Tiny House Episode 17: Plumbing

The PEX water lines for the shower and washing machine.

Since there is no crawl space or basement to run plumbing in a tiny house on wheels, most builders of cold climate tiny houses design their floor plan around this restriction rather than coming up with another solution. This mentality often results in floor plans where the bathroom and kitchen are side by side so the plumbing stays in one area of the house. This design allows both water and drain lines to be hidden in a shared interior wall or within the kitchen cupboards.

To be blunt, we weren't thrilled with the idea of preparing our food beside a bathroom. Let's be honest, no one wants to think about, or smell, excrement while cooking a meal. This restriction forced us to wear our problem-solving hats. Recognizing the abundance of headroom we had in the living room inspired Aimee to suggest raising the living room floor. When I heard the idea, it immediately made sense to me. By raising the living room floor we would create an insulated space to run our plumbing lines. Additionally, this would allow us to hide everything else that would normally go in a mechanical room thus saving us precious floor space in the process. The RV hot water tank was too tall for the raised floor but we were able to tuck it under the bedroom loft stairs.

Working under the counter in the kitchen wasn't much fun. On the plus side so far no plumbers crack! :)

We used red and blue PEX for our hot and cold water lines. PEX is an easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive alternative to traditional copper water lines. Originally, we were going to have a built-in holding tank for our grey water but, not only were the ABS drain pipes going to be challenging to run, that would use up the valuable space we wanted for our fresh water tank/bladder. We decided to just drop the plumbing drains straight through the floor and connect the sewer lines to the holding tank under the trailer instead. This makes moving the house a bit more time consuming, since we would have to disassemble these drain lines first. This additional step isn't a big deal since we weren't planning on moving the house often due to it's size and weight.

We cut the holes for our sewer lines with hole saws.

The final piece of our plumbing puzzle was our 150 gallon water bladder that we use for fresh water storage. This bladder was actually designed for temporary water storage but was so durable that many people were already using it for long-term storage. We have been using this bladder for a couple years now and it still seems to be in good condition, despite overfilling it a few times!

I used a double layer of poly as a secondary barrier to prevent water damage if the bladder were ever to leak.

Initially, I had sourced a 200 gallon flat rectangular container from a water tank manufacturer. Instead of pre-ordering the tank and setting it aside, I waited until we needed it only to find out they had discontinued that design! The bladder ended up being a good idea because its flexibility allowed us to install the raised floor first. Once we received the bladder we were able to unfold it in the empty space where the tank would have been located. Ordering a custom tank would have increased our cost and put construction on hold until the tank was built and shipped.

Thanks for reading everyone! Please upvote, follow and resteem to support this work. As always, comments are welcome and I would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have about tiny houses.