This is blither, of course. It depends on the design and usage. Four tiny houses with a total of, say, 1,000 sq ft would not necessarily be any more "environmentally friendly" than one house of 1,000 sq ft. They would use more of some building products, such as exterior siding and kitchen/bathroom fixture, and less of others.
I don’t personally care about the environment aspect of the story. That isn’t what attracted my attention. The living arrangement, where the kids are semi-independent in their own small apartments, taking care of themselves full-time, just within an earshot of their parents for security, is what got my attention about it.
Each small house will cost about $15,000 each, if you have the talent for building them yourself to completion, so there isn’t anything cheap about this.
I just like the independence aspect for the kids. They have security under the parents, but they have to care for themselves like adults at the same time.
I agree. I would expect heat loss to occur through surface area. One building with a (relatively) large volume and limited surface area seems more heat efficient to me. Lots of small buildings would have lots of surface area, lots of heat loss, lots of inefficiency. And the need for furnaces, hot water heaters, etc would increase proportionately as well.
Four tiny houses take considerably more resources to build and heat than the equivalent floor space of a single house. It is the basic square/cube ratio. Smaller units have more area for the volume contained. A single larger heating/cooling unit is almost always more efficient than four smaller heating/cooling units.
Yes.
The article shows a lot of tiny houses, barns etc.
Kind of wasteful.
It seems to me that this is no way saving anything!
I suppose there’s a little bit more efficiency in that there’s a little less empty space being heated than there would be in a full sized, two story, four bedroom house. But it doesn’t seem like it would be a LOT less.