Two pods, four en-suite bedrooms, sleeps 8. Wood-fired hot tub, seasonal pool, a dock with kayaks and five acres of woods to yourselves.
★ 5.0 · 93 guest reviews · Book direct: no cleaning or booking fees
We bought five acres of woods by the lake, an hour south of Kansas City, and spent two years planning and building the Butterfly Pods: two cabins built to Passivhaus standards that run on their own solar power and filtered rain and lake water. They opened in summer 2024 and we're still adding to them. The latest addition is a pair of solar trackers we built ourselves. We'd love to show you how comfortable off-grid can be.
When you book here there's no cleaning fee and no booking fee, so the same dates usually cost around 13% less than on booking sites. For a two-night stay that's about $170 back in your pocket. You pay the nightly rate plus local taxes, and you deal with us, not a call centre.
Weeknights are quieter on the lake, and often a little cheaper.
“The pods themselves are thoughtfully designed, beautifully decorated, and well-equipped. Every detail has been considered, and the bathroom/wet room design is absolutely brilliant. It’s amazing to experience how everything functions so seamlessly while being off-grid.”
Lindsay B. · family of five · July 2026 · read all 93 reviews
Levi Kelly Tours filmed a full walk-through of the pods: the build, every room, and how the off-grid systems work.
Video by Levi Kelly Tours on YouTube
The property comfortably sleeps 8 adults and 1 child between four bedrooms. The two pods are rented together as one private booking. The main pod has two bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms. The Annex pod includes two queen bedrooms, each with a compact en-suite.
From bed you look straight out through the 10-ft quad windows into the trees, and deer often wander past in the morning. The beds are Helix mattresses with good-quality linens.
The main cabin features an open-concept kitchen and dining area, highlighted by slanted ceilings and views of the surrounding forest and lake. The contemporary kitchen is fully equipped with high-end appliances, cookware, dishes, and utensils.
The granite island seats four, and the tulip dining table offers seating for four more — so eight people can eat together.
Wrap-around decks on both cabins provide multiple spots to enjoy the view. Lounge in built-in hammocks, sip coffee, or enjoy a drink at sunset. Unwind in the heated seasonal pool or soak in the wood-fired hot tub under the stars.
A dedicated wood store keeps a steady supply of seasoned firewood on hand year-round, fueling both the outdoor fire pit and the wood-fired hot tub.
Fish from the private dock, or take the kayaks or paddleboard out on the lake.
Everything runs on our own solar power and treated rain and lake water. We watch the systems remotely, and you'll have both our cell numbers for anything you need.
About 17.6 kW of solar across the ground mount, the greenhouse, the carport and two solar trackers we built ourselves, feeding an 800Ah 48V LiFePO4 battery bank (about 41 kWh). A 5 kW propane generator covers long cloudy spells.
Rainwater and lake water captured, filtered, and treated via 6-stage filtration including UV treatment for safe drinking water. 800-gallon storage.
Mini-split system provides heating and cooling year-round. Energy Recovery Ventilators in both buildings. Indoor wood-burning fireplace for cozy evenings, with backup convection heaters.
Power, water and heating are monitored around the clock, so we usually spot a problem before you would. You can follow your own energy use on the Guest Energy Dashboard.
Airtight "perfect wall" construction with continuous exterior insulation, triple-glazed windows, and a rainscreen cedar cladding system.
podhopping is the vision of Hein & Michelle le Roux. They bought a 5-acre property one hour south of Kansas City with the idea of building a contemporary off-grid retreat, and spent two years planning and building it. The Butterfly Pods opened in summer 2024.
The longer-term plan is a network of pods in beautiful places, close enough together that you can hop from one to the next and really get to know an area. That's where the name comes from. Each one should show that living off-grid can be comfortable, not a compromise.
POD is an acronym for Passive Ordinary Dwelling. Built to Passivhaus standards, using ordinary materials — the dwellings are robust at their core, but also renewable and recyclable in their skin. They have a low embodied carbon content with maximum use of timber allowing them to be highly durable over time.
The pod has a conventional timber frame construction. The frame is sheathed and covered with an impermeable membrane, which is then covered with exterior continuous insulation. This approach is known as the "perfect wall" and mitigates thermal bridging, ensuring an airtight structure — the foundation of a passive house. The insulation is covered with UV resistant membrane and furred out to receive the cedar rain-screen cladding and air gap. Concealed gutters harvest rainwater through the rain-screen.
The foundation design utilizes a steel helical screw pile system, with minimal impact on the underlying ground. This system allows the pod to be moved and mitigates the requirement for concrete and/or complex waterproofing membranes. The roof is profiled metal sheeting with an air gap on insulation. All exterior windows and doors are triple glazed systems in high performing fiberglass and aluminum frames.
The Butterfly Pods utilize a ground mount PV array (5.2kW + 3kW expansion on greenhouse). We've since added roughly 5kW more via a carport-mounted solar array, and in 2026 two dual-axis solar trackers we built ourselves (3.6kW), bringing total on-site solar to around 17.6kW across four charge controllers. A utility building underneath the array houses an off-grid hybrid inverter and an 800Ah 48V LiFePo battery bank (about 41kWh). This setup provides standard 120/240V electricity to the buildings. A backup 5kW propane generator ensures that the batteries can be charged when poor weather conditions prevent electricity production from the PV panels. A smaller 300W array with battery storage provides redundant power for water pumps.
The pods capture rainwater and surface water which is treated and used for drinking and washing. The Butterfly Pods have 800 gallons of storage capacity. A sequence of filtration, reverse osmosis and UV treatment ensures safe drinking water. Depending on local building code, the pods can be equipped with flush toilets connected to public sewers or septic tanks. Some sites like the Butterfly Pods will have standalone lateral fields for sewage processing. Also, where necessary, composting toilets could be used.
