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> The cabins are handmade by Treesign, a local builder of tiny homes. Each house had to be hauled into position by a truck along several miles of dirt roads. T

> The cabins are handmade by Treesign, a local builder of tiny homes. Each house had to be hauled into position by a truck along several miles of dirt roads. This isn't sustainable living, it's a niche luxury product.

null_object 4y ago
> This isn't sustainable living, it's a niche luxury product. I agree, this article is a mis-characterization of what 'off-grid' should mean: not only do these sorts of cabins have all modern utilities, they're also constantly serviced by the owners, who themselves need to drive around to each of them, probably destroying any 'ecological' benefit they might otherwise have. In nordic countries cabins similar to this have existed for centuries - the only change here is that they've become a commodity for middle-class city-dwellers. Also by placing them in the middle of forests instead of (mostly) near the edges or alongside some water, these cabins simply give affluent vacationers the chance to experience the illusion of 'returning to nature' or living in some idealized 'primitive' state, at the cost of someone else needing to (literally) clear up their shit afterwards, and also transport water and other essentials deep into the woods, which would otherwise be free of traffic and disturbance to the animals and flora that have been there for millennia. As for the suggestion in the article that they could extend the season through the winter with some sort of battery top-up (because of the lack of natural light), anyone who has experienced trying to get to a place out in the countryside (and even near to a road, let alone in the middle of a forest), after a meter of wet snow has fallen would never even dream of suggesting this as a vacation option. Not only would the experience turn into one of raw survival (which might even be doubtful if the heating failed), but living in an isolated spot with barely 3 or 4 hours daylight each day would be stretching most people's endurance.
- ajuc 4y ago
  The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. If you do that - it doesn't matter what the source of heating, energy etc. is, and what kind of a car (if any) you drive. Even if it's all coal and fossil-fuel powered - you are order of magnitude more sustainable than people living in suburbs with solar panels, heat pumps and Teslas simply because you waste so much less energy on building and transporting stuff to make living there possible.
  - danhor 4y ago
    No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude. People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).
    - ajuc 4y ago
      It's order of magnitude, easily. For example - if you live in a commie-block - you don't need and often you don't have the option to own multiple cars per family. Often you don't own a car at all. Parking space is at premium and walking/public transport solves most of your transporting needs anyway. So that's the difference between producing 1.75 cars per family vs let's say 0.75 in the city. And then driving let's say 5000 km per year vs let's say 30 000 km per year. And changing these cars every 3 years vs every 6 years. Heating is another thing. Surface area of my block is maybe 4 times the surface area of a detached house. But it houses 16 times more people. But that's nitpicking. The big thing is infrastructure. How many km of roads, cables, pipes, etc do you need per 1 detached house vs 1 flat in a commie block? How much concrete and steel do you use for that? How much energy is spent building and maintaining that infrastructure over the years? My 4-stories commie block houses 16 families in a plot that would be roughly equivalent to a plot where 1 detached house would stand in the countryside. And it's pretty low-density as far as city planning goes. You could easily make it much denser. There's a small park and a playground in that plot of land. So that's ~1/16th the infrastructure to service the same number of people compared to the countryside. And building the infrastructure is cheap compared to maintaining it for decades. The real unsustainable part of suburbia is maintaining all the extra infrastructure that low population density housing requires. If anything - 1 order of magnitude was an underestimate.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        I didn't follow the car replacement schedule line. Why would a suburbanite replace cars every three years vs six for a block dweller? Both of those seem extremely short to me.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > at the cost of someone else needing to (literally) clear up their shit afterwards, and also transport water and other essentials deep into the woods, which would otherwise be free of traffic So, Burningman for suburban families…
ramesh31 4y ago
We’ve had these for decades, and they’re called trailers. But slap some shingles on it and call it sustainable, and you can charge middle class people $200 a night for the privilege of it.
stephen_g 4y ago
That in itself isn’t necessarily that unsustainable - prefabrication (as long as the factory is somewhat close to the final site) can be much better than building on site because you need to move the thing once instead of having multiple workers travel out to the remote site every day for weeks, plus hauling in all the materials and then hauling out a lot of waste. Tools in the factory can be powered by electricity from the grid (and factory roofs are usually pretty good for solar), whereas on a remote site you would probably be using a diesel generator. So there are potentially a lot more pros than cons.
dingdingdang 4y ago
The point that the owner is openly looking to "buy a Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck" in order to drive around and battery pump the individual houses just makes the whole thing mega awful for me - at that point surely the proper green option would be to have a little wood-stove in each house which would easily be offset by the natural bio-sequestering in large surrounding woods!!??
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >at that point surely the proper green option would be to have a little wood-stove in each house which would easily be offset by the natural bio-sequestering in large surrounding woods!!?? Even if you lived on a plot of forest that provided enough timber sustainably satisfy your energy needs (obviously everybody can't but why not let those who can/want to do so?) you'd still have every idiot coming out of the woodwork to complain about local air quality. It's easier just fractionally poison some watersheds half a world away building batteries and then charge up those batteries with grid electricity of mixed provenance giving you a veneer of plausible deniability than deal with the idiots next door who have a small but easy to quantify gripe.
- avianlyric 4y ago
  They use LPG for heating and cooling already. The battery isn’t needed for that, so a wood stove wouldn’t change anything. Their primary issue is that there just isn’t much sun light in the winter. Not only is the duration very short, maybe 7 hours total per day, but the angle of incident is extremely low (sun doesn’t rise very far), making shading a serious issue. Conversely electricity consumption will be higher because lights need to be on longer, due to the reduced daylight hours. To top it all of, be so far north also means the intensity of sunlight is lower, so the energy delivered by a each sq meter of solar panel is lower compared to a similar panel near the equator. Put that all together, and collecting enough energy for functional illumination, and pumping water can become a real challenge.
MisterTea 4y ago
The interiors of these things are so sterile that it completely detracts from the natural surroundings. It's like a sci-fi story where a room in an affluent city apartment is teleported to the middle of the forest. It's lame to even try and call this off-grid living. This is glamping for people who are too afraid to leave the city behind. A real off-grid cabin is like a hunting shack or a boy scout cabin: four walls, a roof, beds, a table, and an outdoor shit house. Heat is optional from a fireplace or gas/kerosene heater. A step up would be indoor plumbing and a basic kitchen.

