Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

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That’s the thing- it’s an idea of a house, rather than a house:

* how much does it cost?

* what’s included? What are the specs on the windows? What kind of toilet? What’s the flooring made from? What are the screws that hold on the bathroom mirror?

* how long is the warranty?

* where is it located?

Obviously these questions don’t apply to a spec house listed on an architect’s site.

But more generally you find when attempting to purchase an off-grid house or even a small/tiny house, that they leave as many question marks up to the buyer to DIY as possible.

I’m advocating for the reverse: sell me the cheap Xiaomi phone of houses: something mass-market, with sane trade-offs, and all the boxes checked in advance, including the parcel where it lives.

Go ahead and put a price tag on the whole package, builders. Customization = bad (for me).

If somebody else wants the modular custom-built PC of houses, that’s fine.

Me, I’m good with mass-market.

You want an off-grid builder-grade house like you’d buy in a suburb, it sounds like. Going to be a long time before that happens. The builder homes work (both price and reliability) because there’s hundreds of thousands of them virtually identical. Trades know exactly what to do, even affordable ones, because they’ve done it 1000 times before. That’s a mature industry producing a stable product.

Until there are thousands of these things and the kinks have been worked out you can’t have that. Every innovative architect home has one (or more) secret horror story/screwed up detail you haven’t heard about. When doing something new you need to bear the mental burden of making the house work, build yes but also maintenance which is also specialized and non-standard.

There will be a lot of customers learning this the hard way as the industry catches up with demand.

"Me, I’m good with mass-market"

So you want mass-market off the grid?

You realize thats kind of an oxymoron?

The mass market is by definition only on the grid. Because the grid is predictable and there you can mass produce.

But off the grid allmost always has to be customized. Just alone the getting things there and installing them part.

And like others mentioned, what do you do off grid if your mass produced solar/thermal heating system breaks in the winter?

Order a new one? To be delivered by helicopter?

There are quite a few tiny complete off-grid houses available as prefabs. Larger ones tend to be custom, but if you want something that will fit on a flatbed truck, that's available prebuilt.

Off-grid power, water, and sewerage do require on-site work, and usually more land than the house alone uses.

It sounds like you're describing a traditional mobile home. That part is already "solved". The other stuff is site specific - well, septic, solar, etc. Perhaps there is a market for setting up sites, but the site development items are so unique to each site in an off-grid dispersed scenario. The actual house part is readily available though, full specs and all.

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