Recently I got a small job on the Virgin Islands, and I made a deal with the client – pay for my ticket as part of the fee, and put me up for a couple days. I could then visit the Professional Engineer board office and get my license application, and meet with Code officials to talk about shipping containers. Just a couple days…
This morning I got up, and my client told me we’d take the day off today, they didn’t work Sundays. Good, I needed a rest. Then Hurricane Earl decided to join us. We found out we have a tropical storm warning and a hurricane watch. Well, so much for the day off. I spent the day with my client helping him tie down his boat, carrying plywood up steep hill, and various other forms of manual labor helping him get his house ready for Earl’s visit. I thought getting a visit from in-laws was bad, but Earl is a pain. He’s supposed to bring 45-50 mph winds with him.
This isn’t something I expected as part of my engineering services, and I hope my client doesn’t judge me by my carpentry skills. His foreman, Santiago came over later this afternoon, and I was taken off helping put plywood over the windows, and given the job of carrying wood up the hill. I understood, there’s a reason I stay away from saws.
I hope Earl behaves, and doesn’t stay too long. He’s sent some wind ahead of himself, I can hear it blowing outside now, and it’s thundering too. I will put more updates later.
This article appeared in CNBC the other day – Death of the Mc Mansion: Era of Huge Homes is Over. It tells us pretty much what we can see – the popularity of the supersized, yet hideous homes that appeared in former forests and fields around every major city has crashed. During the housing boom I didn’t complain in particular about the business these things brought me, but a couple things irked me to no end:
1. The ostentatiousness of these things was downright creepy. The kitchens were outfitted in ranges, ovens, and refrigerators that were much beyond what you needed for fixing normal suburban meals (microwave lasagna, cheeseburgers…), and would put some of the kitchens I’ve seen in institutional and restaurant facilities to shame. Then there are the chandeliers, the hardwood floors, palatial bathrooms, expensive light fixtures, home theaters… It was absolutely insane. I don’t understand building a house that contains everything you might need or want in your day-to-day life – wouldn’t it be better to go out once and a while?
2. The size causes trouble for the environment. It got to the point I didn’t think 5,000 to 7,000 square feet wasn’t a big deal. My own personal home is 2,000 square feet, which I actually found embarrassing. The extreme size of course uses up valuable resources and energy, but there is also a drainage issue. An extremely large house eats up the open ground that can absorb rainwater. Yes, a townhouse subdivision eats up pervious area too, but the square footage eaten up per person is less. A Mc Mansion adds a lot more runoff into local streams causing various forms of pollution and flooding at much greater quantity per person. Witness the extreme flooding we’ve gotten here in the Atlanta area this past year, and we can directly blame all of the subdivisions that have popped up in the past 20 years.
3. They are ugly. There is no discernible architecture. The 70′s were a bad decade for design, but people in future generations will be shaking their heads at us hundreds of years for putting up these awful things. They are even worse than leisure suits and disco, and I never thought anything could be that awful.
4. They are energy inefficient. The two story foyers and extremely large rooms add unnecessary areas that you have to heat and cool. The roofs with all the peaks and valleys add area that soaks up heat from the sun in the summer, adding to your cooling load, and dissipates heat in the winter, adding to your heating load.
5. They are hard to maintain. The numerous valleys in the roofs are all areas subject to leakage as time goes on. If you have gone for the fake stucco (EIFS), you will more than likely have nightmares for years to come with moisture infiltration, and you probably have two furnaces, two air handling units, and two condensers at the minimum. You may even have multiple hot water heaters. All of these things wear out and have to be replaced.
So, maybe the time has come for more sensible construction. Shipping container houses of course aren’t the solution for everyone, but let’s compare notes with the Mc Mansions:
1. They aren’t ostentatious. The size is reasonable, and when you drive by one of these you don’t expect to see Jed, Granny, Ellie Mae, and Jethro coming out the front door.
2. The size is more compact. The Atlanta house has a footprint of 640 Square feet, with a livable space of over 1800 Square Feet not counting the garage. It’s not wasting space on the ground, and all of the space is “usable”. We’re also recycling to build these things and not sucking resources out of the environment.
