So - you’ve got a dream to sell up your house in the city, move out onto a beautiful acreage site and build a gorgeous modular home on your new land.
Or maybe you are moving into your very first home and are still considering your options. Whatever your situation, building a modular home on acreage is a great lifestyle choice!
However, it is also a little different building on a “normal'' townsite, and the odds are that your site will be missing some of those critical services that we tend to take for granted in suburbia.
When we’re talking about services, we’re thinking about things like electricity, water, sewerage, gas, and telecommunications. A common oversight many clients make when buying or building on an acreage block of land is assuming these services are already connected.
Let’s drill into some of the key services that you need to ensure are connected, look at the potential pitfalls and see what solutions you can take advantage of.
Let’s start with the big one. Electricity. While most semi-rural and rural sites will have a power connection to them, that’s not the end of the story. Because an acreage site is typically big – meaning your house location may be quite a considerable distance from where the power connection is on the site.
The obvious solution is to trench or run overhead power from the power connection point to your home. However, the cost increases dramatically if your power run is over 300m. We find that a single-phase power run usually ends up costing between $100 - $150 per lineal meter, meaning a 300m power run will end up costing you between $30,000 and $45,000.
What to do now? If you must spend that amount of cash on your power, it may be better to think of something right out of the box. Standalone solar power is a terrific choice nowadays for sites where it is cost-prohibitive to connect to the existing power grid or an unreliable power supply.
Costing between $45,000 and $75,000, a stand-alone solar power system will give you the peace of mind of never running out of power and never paying a power bill again. Most good quality systems include a backup diesel generator for emergencies if your batteries run out.
The next oversized cost item is your sewerage system. A significant proportion of acreage blocks will NOT be connected to town sewerage. This generally means that you will need to budget on installing a septic system or sewerage treatment plant.
While this is not necessarily a high cost, you can expect to be paying between $15,000 and $30,000 to get a plumber to supply, install and connect your onsite sewerage to a modular home.
Lastly, the final critical service to your site is water. Like sewerage, town water services are not commonly connected to acreage or semi-rural blocks. The obvious and best solution is to allow for a water tank.
The trick here is to make sure you put enough tanks in to catch water and minimise your water usage as much as practical to ensure you never run out of this critical resource.
We’ve got a helpful tool from Kingspan, an easy way to estimate your water catchment for the year. Just click this link here to access it: Rainwater Calculator | Water Catchment Calculator | Kingspan | Australia
The average person in Australia uses between 200-400L per day. Taking this into account will help you decide how many tanks you need.
We hope you’ve found this information insightful and helpful. Remember that the advice we’ve made here is very general; your particular site will have unique requirements.
With this in mind, we’d recommend that you speak with a modular home consultant or your local plumbers and electricians early on in the building process to help you ensure you understand all the requirements you need for your onsite services.
If you think that building a new modular home might be the best option for you, and you’re interested in a more streamlined construction process, talk to the team at Westbuilt Homes.
We have been designing and building stunning modular homes since 1993. The construction process of a modular home is very different to that of a conventional home, giving you greater control over the construction time, the quality and the timeframe.
To learn more about modular construction, book a no obligation consultation with one of our modular experts. We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have.