Jan

19

I’ve reviewed elaborate videos and glossy books on shipping container homes at the high scale end. It’s far simpler for cheap. I’ve lived in two containers in different valleys and it’s as easy as going to the bread aisle at the grocery store.

You go to the vendor – around the Salton Sea it’s the Calpatria hay store or trucking companies near the border. You pick out a used one from the lot, fork over $1-2000 that includes transportation, and lead the flatbed with your new home out to your place. The driver slides it onto pre-laid RR ties, you put a lock on the door, and celebrate the new home.

The biggest advantages are it’s difficult to rob, arson, or blow over like in the Three Little Pigs, and without building codes since it’s on skids.

I had no idea on moving into my first container in 1999 on the Sonora that I was looking into the architectural future. I installed a loft with waterbed, office with a solar powered laptop, and garage beneath a trap door. Chilled air rose from the garage through stovepipes into the interior and vented hot air out the roof. A satellite dish pulled in the Nature and History channels on an upside-down B&W TV. A pet packrat was a muse and road partner in search of gold in abandoned mining camps that it had been trained to retrieve. We drove two hours to sub-teach when mining was poor.

Then, in 2013, I owned the first container home in Slab City and am as content as a clam. There are three more now, the nearest scavenged and dragged from a bombing range target and riddled with hundreds of high-caliber holes. The second was towed from the Mexican border and is hemmed with painted flowers. And, the third was trucked from Los Angeles and converted into a church.

I thought I was on the vanguard of a would craze that is verified.

In the South Africa capital of Johannesburg, thousands of brightly colored boxes piled on and around each other, are stacked and re-stacked, and hauled away on trucks and freight trains, as homeowners decide where they want to live or sell. In Sudan, a prison is built of old containers slammed together. That’s how secure they are. Now container architecture is a hip fad in European cities for offices and homes. London has one of the biggest housing projects in the world of containers, and Amsterdam has the largest student village with over 1000 containers.

In USSR, shipping containers are used for market stalls and warehouses. Southeast Asia bazars are typically double-stacked containers. New Zealand earthquake rocked malls were rebuilt of shipping containers in the business districts. A Tokyo company provides container modules for multi architectural use. Prefab container homes are bomb across China. Google barges ply the seven seas with superstructures of stacked containers.

Shipping containers were invented in the USA in 1953 when trucking businessman Malcolm McLean gave a lot of thought when, frustrated by the glacial pace of overnight freight transport on the American highway system, he fashioned a set of stackable aluminum boxes and outfitted a decommissioned tanker ship to shuttle boxes of cargo up-and-down the eastern seaboard. In the next two decades, it spread over the oceans to other continents to radically change the face of global shipping. No longer does cargo have to be loaded and unloaded by a cadre of dock workers. Suddenly, the major cost of getting consumer goods around the world efficiently dissolved, and with it, many millions of boxes have been built and shipped, trucked, and trained, and now lived in.

Today, at any given moment, there are about 20 million more bobbing across the ocean or sitting in ports around the world. Union Pacific trains slide them three miles from my Conex home, and hobos know that a ride on a container train is a cannonball to any destination.

The sky is the limit. I think shipping containers will advance to fill into our architectural dreams for city projects, apartments, condos, hotels, and single housing units. Shipping containers are legal homes in California and elsewhere. They are cheap, built like a tank, fit the Golden Ratio, fast to construct, without codes, with high resale value, and can be moved as your heart pleases.

Alex Castaldo comments:

I have never lived in a container, but I would not recommend it. They lack the natural insulation properties of a wood or brick home, so they are chilly in winter and hot in summer. There is also the problem of no windows….

Larry Williams responds:

They work well here in the usvi where folks put 2-3 together for L or U shaped home.

Henry Gifford expands:

A steel box leaks almost no air unless doors and windows are installed in a sloppy way.

In rare cases, a building's heating and cooling loads are actually calculated before equipment is chosen. The job involves lots of measuring, and some simple math in the case of heating, and some fancier calculations for cooling loads.

Having calculated the heating and cooling loads of each room in many buildings over the years, I have found that very roughly half the peak and annual heating loads for a building are attributable to cold outdoor air leaking through the building, about one fourth is heat transmitted (conducted and radiated) out the walls and roof, with the other one fourth going out the closed windows. This is a rough generalization, but about equally true for old, poorly insulated buildings and new, very well insulated and airtightened buildings.

So, the lack of air leaking through a shipping container goes a long way toward comfort - it eliminates maybe half the heating load. And without the usual chemical soup of construction materials (glues, sealants, caulk, paint) in a normal house, the need for ventilation for health is reduced to a smaller amount. As few houses, old or new, are ventilated (few people open windows, as they also admit cold air, hot air, humidity, insects, rain, snow, and criminals), reducing the need for ventilation is a nice thing.

One way to explain the leakiness of normal construction is to point out that a person can hold a concrete block to their mouth (or a piece of a block) and breath in and out at a rate sufficient to satisfy the needs of an adult. I don't recommend vigorous exercise while trying this, but the point is that normal, sturdy looking materials leak a surprisingly large amount of air. The leaking is worse at connections between materials, and even worse than that at connections between assemblies (walls to roof, etc.).

Cooling loads are much more complicated mathematically because of the effects of humidity on indoor comfort, and because a cooling load calculation has to account for solar gain into windows (usually the largest part of a cooling load for a house), internal gains of heat and humidity from cooking, lights, showering, breathing, etc. Numbers for heat and humidity output from a bowl of soup or a lab mouse can be looked up, and are useful for calculating the cooling load on a restaurant or a medical lab.

The total lack of windows, or lack of numerous large windows in a shipping container goes a long way to keeping a shipping container comfortable during the summer.

Bo Keely responds:

You make the mundane details of buildings interesting, and this more than usual. The only air leaks in my container are fork holes where they loaded it over the years. This brought the price down to my wallet. I choose to not plug them near the roof as they vent the air in the summer. Where there is air, there is sound. My almost hermetically sealed box is soundproof. Also, roaches and rats can't get in. These are things money can't buy in Manhattan. I've never been so content.


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