Shipping Container Houses

I follow some tiny house blogs because I'm interested in sustainable building and it overlaps one of my other interests, shantyboats.  Periodically one of these blogs gushes about a house built at least partially from steel cargo shipping containers.  Is it just me or is this one of the worst ideas ever?  Granted, steel is 100% recyclable, but that's about the only thing it's got going for it as a home building material.  It's strong, but in fact it's much stronger (and much heavier) than it needs to be to build a house.  A shipping container can weigh 67,000 pounds (loaded) and it must be built to support the weight of up to 8 or 10 other containers stacked on top of it.  How many houses need to be built to support 670,000 pounds?  There's nothing wrong with strength per se but empty containers can weigh almost 8000 pounds.  This doesn't matter much to the Maersk Emma but it's one of the reasons why freight-hauling trucks get 4 miles per gallon, and if you build a house from containers you have to get them to your building site somehow.  You're also going to have to build a foundation to support the extra load, which is going to involve transporting and pouring thousands of additional pounds of concrete.  Also consider the fact that steel must be mined from iron and created in a process that requires enormous amounts of energy.  Contrast with the other most common building material, wood, which literally grows on trees.  You can't grow a mountain back.

Now consider what you've got: a box.  The doors are on the end, so they're basically useless, unless you want to feel like you're living in a coffin, so you have to cut openings for doors and windows elsewhere, and this requires a plasma cutter.  You're going to need lots of windows, because your box is pretty dark inside.  How are you going to get those doors and windows to stay on your house?  It's not like you can drive a nail into a steel wall.  And don't bother trying to figure out how to hang a picture or a cabinet.

Your box can't be more than 8'6" wide.  I've never set foot in a house where any room was 8'6" wide, save for bathrooms, laundry, etc.  So you're almost guaranteed to need more than just the box you started with, which means that it's now just a footnote supporting some other type of construction.  Even if you decide to live in a hallway, you're still going to need to build a traditional roof.  Shipping containers have flat roofs, which don't shed water.  This is fine while the boxes are almost constantly in transit, but doesn't work so well when you leave it in place for years.

To their credit, some designers have done incredible things with shipping containers, but that still doesn't make them "green" or a sustainable means to build a house.

Digital Media Tip

You probably have a digital camera, and it probably records pictures on a little card like CF, SD, or something close.  I was surprised to read a tip in David Pogue's tech column in the NY Times, where he recommends reformatting your card frequently.  This is pretty much the worst thing you can do to your card for its longevity.  This has to do with the way these cards store information, but the upshot is that you pretty much never, ever want to format your media card.  At least if you want it to last a long time.  In practice, it probably doesn't make any difference, but if you take a lot of pictures, don't reformat your card.  I use digital media cards as write-once, meaning that I never actually erase pictures from the card (unless they're really bad ones that I'm not keeping anywhere else anyway).  Cards are so cheap these days, and so huge, that you can simply copy the files from the camera's folder (usually called something like DCIM) to another folder on the media (say, Backup).  Then copy them again to your computer's hard drive for editing and upload.  When you fill up your card, buy whatever size media is available for around $20-$30.  By the time you fill up the new one, you will probably be able to get one that's twice as big for the same $20-$30.  And you have a second backup of your shots if your laptop dies and Picasa loses your photos.  Keep in mind that there's absolutely no guarantee that any online photo site will keep your pictures around; they do their best but since you're getting the space for close to free, they don't spend a lot of time or effort insuring that every last upload is going to be there forever.
There is an interesting parallel happening right now in the oil industry.  For decades, oil companies have been using a form of sonar to find oil, or at least the spots deep in the earth where oil is likely to be.  (They still have to drill a well to know for sure).  The methods they use to analyze seismic data have become orders of magnitude more advanced as computers have become faster, smaller, and cheaper, which is why we pay less at the pump now than we did in 1971 for a gallon of gas.  A lot of the oil companies decided not to save the original storage media (tapes) that their surveys were stored on from decades ago--it's expensive to store tapes, and there's no guarantee that they'll work after years in storage.  Now, they're finding that it's possible to go back to this really old data and find lots of potential oil sources that they missed the first time around because the geophysical techniques were relatively primitive.  But they no longer have the data, so they have to spend millions of dollars redoing surveys that they did a long time ago.  So save those media cards!

