 2013, it wasn't because we didn't like them. They were simply too big. We had moved to an apartment, where they needed to be stored in a cramped bike room in the basement garage. When we wanted to take them on a road trip, we had the bulky car carrier and all sorts of straps to content with. 

Bill had read about folding bikes, studied reviews, even gone on a test ride. Gradually, I came along for the "ride," and agreed the convenience of a small bike was worth the expense. We bought our Bromptons.

Bromptons were designed and are still produced in West London. Buying a bike that has to be shipped across an ocean doesn't sound too green until you consider the environmentally-progressive philosophy embraced by the company—from the materials they use, the processes they employ, the energy they save, to the lifestyle they promote for their employees and customers. Read more at their website.

We love them. They're small enough to store on a shelf in the closet or, when we're on the road, behind our seats in the car. They'll be an easy fit in the tiny house! To use them or put them away, it's a simple, 15-second fold/unfold process once you get the hang of it. And, best of all, they're a comfortable ride. They're not mountain bikes, but they're great on the nearby W&OD trail, and we've already taken them on one cross-country road trip.

My review in sum: The Brompton is the perfect bike for tiny living. Expensive, but worth it.

Wondering where you can learn more about these folding wonders? We test drove and purchased ours from the friendly, knowledgeable folks at Bikes@Vienna. They sell five brands of folding bike brands. Or, if you don't live near Vienna, VA, there's probably a Brompton dealer closer to you.