3. There is more of an architectural style. In the ones in Atlanta, the architecture is an industrial look to match the history of the neighborhood, which is now lofts from converted warehouses and cotton mills. The one we designed for a client in Louisiana has a nice cottage type look to it.
4. We aren’t wasting roof space, floor space, or dead air space. You don’t have the excessive heat gain or heat loss in the roof, and you aren’t heating and cooling areas that no one uses.
5. As far as maintenance, you don’t have to worry so much about termites at a start. You don’t have all sorts of complex features on the roofs to cause leaks, you don’t have have multiple and heating and cooling units to wear out, and don’t have to worry so much about moisture infiltration through the siding.
So maybe a not so fond farewell to the Mc Mansions will bring a more fond hello to our shipping container houses. I highly doubt we will see subdivisions full of shipping container houses, but a few more here and there are fine with me. I would be quite happy to see us go back to the more sensible construction of the late 50′s and early 60′s. Houses in that era were well built, attractive, and had a very good use of a much smaller footprint. You couldn’t fix dinner for a battalion of soldiers in the kitchen like you can in a Mc Mansion today, but if you ever do find yourself having a dinner party for the local Infantry battalion, you can use some of the money you saved on the house to hire a caterer.
This video shows something that is about my worst nightmare – a deck falling off a house. To hold a deck to a house, you should through bolt it to the rim board of the wood framing. In this case, the builder drilled holes in the brick and set 1/2″ bolts in the brick. They weren’t even well anchored to the brick, they were working themselves loose. The deck could have fallen down.
Found your site looking around for shipping container based homes around Atlanta and while it appears you have some interesting projects, your site leaves a lot to be desired.
There are not many people doing this in the south from what I can find and your site is your presence online. Spend a few thousand bucks, hire a professional web designer who has graphic design experience and you will have a kick ass site to show off all your projects.
Your site does not scroll smoothly, the videos dont play and it just looks very unprofessional and poorly laid out. I am not trying to be a d***, just offering constructive criiticism, especially in an industry where you are dealing with architecture and design, this is very important.
Cheers,
Jon>>
I really wasn’t in the mood for unsolicited advice, so my response was this:
<<Jon, I’m not trying to be a d*** either – but waste somebody else’s
time with unsolicited advice. Go away.>>
and the final response…
<<ok, keep your s****y website, I will buy my containers from somewhere else..>>
Well, I burst out laughing when I got the final response. I’m really not in the mood to do any business with someone that starts off with criticizing my website. However, there are some pertinent issues worth looking at here. First off, there are people on the net that have way too much time on their hands and are more than a little creepy. We all know that. The next one is the broader lesson. Obviously I have considered having a professional website designer do my website. The problem is simply cost vs. payback. For a very simple web site of only a few pages, the cost would be between $2,500 and $5,000. A several page website would be next to worthless for me, my site draws people in because of its information. To redo my site professionally, the cost would be between 25K and 50K. Would it pay off? I don’t believe it would. The reason is I have benchmarked my site vs. other sites owned by friends of mine in various businesses. All of them have sites that cost upwards of $100,000. I get right now 130 to 150 visitors a day. All of my friends get between 20 and 50. It’s not the look of the site, it’s the content.
If I redid the site, let’s say it did bring in more clients. How many more would it bring in? More importantly, would my company be able to effectively handle the increase in work that would happen so fast? My analysis is the increase in business would be minimal, making that expenditure a waste of money. If it did get a huge increase of business (which it would have to be to justify that kind of expense), it would be faster than I could handle, and I could get squeezed seriously in cash flow and proper quality control would drop, leading to design problems and risk of losing all business and getting sued. So, to spend the “few thousand” extra dollars would be a lose lose proposition for my company.
The lesson? Well, obviously, don’t waste people’s time with unsolicited advice. They probably already considered what you are telling them, and you will only insult them. The other lesson, in business constantly analyze your marketing and processes. Know why you are doing or not doing something. The worst reaction for me with this letter would be for me to think “I know all about website programming, I don’t need some fancy dancy professional to redo my site”. Well, no the worst would be “hey, this guy is right, let me spend a load of money my company doesn’t have to get no return at all!”
