Off-Grid Living in Killingly, Connecticut

Killingly, Connecticut is a zoned town, and that's the first thing to understand if you're eyeing land here for an off-grid setup. The Killingly Planning & Zoning Department administers a full set of zoning regulations organized by district, plus a separate Danielson Borough zoning code within town limits, and there's also subdivision and inland wetlands regulation layered on top. What you can do with raw land, minimum lot size, setbacks, all of it, depends on which zoning district your parcel sits in, so my first move if I were researching a property here would be to call the Planning & Zoning office and ask what district applies.

On dwellings, I couldn't find an official Killingly page that specifically addresses tiny homes or RVs as permanent residences. That doesn't mean they're banned, it means the answer lives inside the zoning code's dwelling definitions and in how the town's Building Official chooses to interpret the State Building Code for your specific structure. This is exactly the kind of thing you want in writing from the town before you invest in a structure, not after.

Building permits are required and administered locally: you file with Planning & Zoning (and Wetlands if applicable), submit plans, and trade permits (plumbing, electrical, heating) generally require licensed tradespeople, though there's a homeowner exemption for owner-occupied one- and two-family homes doing their own work.

Septic and wells are not handled by the town directly. Killingly delegates its local health authority function to the Northeast District Department of Health (NDDH), based in Brooklyn, CT. Any septic system serving a property off the public sewer needs an NDDH-approved application, following the state's Public Health Code technical standards for systems under a certain design flow. Wells work similarly: your driller submits the permit to NDDH, and a completion report plus water analysis has to go to NDDH before final sign-off, per Connecticut's statewide well-testing law. I found nothing on composting toilets as a sole waste solution from Killingly or NDDH, so that's genuinely unclear, ask NDDH directly.

Greywater reuse is also a blank spot in the official record for this town. I'd call it unclear rather than assume either way, and I'd bring it up directly with NDDH since they're the ones who'd weigh in on any wastewater-adjacent question.

Rainwater harvesting doesn't appear to carry any Killingly-specific restriction beyond whatever the state building code requires for the collection system itself, so I'd loop in Building & Safety Inspections if you're building anything permanent for it.

Bottom line on going fully off-grid here: occupancy requires either a public sewer connection or an approved NDDH septic permit as part of the building permit process, so living disconnected from water/wastewater infrastructure isn't really a legal option in Killingly, consistent with Connecticut's baseline statewide approach.