null_object 4y ago

> This isn't sustainable living, it's a niche luxury product. I agree, this article is a mis-characterization of what 'off-grid' should mean: not only do these sorts of cabins have all modern utilities, they're also constantly serviced by the owners, who themselves need to drive around to each of them, probably destroying any 'ecological' benefit they might otherwise have. In nordic countries cabins similar to this have existed for centuries - the only change here is that they've become a commodity for middle-class city-dwellers. Also by placing them in the middle of forests instead of (mostly) near the edges or alongside some water, these cabins simply give affluent vacationers the chance to experience the illusion of 'returning to nature' or living in some idealized 'primitive' state, at the cost of someone else needing to (literally) clear up their shit afterwards, and also transport water and other essentials deep into the woods, which would otherwise be free of traffic and disturbance to the animals and flora that have been there for millennia. As for the suggestion in the article that they could extend the season through the winter with some sort of battery top-up (because of the lack of natural light), anyone who has experienced trying to get to a place out in the countryside (and even near to a road, let alone in the middle of a forest), after a meter of wet snow has fallen would never even dream of suggesting this as a vacation option. Not only would the experience turn into one of raw survival (which might even be doubtful if the heating failed), but living in an isolated spot with barely 3 or 4 hours daylight each day would be stretching most people's endurance.