Like the Butterfly Pods, other sites will also be fitted out with internet enabling Smart monitoring systems to be installed. With the use of Smart platforms like Home Assistant, the power, water and heating systems can be monitored remotely and on site from tablets or smart phones.
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The Butterfly Pods are a working prototype as much as a place to stay. Here's what we're designing, fabricating and testing around the property, plus a couple of things we've made with friends.
Plants coming soon
A cedar-framed lean-to greenhouse with 3 kW of the pods' solar on its sloping roof. We're filling it with greenery, edible plants and herbs for guests to enjoy, looked after and curated by a local neighbor.
Write-up coming soon
In design
Concept render
Our first single-segment sauna pod: a wood-fired, cedar-lined hot room, a slatted porch to cool off on, and a full-height window looking out from the benches.
Design in progress
Plan your own off-grid pod from the same 8′ × 18′ segment we build with. Choose segments, windows and doors, place it on your land, and see a price range as you go.
Designer tool under development
Songbird Roasters × podhopping“Because not every bird needs to catch the worm.”
A small-batch medium roast made with Songbird Roasters, inspired by the Northern Cardinals at the pods. Shipped whole-bean for guests to grind fresh each morning.
Meet the roastThe pods already run off-grid on around 14 kW of solar: a ground-mount array, panels on the greenhouse and a carport array. The two trackers add another 3.6 kW, bringing the total to about 17.6 kW. A fixed panel only faces the sun squarely for part of the day. A tracker turns to keep facing it, from the low morning sun in the east to the evening sun in the west, and tilts with the seasons. We designed and built two of our own: steel from the shop, timber from the garage, and a lot of afternoons in the field. Each tracker carries four bifacial panels, which also collect light reflected off the ground onto their backs.
A see-saw at the top of the mast tilts north–south for the season. On top of it, the panel frame rolls east–west on heavy gate hinges to follow the sun through the day.
Side view, looking west. The see-saw tips the array from about flat to 30° toward the south.
End view, looking north. The frame rolls on gate hinges through 55°, east to west.
Each tracker stands on a concrete pier, poured around a plywood template that holds the anchor bolts exactly where the base plate needs them. The steel mast is welded to its base plate in the shop and bolted down after the concrete has cured for 7 days.
The east–west frame was cut and assembled in the garage from 2×4 and 4×4 lumber, with steel bracing at every corner fixed with 2-7/8 in HeadLOK screws. A central 4×4 runs through the middle and connects the frame to the see-saw below. Once assembled, it was painted black.
The first axis sits at the top of the mast. The see-saw beam is a bolted sandwich: two 2×6 outer members with two 4×4s set either side of the axle position. It rides a 5/8 inch through-axle in pillow-block bearings, and spacer washers hold the offset so the beam clears the 3½ inch mast. It tilts the whole array from roughly flat to 30° toward the south as the sun's height changes through the year.
The second axis lets the frame roll east to west on heavy gate hinges, each rated for 1,100 lb, through 55° of travel. Two full-depth 1-5/8 inch strut channels run north–south along the frame. Four shallower channels across them, set 34 inches apart, give the panels their mounting points.
Each tracker's four panels are wired in series. The two trackers run on their own cables to a combiner box, join in parallel, pass through a disconnect switch and feed a dedicated Victron charge controller. From there the power lands on the same DC busbar as the rest of the pods' off-grid system. Alongside the trackers, the system went from three charge controllers to four, and the battery bank grew from 700Ah to 800Ah (48V lithium iron phosphate, about 41 kWh).
Each tracker carries four 450 W bifacial Hyperion panels: 1.8 kW per tracker and 3.6 kW for the pair. Bifacial panels generate from both faces. The front takes direct sun, and the back collects light reflected up from the ground. Raised on a mast with open space underneath, the trackers give the backs a clear view of the field.
Within each tracker the four panels are wired in series, positive to negative, like batteries in a flashlight. In series the voltages add and the current stays that of a single panel. On first light one tracker read 133 V at 11.6 A, about 33 V from each panel.
The two trackers then join in parallel at the combiner box. In parallel it works the other way round: the voltage stays the same and the currents add, so two strings at 11.6 A deliver about 23 A at the same 133 V. Either way, power (volts × amps) adds up. Running at high voltage keeps the current low on the long cable runs, so less energy is lost as heat in the wire.
Each tracker has its own 8 AWG cable run back to an 80 A combiner box, where the two strings meet and join in parallel. Straight after it, a DC disconnect switch lets us isolate the whole tracker array from the charge controller for safe maintenance.
A Victron SmartSolar MPPT 250/70-Tr VE.Can does the charging. MPPT stands for maximum power point tracking: the controller keeps adjusting how hard it draws on the panels to find the voltage where they produce the most power, then converts that higher array voltage down to the 48 V battery system, raising the current as it goes. It accepts up to 250 V from the panels and delivers up to 70 A of charge current.
Its output lands on a Victron Lynx busbar, the shared DC backbone where the solar chargers, batteries and the rest of the system connect. It reports over VE.Can, so the new array shows up in Victron's VRM portal alongside the others.
The first tracker went straight to work before its actuators were set up. In VRM the new array appears as MPPT-1, producing 1,537 W at 133 V and 11.6 A. That is one of the two trackers, pointed the wrong way. Across all four charge controllers, the whole system was making 11.17 kW at that moment. Once both trackers are aimed and following the sun, we'll post the real numbers here.
Both trackers are standing in the field beside the pods and the ground array, panels mounted, and the first one is already feeding the system. Next we finish setting up the actuators and bring the second tracker online. Then they start following the sun.
Stay at the pods