Trailer Is Ordered!

So yesterday we put the deposit down on the trailer from Tiny House Basics! It should be delivered to Abbie's parents in 3 to 4 weeks. Since Abbie was talking trash on me in her last post, I thought I would show you what I was up to. Here is a link to the spreadsheet that we have going for keep track of all things tiny house.

There is a tab called "Weight & Balance" and one called "Flipped Weight & Balance." We originally wanted to have the bathroom on the hitch side of the trailer, but based on the weight and balance the fender would have fell where we wanted to put the door into the tiny house. We could have worked with this, but in the end we decided that it would be better to flip the tiny house around and have the living room on the hitch side. This put the fender under the kitchen counters where we wanted it.

To decide where the fenders (wheels) needed to be placed, I had to do a little research. I knew that you wanted to make sure that you had weight on the tongue of the trailer (more weight in front of the wheels than behind them), but I didn't know what the sweet spot was. After a little googling it seemed like somewhere between 10% and 15% of the weight of the trailer should be on the tongue when it is fulled loaded. I decided that since we are going to have such a heavy tralier (~12,000 lbs) and that class IV and V hitch ratings have max tongue weights of 10% of the max gross trailer weight, we should shoot to have the tongue weight be between 10% and 12%.

So we created a line item in the spreadsheet for everything that would be on the trailer once we were done, gave it a weight, and gave it a center of gravity (CG) from the front edge of the trailer deck. That way we could get the final trailer weight and CG. Then using some math we could figure out the ideal place for the wheels to give us between 10% and 12% of the weight on the tongue. We went with the location required for 11% of the weight on the tongue, just so we would have some play on either side since the weight and CGs of the line items were just best guesses.

I hope that at least kind of explains our rational on deciding the location of the wheels and explains the importance of calculating the weight and balance of your tiny house. I'll create another post soon that goes a little bit more indepth on the trailer and why we choose all the options that we did.