OK, I admit it, as an engineer I have a low threshold for excitement. The other night I was thrilled to figure out how the Conjugate Structure Method of determining deflections actually is a semi-graphical method of performing calculus on a structural element. I also was thrilled to read through the derivations of formula and see how the shear force diagram is the integral of the load on a beam, the moment diagram is the integral of the shear force diagram, the slope of the deflection is the integral of the moment diagram, and the deflection is the integral of the slope diagram. Yeah, I know, I need a life.
That said, my associate, Brian Hamil, spent the past couple of days working out how to code special sections into RAM Elements. While it is certainly possible to model our containers using the library of shapes that come with the program, and the shapes can be modified as necessary, we are designing much more conservatively than we need to. We discovered this by doing some hand calculations using the actual moments of inertia of sections like the door posts and rear corners. So, we knew RAM Elements had a language (LEO) that allows you to build your own sections, but I never got around to figuring it out. This week we started analysis on a cold formed steel module that we are developing for some prefab construction, and the manufacturer has some sections that don’t come in our library. Approximating would have given ultra conservative results, which would not do our client any good.
So, after a couple days of struggling, Brian (a GeorgiaTech grad none the less) got the system worked out. This is the nightmarish section that he modeled:
This is a section made from a combination of C Channels and a U Channel that is being used in a hallway. We need to model the strength of this, and an approximation just wouldn’t do. To verify what was done, the section was drawn to scale in AutoCAD, and its properties determined (area, moment of inertia). That was compared to the calculated section properties from RAM Elements after Brian built this. It worked. Next week we’ll test this with hand calcs and results in the computer to see how it works.
OK, I got this video sent to me by e-mail: #mce_temp_url# Thanks Mike, I appreciate getting the link, and the chance to talk about this some more. As you all probably have figured reading my blog posts and web page, I stand strongly against burying containers. Of course there are exceptions, and I thought maybe this might be one as I watched the video late last night. However, I did see some issues that I see common to construction, and failures all the time.
It’s an instructive video of how to bury a container. Now, I have to say the guy did put some good effort into what he did. We see a reinforced slab at the the top, and he built a good set of stairs into the container. He also put in a sump pump. What I see as the problem is the sides – which is the big hassle with burying containers. He left an air gap (good, keep the soil away from the corrugated metal sides and corrosion), but the soil is not braced in any way. Over time the soil walls could collapse. I’ve seen similar soil walls in cellars and basements last for years and years. I’ve also seen them last for years and years and collapse suddenly when a rainstorm occurs and the drainage is just right (or wrong). So, as an engineer I would never approve this. The container walls are not strong enough to hold back the soil if it collapses. Fortunately, it won’t be a catastrophic collapse, the walls will simply crush inwards slowly.
While this MAY work for an extended period of time, there is a fair chance it won’t. Get the right rainstorm, not enough drainage, the soil saturates, and you get a collapse. Also, it’s hard to tell the soil type in the picture. We may have unstable soils that will collapse under their own in time. It’s not a good way to build. What I don’t understand is with all the care that was done to build this, why not just build a block subwall on a foundation slab, and then put the steel and concrete deck on top? If you really have to have a container, you could put it inside the vault that you built with an air gap, and you wouldn’t have to worry about collapse in the future.
So, I still stand against burying containers. In this case, which is typical of many homeowner projects, the guy did a good job in many areas, and put a lot of effort into it. However,he overlooked what could in the future be a critical problem – the lateral pressure of the soil. Unfortunately, I deal with collapses from this kind of thing all the time, and with people that I can’t convince that this type of construction can collapse.
In two recent designs I’ve realized an architect that I know, Roy Taylor,is right. Don’t use the corrugated metal of the container for the outside skin. Roy didn’t like it because of the extreme industrial look, but my issue is from an engineer’s standpoint – practicality.
There are a couple of real hassles with design of containers because they aren’t made for buildings. When you put them side to side, there is a gap, and the same with top to bottom. How do you cover the gap? In the Atlanta houses we’ve used strips of metal, but that involves welding and is expensive.
If we put insulation on the outside of the container, and then a good siding (like hardiplank), we can fill the gaps in a much more simple way. We can use treated lumber, expansive foam, or just bridge it with the siding and exterior insulation.
