Earth-cooled, shipping container underground CA home for 30K

some people like the delivery guy will come in he said where's the house and then he drives around the corner he says right about here and it's about this wide over to here about here yeah I don't consider myself a prepper I'm not trying to get away from people or anything it just the idea was a whole lot more about using the earth temperature control than it was about hiding you know when I was a kid we used to go up north of here up Lake Shasta there's a bunch of caves and they're lime stone they're in the hot summer as we go okay exploring because that was so cool inside the cave you know and I always remembered that that if you could just get underground it was cool even on a really hot day looks like they've done this before the shipping container there's tons of these containers sitting around just sitting there you know so why not use them I've found the book in the library and it seemed like a it was all about bomb shelters but why could we make it just a living space and then we got a plan for a single 40-footer dug in and we thought well let's take that idea and expand it a little bit give ourselves 640 square feet that's what we did I think I would do three containers yeah next time I think we go just a little bit more as you can see it looks like a walkout basement we have a 6% grade here and so it made it quite easy to get a excavator in here and just dig straight back and then set the set the containers in and then bring the dirt back over the top that was the technique that we used we left the doors on the front if we've never used them but maybe somebody'd want to lock it up good so we have a 6-foot sliding door there just come on in and you'll feel the immediate temperature difference so it was a hundred what you just stepped out of was probably about 104 by now it started to cool down a little bit and I've got a thermometer in the back and it's been staying eighty degrees all day so we have our living room there and I did cut throughs so that the to eight foot becomes sixteen feet and it gives a lot more spacious feeling to it since we're underground we realized that light it would be a commodity what we did was we have these are solar tubes it goes through the roof and it has a prism on it and then it's got real shiny interior so it make sure and gathers all the light down so we wanted to have these solar tubes to let as much light down these are the high cube containers so there's an extra 18 inches on these so it gives you a lot more headspace and so it doesn't feel like it's pushing down on you so bad and it also gives you room for cupboards and stuff as well so in order to be able to put sheetrock because I didn't want to make holes in the walls because that's another thing that can get rust started is if you put a hole where you can get moisture so what I've decided was that that Square bar is closed in itself I could tap into that with l-brackets and then these these two by fours are just a little bit too wide to fit in here so I would cut them down just a little bit and then they fit snug in there and they're there right even with the front of this you see this is a wavy link there so that allows you to go ahead and do a more or less regular kind of wall plus like cabinets be able to have to before is up there to hang your cabinets on we wanted to kind of split things a little bit as you see we have we kind of had to do a regular walls to do cabinets and things but we also left some of the metal so there's a little bit of industrial lit as well and we had to be a little inventive like you know to bring the gas down we had instead of bringing it up as a regular house we have to bring it down you know so and the water as well but it comes in the back so we have like a nice fairly nice pant pantry here that was another thing that it with these walls it's hard because you have cement coming right down to the metal so in order to make a hole you would need a metal bit going into a mason bit and it doesn't work too good we kind of had to come up with a unique way of doing our walls and that was to make them an eighth of an inch longer than their measurement and then drive them into place with a sledge hammer these are held in place by friction but then as I put the other wall to it then they're screwed together so they and then they're screwed into the floor as well and they're very solid but it requires a little bit of inventiveness that's solar that's a solar to just turn this light on just to get a little more view in here this brighter another thing I did whenever I did a cut-through I used these beams to support the weight so that if I was sacrificing any strength by doing the cut then I would hold up that strength by adding these beams in here so and we made this big enough that we could put a bed in there but it's being used for surely sewing and then the bedroom we opened it up so that it's got the full 16 foot and it's got two solar tubes as well and we used a larger one on this side yeah this one's got a lot of light the second opening is a vent so that we can exchange air so we're pulling the air down here and then we're pushing it out from the front so we can do a full exchange of error in a fairly short period of time and that's important because outside it's about 25 percent humidity inside here it's about 45 percent and that's this because we're in here and so you need to exchange that air fairly frequently and you don't want to let things get too damp or that's going to be a major issue especially since you have metal containers you don't want to get rust starting and stuff like that so now another thing we did that's also combating a moisture for the wintertime is on the outside of these walls we have four inches of polystyrene styrofoam panels then we have 18 inches of drain gravel all the way up the walls back sides and then we have six inches underneath