So what are we looking at here: some people would say this is the inside of a flexible 4 inch vent, and that it is, but it’s also the hose that sucks up all your time and money when you’re building a tiny house, especially if it’s your first time building a structure.
As a person who has built 4 houses, I’ve done approximately 10 bath fans I kind of have a clue. So I figured hey no big deal, fan, vent, associated parts, we should be able to jam this out in a couple hours.
Nope! It turns out if you want to use this particular pipe you need a 4 3/8″ hole saw not the 4″, 4 1/8″, or 4 1/4″ I already own. So it’s back to the hardware store for either a bigger hole saw or rigid venting, costing a half day of my time and pushing the build back a full day. Multiply this minor annoyance by 1000 different tasks and it’s not hard to see why most tiny house builds take way longer than they should.
This is one of the big inspirations for us to create our upcoming plan set and our YouTube channel, not just to give people generalized overviews of things but to give people step-by-step specific instruction so when you come back from the hardware store you have everything you need so you can just work straight through and finish the task. Whether it’s plumbing or electrical structural ventilation or anything else that needs to happen in a tiny house in our videos you’re going to get those invaluable pieces of advice like:
“Remember, if you’re using a fan vent cover that only penetrates to being flush with the interior wall you’re going to need to feed your ducting through from the outside and if you decide to go with semi rigid this means you’re gonna need to pick up at 4 3/8″ holesaw.”
Seems like such a small thing almost an afterthought but it’s 1000 little tips like that that make your build go twice as fast with half the stress. Check out the actually tiny YouTube channel for a growing library of in-depth tiny house videos.
– Brian