This year’s West Coast Green, showstopper, is made from five 40-foot-long shipping containers that once roamed the high seas, packed with washing machines and the like. From the outside, the two-story, 1,700-square-foot house, dubbed Harbinger for its potential to influence home construction in the years to come, looks like the sort of modern dream home one finds in the pages of Sunset magazine - not a major surprise, as the publication is one of the home’s sponsors.
Whatever they’re called, the advantages to building a house from steel shipping containers are significant. They’re made of heavy-gauge steel, which holds up nicely in a hurricane or earthquake, but is usually too expensive to use in construction.
“You wouldn’t dream of asking your builder to use heavy-gauge steel,” says Cross. But he gets the containers cheap - $500 to $2,000 a pop - because the fuel costs to ship them back empty to China or other places overseas are prohibitive. Because of the United States’ huge trade imbalance, there are many empty containers lying around, proof of which can be found on a drive by the Port of Oakland, one of the world’s biggest container ports.
Steel-container homes are as environmentally friendly as the user wants to make them. They are also only about 5 percent less expensive than building in wood or other conventional materials, but homes using them can be built about 40 percent faster. The savings are more significant if the containers are used to build apartments or condos, a popular utilization of them in Germany.
I’ve seen many pictures of them used as houses, apartments and many other cool homes in Europe. So this home built at the local show was a cool find. I included a link to the CBS broadcast where I found out about it… too bad they are behind the times and don’t allow embedding. Here is the SFGate article I got a lot of the text info from. And here is a manufacturer that has a number of great photos of other buildings. Watch the video for good shots and descriptions of it.
Tags: building, Construction, Environment, Green, home
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