with drain tiles so any surface water that comes towards this will hit that gravel and immediately go down so we don't let water get in on top little on the sides of this and now we felt was another important thing of keeping the metal dry so we don't get rust Porton steel is what they make these containers out-of-court ins is resistant to rust already but you still want to protect it even structurally we worried I mean this is a big cut out here right here's the thing is with a container the corner posts are what's made for to hold the string if you see a ship and they're designed so that they stack and so corner post meets corner posts so that's going all the way up so what you want to do is you want to carry the weight of the dirt to the corner post and so what we did was we made a 6-inch slab on top of the container and the slab has half-inch rebar at 1 foot grid all the way through it so it's a very strong slab and so what that's doing is carrying all of the weight to those corner posts so when we brought the weight the dirt back over we have at least three feet in the front and then it goes deeper and towards the back we had the tractor on you know caterpillar shoving the dirt so there's been a tractor driving on the roof of this you know and so that's how strong it is well I just had so many people asking about what how this came about what how we did it this is how we laid it out for the slab on top by having that slab essentially what you have is you can just imagine like a table with the legs and the legs are the only strength of the table the table is strong because it's putting that wood out to those you know so essentially that's what we have going on here yeah this is a corner and then that's behind in the closet it's the other side so you can see the corner post there different piece yeah it's a full totally different it's a it's a hollow square and you also you'll see along the edge there too that's a square beam as well and so this metal is welded all along they're into each other and on the bottom and then you've got this part here's metal but as soon as it turns into wood that's inch and a quarter mahogany plywood and then it's got tar on the bottom so these things are made to take all of that abuse you know there have been ship wrecks and they have found years later these containers still floating on the ocean and they seal up the air and so they act like a boat themselves you know so these containers the whole idea of the container cargo was you know it's been developed pretty highly over the years so using these containers you're really gaining the benefit of all of that engineering and most of the time you think of having all of your utilities come in underneath but since we're on the ground we bring our utilities in the top so that's the main shutoff for the water the electricity is going in there as well and the gas is going in there it's propane and we just used these 90 pound bottles so that we can look put them in the trunk and go get more and because you have to be permitted to get the big tank anyway so that's just the way it is we asked the county if we needed to have a permit to put this in here and they said at this point when we asked them they didn't have a permit for burying containers so we said fine that's all we need to know so they have been out and inspected us since we have been in place and living here and no problems but we do not technically have a single-family permitted dwelling here we have a permitted septic system we have a permitted well everything is up to snuff as far as that goes it's just this is such a non-conforming type of building that they really didn't know what to do with this just another thing your savings this is about thirty thousand dollars to get it to this level and that includes the solar panels and stuff too so if you take 640 square feet you're just a little under fifty dollars a square foot which isn't great but that's just the beginning of where your savings are because we haven't had a utility bill for since 2002 obviously we're not running an air conditioner that's those are big energy hogs and then in the winter we just have this little little RV catalytic heater is the only heater we have in here that's all you need in here it's just just this much heat yeah even if the heaters not on it doesn't get below 62 degrees in here in the coldest day of the winter the earth has a tendency to not change much at all it's the same thing that's keeping us cool in the summer keeps us warm in the winter it's that thermal mass and so you're getting the benefit both in the winter and the summer on opposite ends of the temperature scale oh I think I think it's a great idea to me it just makes a whole lot of sense so you know there's whole cities in Turkey that are underground so you know there's a few people that are understanding the benefits you just let the earth do the work

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 3,491,743

Keywords: shipping container, cargo container, shipping container architecture, cargo container architecture, shipping container construction, cargo container construction, underground home, underground house, passive solar, off grid, homesteading, small space, small home, simple living, self sufficiency, northern california, solar, pv, photovoltaic, underground construction

Id: Z0oFJ2jbkDI

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/stickmanDave]

Half buried "earth ship" homes such as these were popular in the 70's, but typically developed mold problems. The issue is that in the summer, warm air meets the cool interior walls and condensation forms. Eventually people realized that if this is to be avoided, the underground walls need to be every bit as well insulated as the exterior walls in a conventional dwelling. This pretty much eliminates any benefit of being underground in the first place.

[u/stuffucanmake]

Good educational video.