Water, sanitation, heat, power, storage

Systems

The systems that make a structure habitable. Water and sanitation decide where the house can go, and both are harder to change than a floor plan.

Most people plan the house first and discover the systems later, which is backwards. Water and sanitation determine where the house can go, and both are far harder to change than a floor plan. A failed perc test can move your build site by a hundred feet. A good spring can fix it entirely.

The order decisions actually happen in

1. Water. Where it is, whether it runs year round, and how it reaches the house.
2. Sanitation. What the county permits, and where the drainfield fits.
3. Build site. This falls out of one and two. Not out of the view.
4. Heat. Sized to the building envelope.
5. Power. The most flexible of the five, and the easiest to add later.

If you are still choosing a parcel, finding land comes before any of this. If the parcel is settled and you are deciding what to put on it, building comes after.

A note on what we host

Everything mirrored here is either a work of the United States government, and therefore in the public domain, or a state publication we have recorded the source and retrieval date for. Copyrighted material is linked, never copied, however freely its author gives it away.

Links rot. Two hosts in our own research notes stopped resolving between writing and publishing, and one of them was a federal agency. That is the whole argument for keeping copies.

• Water

  Springs, rainwater, wells

  A genuine perennial spring is often worth more than everything else on a listing. What to verify, and how to size what you catch.

• Sanitation

  Septic, and where composting toilets are actually legal

  Perc first, always. Soil that fails turns a cheap parcel into an expensive one.

• Heat

  Wood, and what actually matters about it

  On a wooded parcel the fuel is already on the land. The cost is labour, every year, forever.

• Power

  Solar, batteries, and pricing grid-tie honestly

  Design for the worst month, not the average. A system sized on the annual mean leaves you dark when the nights are longest.

• Food storage

  Root cellars, and the two-zone problem

  Cellars fail on humidity and ventilation, not on temperature. Most crops want cool and damp. Onions, garlic and squash want cool and dry.