Comment by Beached | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beached | Hacker News Reader

You may try looking into Tiny houses, they may cause some problems with zoning in some area's so picking a location will require some research.

A tiny house can easily run under $20,000 fully equipped. Some people have been able to build them for under $10,000.

Fix the house with solar panels, maybe a small wind turbine for electricity. tin roof with a rain water collection, you can run is through a 3 stage or 5 stage filter into a small water tank under a couch. Solar or propane hot water heater, propane gas stove. Grab yourself a 5-mile wifi- antenna to pick up wifi from coffee shops nearby. Composting toilet or a standard RV backwater holding tank to take care of the nasty.

A tiny house with this set up can take care of all of your basic utilities and if you are frugal, resourceful and pick up recyclables, you could drive down the cost possibly under $10k.

Check out this video for my favorite tiny house build. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VckbqU4kK2I

Edit: You will need a car/truck that can tow it around. But an automobile would definitely come in handy if you still want to commute into the city.

Where would you typically park them for an extended period of time? Is that what you mean with zoning problems? Do people usually try to hang out in a large parking lot for long enough? Or perhaps just get outside the city limit in what looks like abandoned land?

Also, how do you deal with the waste water in the long run? Stop by RV parks and empty out your septic tanks?

Location is the hard part, but you can "Rent" from someone with some land. If an individual has a few acres, they may agree to let you park for a small rental fee. Also, if you buy your own land, technically a tiny house falls under the same classification as an RV, but some counties may want to "Keep the riff raff" out or to ensure a certain amount of revenue from property tax. Ask the local count if they will permit the use of property as a residence in a tiny home.

waste water can go into a holding tank, then disposed at an RV park for a small fee. if you purchase land, you can build a septic tank on your land and set up an RV hookup to your septic field. get it pumped once every year or two.

I did some research on this few months ago. The rules and regulations are different from state to state, city to city. One of the tiny house builders I spoke to, told me that when a client comes to him, they often don't know the rules of their area, and it usually takes a lot of time for the builder to find out those rules (online research, call up gov offices etc). He was saying he'd pay good money for a "rulebook" - if someone can compile the rules and put them in an easily searchable format (and keep them updated).

So yeah, there are zoning requirements and it's a good idea to do research before going for a tiny house.

> Grab yourself a 5-mile wifi- antenna to pick up wifi from coffee shops nearby.

This sounds incredibly illegal.

:)

Beyond illegal, it's an abuse of trust. Very much "this is why we can't have nice things" behaviour.

I hope anybody doing this only uses it outside of business hours or something to not be a total jerk.

> …illegal…

Barring access controls (like secured-wifi or a 'captive-portal' requiring authentication), I doubt this is illegal, at least in the US.

Lots of people and businesses leave their wifi open specifically to share with anyone within range. The few pennies of marginal cost are outweighed by the desire to be generous, or by actual goodwill earned from neighbors and passers-by.

And there may be no marginal cost at all! On typical unmetered broadband-plans, until the link is saturated, bandwidth is a "marginally-free" resource that expires worthless every second if it's not used.

So it should be used! An extra person hopping on is (until saturation) as close to a "free lunch" as you'll find in economics. It's the sort of ultra-efficient practice that law and culture should encourage, not stigmatize.

It also probably won't work unless you can figure out how to get a similar antenna on the other end.

I'm sure it's a problem if you don't ask, but one could always ask, or maybe even offer to pay for the access.

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