Solar for tiny homes

A 200–400 square-foot tiny home has a roof of perhaps 250–500 square feet, much of it lost to a loft dormer, a vent stack, a mini-split line set and edge setbacks the fire code requires. At roughly 20 square feet per 400–440 W panel, that leaves room for maybe four to eight panels, and a shed roof pitched the wrong way can cut that further.

That’s why the best-performing tiny-home systems we’ve seen are ground mounts. A small pole or rack array a few feet from the house can hold 8–12 panels at the ideal tilt and face south regardless of how the home is oriented. It costs more per watt than a roof mount, but on a lot with any room at all it usually produces enough more to be the better buy.

Tiny homes use less energy than a standard house but not as little as people expect, because the big loads don’t shrink with the floor plan. A mini-split, a water heater, an induction cooktop, a small fridge and a laptop might add up to 200–450 kWh a month, more with electric heat in January. A well pump on the property adds to that.

At 1,300–1,600 kWh per installed kW per year in Colorado, that use is covered by roughly 2–4 kW of panels, or 5–10 panels. At our $2.80–$3.25 per watt that’s a small system, and small systems carry a higher share of fixed costs: permit, interconnection, inverter, trip charges. Expect the per-watt price to sit toward the top of the range. A battery is optional and doubles the budget, so we only recommend one where outages are a real problem.

If the tiny home shares a lot and a meter with a main house, treat it as an ADU: the system goes on whatever roof or ground space is best, and the meter serves both. That’s often the cleanest arrangement.

Colorado has no single tiny-home rule. Some counties allow tiny homes on foundations as primary dwellings, some treat them as ADUs behind an existing house, and some have minimum square-footage rules that exclude them. A few mountain and rural counties have written specific tiny-home ordinances. Before solar, confirm your home is a permitted dwelling with its own utility service; solar gets a permit against the structure’s legal status.

For the foundation case, solar permitting works like any home: an electrical permit, usually a building permit, and utility interconnection. For a tiny home on wheels, none of that applies because the structure isn’t a building. Panels on it are an RV-style system, installed by an RV or mobile solar shop, and typically don’t interconnect with the grid at all.

A tiny home on a trailer is treated like an RV by most jurisdictions and by us. Solar for it means a roof-mounted 12/24/48-volt system with its own batteries and charge controller, sized to the roof (often 800–2,000 watts) and to what you’re willing to live without. Market ranges for those kits run roughly $3,000–$15,000 depending on battery size; prices vary and we don’t sell them.

Where we can help is the pad. If the tiny home parks long-term on land with a meter, a dedicated 30- or 50-amp outlet from the house panel, or a ground-mount solar array feeding the property meter, offsets the power the tiny home draws through its shore cord. That’s a grid-tied job on the property, not on the vehicle, and it’s in our lane.