From the standpoint of the architect, we give ourselves a bit more space inside (about 8″ of width, which makes a difference in an 8′ wide container), and we don’t have corrugated metal showing on the outside to infuriate the neighbors. I like the idea furring the outside with 2x’s, putting poly isocyanurate boards between the 2x’s, wrapping the structure with a house wrap like Tyvek, and then putting on the siding.
It’s not much hassle, solves a number of problems.
As I’ve worked on this website and blog, I’ve been humbled by the amount of people that visit it and contact me. However, I get my share of strange people. Way back when I was a little boy in the 60′s, I was living in the Washington, DC area. My favorite show when I came home from school in second grade was “Countdown Carnival”. It was a typical kids show on Channel 5, low budget set, a host, and it showed old cartoons and 3 Stooges shorts. The host was pretty funny, but often he went over the heads of his young audience. One day he introduced his show and said “This is Countdown Carnival, NOT “The Secret Storm”. Seems an old lady got her channels mixed up and had been watching Channel 5 for weeks thinking she was seeing a soap opera “The Secret Storm”. When she discovered her mistake, she wrote the host of Countdown Carnival a “very nasty letter” (his words). I thought it was funny even in second grade. How could somebody be so nuts?
Well, after having a presence on the Internet, I’ve discovered just how many of them are out there. The host of that show was making what was probably a futile attempt to head off other letters from angry people who tuned in to his show by mistake by announcing in advance it was a children’s show, not a soap opera. In that vein, I’m going to do the same. Here goes:
1. No, you can’t bury shipping containers. Well, I’m sorry, you can. If you put them in a concrete vault, it will work. Of course you could build the vault and not worry about the container to save money and hassle. The other way is to build a steel structure around or inside the container to take the loads, and put in a cathodic protection system (no – roofing cement WON’T work) to prevent corrosion. It would be ridiculously expensive and impractical, but it would work. Then again, you could do what everyone else does for underground structures – built a concrete vault.
2. Just because it is on the World Wide Web doesn’t make it practical. There are a load of designs out there on the web, most of them are rather silly. There are also sites that will tell you whatever you want to believe is true. I’m sure if you want to believe everything is pink outside you will find a site that tells you that is true. You can believe anything you want, but the last time I checked everything wasn’t pink outside, and you can’t build a lot of the container structures you see on the Web.
3. You may have a great idea, but that won’t make you any money. You need to implement your idea, and that often costs money in itself. I get a lot of calls from people who have a wonderful business idea for shipping containers, but they have no plan, no money, and no idea how to get from here to there. Pretty much everybody that had great ideas, from Alexander Graham Bell to Bill Gates had some sort of implementation plan. Often they had to make it up as they went along, but they did have a way to implement their ideas. I actually have people call me that have grand ideas to manufacture container houses to save humanity, but they have no business plan, no place to do it, and most important, no money. That just doesn’t work.
4. There probably are no government grants for whatever you want to do. It doesn’t matter that you set up a non-profit. I don’t care what the infomercials say early in the morning.
5. Government contracting is worth looking into. However, spend time researching it. Call the Small Business Administration, check out this site: https://www.fbo.gov/ and research the following:
- What type of work is the Government advertising for that you can do?
- What are the requirements for getting those jobs?
-What do you need to do to meet the requirements? Look close at insurance and bonding requirements.
- Be prepared to spend a lot of time checking the web for announcements. It can be very frustrating at times.
-Being that public money is spent, there is an attempt to distribute it evenly. Therefore, there are set asides to various groups, such as Women Owned Businesses, Veteran Owned Businesses, Small Disadvantaged Businesses, and so on. The Small Business Administration is a good source of information on this. Probably the best program, if you qualify, is the 8A program. However, the paperwork requirements are high and from what I’ve seen, the Small Business Administration can exert a lot of power over your business.
Depending on your size, you may find that contracting for the government is not worth it. For myself I came to that conclusion – I lack the necessary staff. However, I subcontract on a large number of Federal and State contracts. That is another avenue.
The International Building Code in the US requires fire rated construction in walls in certain cases. For example, a two hour wall is required between changes in use (like if you have an auto repair shop and office space/waiting room, a fire wall with a two hour rating is required between the two), and must separate dwellings for more than two families. The fire rated construction is called out in the Code, and you can use UL listed alternatives from the Underwriter’s Laboratory Standards. The problem is there is nothing about shipping containers.
