It WAS funny to see the guy's jaw drop when I invited him in on the pretence of having him take a look at my wiring - and he's instantly confronted with this awesome physics lab/machine shop in a place where those are rare (I might be the only one, private or commercial, in the county). You can imagine - a bunch of stainless steel fancy-ass flanges with a zillion bolts, and tanks attached to mass spectrometers, rad sensors, all kinds of computers, a turbo vacuum pump spinning 60,000 rpm...every tool known to man...4 of those big roll around tool boxes 6' high, and one side is all bench - 30 feet long by 3 feet, for playing around with bench work. He probably thought he'd wandered into some NASA outpost, or CERN. (the similarity isn't totally an accident, we do the same type work)
I'd told him a neighbor who is an electrician didn't think much of it, and ask him to take a look just in case (social engineering, my wiring is awesome). The inspector (attracted in the first place by the major thrash outdoors with cranes and solar panels) looked at it, asked how long it'd been there and working - I said, dunno, 7 years or so? He said "well, you obviously know more about this than I do" and that was that. He wanted $25 for a permit to put up the panels. Someday I'll visit his office and get one... Maybe this year, maybe next. Passive-obstructive is the way to handle this particular local government. They forget...and I've gotten away with such stuff since '79 already.
I'm on building experiment #4 now - and this is it as far as I can tell, though I could wish I'd made it bigger - I only have 1024 sq feet (programmers and carpenters take note of that number - power of two and no wasted wood) on two floors total here.
Space is my final frontier, I have far too many toys (some of which have to be stored in the other three buildings as a result - but I count tools and stock as hard assets, like food and precious metals are. IRS, even when they thought I owed them a ton of money (they were proven wrong on that) wasn't interested, it's too hard to change what they know about into the cash they crave. I don't keep much in banks these days.
Surface area to volume ratio goes in your favor the larger it is, and the closer to spherical. Two floors, 16x32 feet...close enough, and you can carry an 8 foot stick vertically on either floor. 8" thick insulation, outer shell 3/4" plywood (treated), inner barrier a double overlapping layers of PE (4 mil) sheet and space blanket (aluminized mylar - and it's all gooped with silicone), followed by drywall, then whiteboard (all my walls you can draw on with dry-erase markers and wipe clean - turns out to be handy when fabbing one-off parts to have the drawing on the wall by the machine).
That space blanket stuff really kicks in when the temperature difference gets large - it doesn't do much for a 10 degree difference, but now, when it's more like 70 degrees drop out to inside - it adds a lot of R value.
There's one hole in the floor to let in the electricity. It's tight and gooped too. No rodents get in, ever. Not even insects most of the time. The big hole is the fan, and that defeats them - if they make it, they're lucky heroes, most get chopped up on the way past the fan blades and blown back down.
Now add some tons of machines and metal stock, some serious scientific gear - I've got the thermal mass (I store the I beams by the stove) - the thermal time constant is many hours long. Definitely a man-cave - that's also my "living room"...all benches, tools, stuff like that. Toys - I never said I grew up, I just got older.
Upstairs is similar with benches (chemistry, electroplating, and electronics/gunsmith tinker, bullet casting), but I have the kitchen, bed etc up here too - and a ton of computers which help me make my daily bread and entertain me, along with many books - I make the matrix look like a low budget movie sometimes. It works. I only wish I'd made it 32 on a side, instead, for more room. But that would have taken a digger - on about the flattest land I have, it's on the ground at one corner, and about 6 feet off the ground opposite. That's about as high as I want to make a foundation. We do have wind now and then. This place just survived a 70 mph micro-burst storm, nothing even rattled, though things shook and whistled. It all just weighs too much, and we really overdid the solar panel mounting stuff, since it looked like the big one for wind risk.
I use another building (dubbed "the office trailer" since that's where our team made all the money programming and designing), about 20 meters behind this, for the one that might someday again be a "chick cave" - it has the plumbing, more solar panels, and some very excessive fast-heat capability - I have 65k+ btu propane to just heat the tiny bathroom - it can go from frozen toilet bowl to burn your butt when you sit down in about 60 seconds - so that only runs when I do, so to speak. There's another woodstove at the other end of that - I used to live in that one, and it leaks like a sieve. I am right now (it's 5f, again) heating that basement with a gas mantle lantern, supplied by a 20 lb propane grill tank - because I like it when my plumbing doesn't freeze, and running the woodstove, which I do quite rarely when it's not stupid-cold (as now, but this is an 80+ year record for cold here). Most times I just shine it one for that one. To really fix it up nice, I'd have to rip out every inside wall (computer benches first - they're bolted to it), replace all the vapor barriers, rewire it (it used Al wiring, ugh, I've redone it once, and every single outlet had had a fire in it already and it's failing again) - I'll get around to it when "miss possibly right" shows up (again, if ever). Else it stores spare tech junk and my main reloading stuff, my darkroom (which is also the loo), which I mainly use when the weather is fit anyway.
No point building ammo when it's too cold to go shooting anyway.
But that place gets pretty hot in summer, despite AC, and is always cold in winter, despite the fact that the roof has been replaced with real wood, insulation and vapor barrier - unlike most trailers, you could dance on this roof (long story). It's fine (though some inside ceiling joints sprung due to shrinkage due to the cold this time - wood and Al metal have very different tempcos) - but it only takes every single outlet blowing a little wind to make it virtually impossible to heat/cool. I'd thought putting it in the shade of nearby trees would do - but putting it over the roots just killed the trees, and nearly us, when they fell later. Hint - don't do that.