ajuc 4y ago
The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. If you do that - it doesn't matter what the source of heating, energy etc. is, and what kind of a car (if any) you drive. Even if it's all coal and fossil-fuel powered - you are order of magnitude more sustainable than people living in suburbs with solar panels, heat pumps and Teslas simply because you waste so much less energy on building and transporting stuff to make living there possible.
- danhor 4y ago
  No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude. People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).
  - ajuc 4y ago
    It's order of magnitude, easily. For example - if you live in a commie-block - you don't need and often you don't have the option to own multiple cars per family. Often you don't own a car at all. Parking space is at premium and walking/public transport solves most of your transporting needs anyway. So that's the difference between producing 1.75 cars per family vs let's say 0.75 in the city. And then driving let's say 5000 km per year vs let's say 30 000 km per year. And changing these cars every 3 years vs every 6 years. Heating is another thing. Surface area of my block is maybe 4 times the surface area of a detached house. But it houses 16 times more people. But that's nitpicking. The big thing is infrastructure. How many km of roads, cables, pipes, etc do you need per 1 detached house vs 1 flat in a commie block? How much concrete and steel do you use for that? How much energy is spent building and maintaining that infrastructure over the years? My 4-stories commie block houses 16 families in a plot that would be roughly equivalent to a plot where 1 detached house would stand in the countryside. And it's pretty low-density as far as city planning goes. You could easily make it much denser. There's a small park and a playground in that plot of land. So that's ~1/16th the infrastructure to service the same number of people compared to the countryside. And building the infrastructure is cheap compared to maintaining it for decades. The real unsustainable part of suburbia is maintaining all the extra infrastructure that low population density housing requires. If anything - 1 order of magnitude was an underestimate.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I didn't follow the car replacement schedule line. Why would a suburbanite replace cars every three years vs six for a block dweller? Both of those seem extremely short to me.
bigiain 4y ago
> at the cost of someone else needing to (literally) clear up their shit afterwards, and also transport water and other essentials deep into the woods, which would otherwise be free of traffic So, Burningman for suburban families…

ramesh31 4y ago

We’ve had these for decades, and they’re called trailers. But slap some shingles on it and call it sustainable, and you can charge middle class people $200 a night for the privilege of it.

stephen_g 4y ago

That in itself isn’t necessarily that unsustainable - prefabrication (as long as the factory is somewhat close to the final site) can be much better than building on site because you need to move the thing once instead of having multiple workers travel out to the remote site every day for weeks, plus hauling in all the materials and then hauling out a lot of waste. Tools in the factory can be powered by electricity from the grid (and factory roofs are usually pretty good for solar), whereas on a remote site you would probably be using a diesel generator. So there are potentially a lot more pros than cons.

dingdingdang 4y ago

The point that the owner is openly looking to "buy a Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck" in order to drive around and battery pump the individual houses just makes the whole thing mega awful for me - at that point surely the proper green option would be to have a little wood-stove in each house which would easily be offset by the natural bio-sequestering in large surrounding woods!!??

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>at that point surely the proper green option would be to have a little wood-stove in each house which would easily be offset by the natural bio-sequestering in large surrounding woods!!?? Even if you lived on a plot of forest that provided enough timber sustainably satisfy your energy needs (obviously everybody can't but why not let those who can/want to do so?) you'd still have every idiot coming out of the woodwork to complain about local air quality. It's easier just fractionally poison some watersheds half a world away building batteries and then charge up those batteries with grid electricity of mixed provenance giving you a veneer of plausible deniability than deal with the idiots next door who have a small but easy to quantify gripe.
avianlyric 4y ago
They use LPG for heating and cooling already. The battery isn’t needed for that, so a wood stove wouldn’t change anything. Their primary issue is that there just isn’t much sun light in the winter. Not only is the duration very short, maybe 7 hours total per day, but the angle of incident is extremely low (sun doesn’t rise very far), making shading a serious issue. Conversely electricity consumption will be higher because lights need to be on longer, due to the reduced daylight hours. To top it all of, be so far north also means the intensity of sunlight is lower, so the energy delivered by a each sq meter of solar panel is lower compared to a similar panel near the equator. Put that all together, and collecting enough energy for functional illumination, and pumping water can become a real challenge.

MisterTea 4y ago

The interiors of these things are so sterile that it completely detracts from the natural surroundings. It's like a sci-fi story where a room in an affluent city apartment is teleported to the middle of the forest. It's lame to even try and call this off-grid living. This is glamping for people who are too afraid to leave the city behind. A real off-grid cabin is like a hunting shack or a boy scout cabin: four walls, a roof, beds, a table, and an outdoor shit house. Heat is optional from a fireplace or gas/kerosene heater. A step up would be indoor plumbing and a basic kitchen.