So, if you are building a set of 4 townhomes of shipping containers, a two hour firewall is required to put two on each side. It can’t be done, since you can’t invent your own fire wall. The only way to get the system certified by UL. UL uses a standard fire, and the time is measured for that fire to penetrate the construction. With containers you could argue that the steel sides won’t burn, but 1. That is meaningless without a UL certification and 2. They probably WON’T work to hold back a standard fire for two hours.
Why wouldn’t steel walls of the container work? Because they transfer heat. Usually two hour fire walls are very thick made from noncombustible material like concrete block or have a breakaway function. With the break away function, the portion of the building that is burning will collapse away from the building that isn’t. With a set of containers, they are likely to get exceedingly hot, and ignite the combustible materials on the other side of the wall. That probably gives whoever tries to develop a 2 hour system a bit of an issue, since you would have to come up with a way to stop the heat transfer between containers that would ignite material on the other side. The heat transfer would probably come through the walls and the floor and ceiling, which would be a bit difficult.
My thought is the only way you could do this is to put a masonry wall between the two sections of container building with a parapet. That’s not the end of it, because Code requires fire ratings in the exterior walls a distance away from the fire rated wall, and fire ratings in the roof (4′ if I remember correctly). That’s so sparks and heat won’t ignite the adjacent part of the building. A fire rated wall doesn’t do much good if the fire can easily jump around it. Will the steel skin of the container suffice for this? I don’t know.
Ulitmately, someone will have to pay to have this done. If container construction really takes off, it might be done by one or more of the companies that manufacture these buildings and/or the ones that resell the containers. Until that happens, it could be a real show stopper for a number of projects.
I constantly get calls and e-mails about burying containers. I’ve covered this a lot, but I’ll go through it again and maybe cover some more material. First off, which shipping containers are strong, they are meant to carry loads through their floors and connection points. The sides and roofs are not meant to be load bearing – the sides have resistance to wind loads, and the roof basically is strong enough for a couple of guys to walk on. Let’s go through the issues:
Loading: Wind loads on a container at the most (say 160 MPH wind, a Cat V hurricane), are at the most 30 to 35 lbs/Square Foot. Soil loads if you bury a container in silty sand 8 deep will be on the order of 250 lbs/Square Foot on the sides at the bottom. Other soils it will be heavier. If the soil is saturated, double that load to 500 lbs/Square Foot. A container can not take that load.
Other People Do It: People call and e-mail me that burying shipping containers must be OK, because others have done it. For some reason, I guess it’s instinctive, if we see someone else doing something, it must be OK. It may have worked out for our cavemen ancestors that if Thog could walk across a stream it was safe to do so. Good thing Thog didn’t have shipping containers to bury, we might not be a species today. Paleontologists for some future race of animals that succeeded us would puzzle about how humans went the way of the dinosaurs, and wonder why they found fossils of humans buried in crushed metal boxes. Here’s the deal – if someone has buried a shipping container, and it hasn’t collapsed, it is the same principle that allows you to jump off the Empire State Building and not hit the ground. You aren’t in orbit, and the container isn’t safe. You just haven’t hit the ground yet (and you will with a SPLAT!), and the container hasn’t crushed yet (it will, but at least it won’t SPLAT!).
They are made out of metal: For some reason people think because shipping containers are metal they have infinite strength. Your car is metal, so kick your passenger door with a steel toed boot on and see what happens. Metals have a finite strength, and the weight of soil is significant.
They rust: It has been suggested that since these are Core-Ten steel that you can bury them. No, Core-Ten steel rusts too. It’s used on bridges because when it rusts it doesn’t scale, and the rust forms a protective coating. However, when buried in soil there is more factors that are at play. Electric current is generated between the container and the soil, and the currents carry oxygen atoms into the metal, causing it to rust. The sides are too thin for the rust coating to protect against this, and pretty soon the container is gone. You can paint the container, or coat it with tar, but any imperfections or area that it is scraped off will cause extreme localized corrosion. The only true way to stop or slow down the corrosion is to use cathodic protection, which is a system of putting a reverse current into the soil to stop the movement of the atoms that cause the corrosion. Now we’ve introduced an expense and maintenance headache.
