Carleton students’ tiny house to navigate natural disasters and climate change

A group of Carleton University students have designed a house they think will be able to respond to climate change and adapt to natural disasters.

Called the Northern Nomad, the house is built on a trailer bed and can generate all of its own water and electricity.

Eric Ho, a fourth-year engineering student at Carleton, said other self-sufficient homes have been built in the United States, where the weather is warmer, but the goal with Northern Nomad was to design one that a person in Ottawa could live in year-round.

“The idea is that if we can build one there, how far north can we push it? How extreme of a climate can we push this idea of self-sustaining house?”

The house is built on a trailer bed so it can be transported in case of a natural disaster, like the Gatineau flooding in 2017. It also comes with solar panels across the roof to generate clean energy and an atmospheric water generator, which Ho said pulls moisture out of the air to create drinkable water. The Northern Nomad can also be hooked up to the power grid to sell back clean energy produced by the solar panels.

At the Northern Nomad's open house, Scott Bucking, the project supervisor, said the house’s water generation and solar panels mean it would offset its own carbon footprint within 10 years.

“For me this is moving towards the future of sustainability,” Bucking said. “That we take a more holistic approach, that it’s not only using renewable energy but it’s also looking at how quickly that infrastructure pays itself off in terms of its carbon budget.”

He said the future of environmental sustainability is to take ideas put into the Northern Nomad and transfer them to bigger building projects.

“I don’t think the solution here is thousands of tiny houses, I think what we need to do is to take this way of thinking and apply it to larger pieces of infrastructure,” he said.

The Northern Nomad was completely designed and built by students in Carleton’s architecture and engineering programs, Ho said. With the help of trades people, the students built the framing, installed the plumbing and put it together from the ground up.

“It’s a very different process than just sitting in class doing assignments,” Ho said. “But the process is kind of like what we do in school, we design something, try it out, build it up, there is that component of taking what we learned in class and applying it here.”  

Seungyeon Hong, a first year masters’ student in the project, said the Northern Nomad is one of the hardest projects he’s ever worked on.

“It brought something out of me that I didn’t think I had. I don’t think I ever worked on something so hard,” he said.

Ho said that while tiny houses might not be the future, he said the project shows self-sustaining houses are possible.  

“I don’t believe tiny houses are going to be the future and everyone is going to have one, but I do think sustainable houses, automated houses…  all the technology we implemented in this house, I see in houses down the road.”