At least it sees a nice breeze all summer long - a north facing (down) hill behind it sees convection cool breeze due to the flat-hot highland to the south-front, and now it has solar panel shade in summer (we'll see - haven't had summer since I put them up there). And is protected from high winds by the trees on that hill - close, but no cigar. It really does take time to find that perfect spot to build on. I finally got it.
Took awhile for the zen part of me to recognize where nature wanted me to be, so I went with its flow, instead of trying to force it - works better, around here, you fight nature, it wins - it's much bigger than you are, even with modern-tool-help and materials. It's what keeps the population density low, and the neighborliness high.
ZH had an article today that blamed wealth disparity on lack of community. That's not even the main issue. It's more the anonymity that comes with too many people per square that's more responsible for the breakdown - a defence mechanism that doesn't really work.
I let air into this (nice) building in one defined spot, at a north corner on the lower floor, so it has to pass over my woodstove on the way in (and is from the shade side in summer) - via a cracked window. Diagonally opposite of that is a 6" hole in the floor with a slow, quiet fan blowing air into the crawl space (about 60 cfm) so my floors stay warm and the crawl space (dirt) stays dry (and there's no measurable radon collecting either). I crack a window upstairs all year, so there's some flow-through ventilation - but the important fact is - it's totally under my control - I don't depend on leaks or diffusion, I control the airflow totally - including inside the insulated parts which I can vent or not as I please. I can seal this place nearly (and dangerously) airtight if I desire. It's amazing how much heat (or cool) you can lose with a leak that's otherwise almost imperceptible. But if you burn things - well, I got a CO detector, as you can get in trouble with that.
I also paid attention to where nature directs the water during things like hurricanes or flood conditions. So I have no issues there - it goes over to one side naturally. I'm halfway up my mountain, so the floods are "down there" and the high winds are "up there" and I'm fat and happy in between them. Since I have the terrain, why not use it? That part "I didn't build that". But then, neither did any part of government, Mr O'bozo.
That would have to be my definition of an "eco" house, but I'm not specially "green" - just cheap, I wanted sustainability sans cash and people hired to fix stuff all the time, or me having to (at 60 already, I think I might get old someday), that's all. I really did the solar to avoid power co hookup costs and PP taxes, frankly, though I thought it was also a "pretty neat idea", to coin a phrase.
I got an adventitious benefit from mounting the solar panels on 2x8" rails (treated wood) instead of the $500/rack overpriced aluminum angle they all try to sell you - which a high wind will turn into a pretzel. It creates this awesome convection channel that will blow out a propane torch at the top most days - as I found when doing the final soldering for the solar wiring. It really helps in summer, since the roof is both shaded and actively cooled by that airflow. I'm guessing it would help in winter too, if I'd gotten around to making the foam blocks I'd planned to make to block those channels, but I didn't get there yet. Wish I could take credit for designing for that, but I can't - it just happened. Works a charm, though.
I keep my batteries and some of the power electronics in a small (4x8') shed behind this. You don't want those battery fumes in your space. It has tiny fans that are programmed to push air through it when the batteries are outgassing (explosion hazard too if you don't vent it), so the fumes won't eat the electronics either - it still looks like the day I installed it in there, about a decade ago. At 24v nominal, I'm using gauge 000 wire (the copper is larger in diameter than my thumb), and short from batteries to inverters and solar charge controllers, and keeping that as short as I can. Even a milli-ohm of resistance can create significant drop and loss at the currents you have when there's hundreds of amperes flowing through it. In fact, I use a one milli-ohm resistor as a current measuring shunt - and it gets way too hot to touch - solder melting temperatures at times. - 300 amps times .3 volts is...~90 watts of heat in a couple cubic inches - and that shunt is multiple parallel two inch long by 20 mil (.02") thick pieces of copper bar, brazed to the connection blocks.
I have, of course, backup generators, which is what I was recommending for 11c1p - you're going to need them (hot spares!) anyway in a full solar system, as it's not practical to have enough batteries to handle a week of "dark" which we have coming up soon - February is a bear here - rainy season. It's just not worth it to spend the extra dough, and have to deal with the added self-discharge an oversized bank of batteries has, year round. So, even though generator electricity is among the most expensive there is (over a buck a kwh) - it's cheap, all things considered. I don't need to use it much. Perfection can really be the enemy of good enough, and I caught on to that one, finally. So I can't say I'm totally independent of fossil fuels, but if I was willing to spend the odd week really hunkered down, I could do without.
Now, all this is pretty off-topic for the OP, but I thought I'd get it out there as documentation of what works, after trying (hard) 3 other times. Because someone might want to do this, and believe me - you'd rather avoid my failures - they weren't cheap in any of time, money, or hassle/quality of life. I couldn't pull this off again - I was a lot younger when I started on this path. Sweat equity, I believe they call it. I only sweat now when I choose, mainly. But it truly seems that whenever a generator or suchlike fails, it's always during some weather emergency on a Saturday night, when no spare parts are available at any store till Monday...or similar - as in "you can't get out to the store because of feet of snow or you already had too much to drink". Some aspects of this do remind me of space or an underwater environment - you have to be really ready no matter what.
So, if it all hits the fan...not much will actually change here. I've provisioned for the extra humans who will no doubt show up in that case, and have plenty for them to do if they should.
This all looks deceptively simple, but in truth, it's not, and it took literally decades for a pretty smart guy to work this all out so it looks (and now is) simple. As some of our older software comments said "Beware the checks that aren't there, because they don't need to be - by design some errors cannot happen unless you change something you don't understand". It's like that.