Heating

We're getting into the thick of the home heating season here in Ohio. We actually need to heat our home around 9 months a year, but that's more due to the variability in climate here than the fact that it's just cold. It's not nearly as cold here as much of the rest of the midwest. However, there is usually about a monthlong period in the spring and in the fall where nighttime temps will go down to near- or below-freezing but during the daytime the heat, or more likely the humidity, will make you want to turn on the a/c. Or you'll get a week of days in the 60s in late April, then another week of daytime highs in the low 30s. I've never lived in a place where the heating season and cooling season overlapped so much.
By now, it's safe to say that the a/c is going to remain idle for a while (which is a good thing, since I may have accidentally broken it while installing a humidifier, which I'm not even using any more since it wastes so much water--but that's another story). After several years of dithering, I finally bit the bullet and bought a pellet stove, and also replaced the 20-year-old furnace in the basement. The pellet stove is a Napoleon NPS40. It fits (just barely) in the awkward space of the false fireplace in the living room. I'm not sure why you would build a false fireplace complete with stone hearth and pad, and not put something in it, but we finally did. I love the pellet stove, mainly because it blows a continuous flow of hot air into the room and keeps the entire downstairs (except the kitchen) toasty. Plus I'm using fuel made from waste wood and made in the U.S., with very little excess carbon content. One of the things that amazes me about the pellet stove is how completely it burns the fuel. I have used almost twenty 40-pound bags of fuel so far and I have yet to empty the ash drawer, which now holds around 4 pounds of ash. I dithered (I mean, "researched") the pellet stove for a few years before buying, and only wish I had bought it last year when we were paying Columbia Gas of Ohio $1.87 per ccf of natural gas. The price is 40% lower now. I did a lot of comparisons of the cost of fuel, and almost bought a gas stove instead, but the carbon-neutral fuel combined with the federal tax credit pushed me to the pellet stove. The pellet stove lobby has a decent calculator for fuel costs here, although I think they're giving the non-pellet wood burning stoves too much credit: my own research showed that you're extremely unlikely to be able to find dense hardwoods with a high BTU content at all, let alone for the $200 per cord they assume. If our natural gas price was still what it was last year, and our old furnace was running at 85% efficiency (although it was built as 90%), the pellets would just about break even with the gas. However, the pellet stove is a space heater, not a house heater, so it's producing at most 44k BTU while the old furnace was pumping out 110k BTU. In other words, the pellet stove is blowing hot air right into the space where we spend most of our Saturday when it's cold out, and the furnace was heating the basement, the unoccupied bedrooms, etc. When we bought the house it was even heating the outside: the so-called "Florida room" in the front of the house and the back porch. If the new furnace is truly 95% efficient, then it's costing $13.15 per mBTU, while the pellets cost $22.87 per mBTU (assuming $6 a bag and 80% efficiency for the pellet stove. They're so efficient that the EPA doesn't rate them, but the downside is that they vary from 80-90% and you don't know what you're getting if it's not tested, so I'm assuming the low end). But if running the pellet stove at full blast keeps the heater off, then we're only producing half as many BTUs, so it's a bit cheaper and it's carbon-neutral. At least that's how I rationalized it.

Radio Flyer

It's been a while since the last sailing post...that pic on the right is why. Tonight I assembled a Radio Flyer wagon for Tilda's 2nd birthday. What a marvel of Chinese manufacturing! Not a hard angle or sharp edge on it. Maybe I'm in a generous mood because of the holiday season, but I'd like to think it's more than just 30 years of product liability testing that made Radio Flyer think hard about the little tykes who are going to be sitting in this chariot as it rockets down the hill at 40 mph. It's made of very heavy sheet steel, but all the edges are ground smooth so no little fingers are going to be amputated. The hinge for the front axle has a special detent, designed to keep the handle from pinching against the wagon. The instructions call for oil on the hinge. Not wanting to make another trip out to the cold garage, I settled for the next best substitute: Boudreau's Butt Paste. I'm sure it will give years of service. I doubt that Tilda is going to like riding in it half as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

Underwater Camera

I was reviewing some of the photos from the Bahamas trip in 2007, and thinking about how much I love my Olympus Stylus 720SW.

On my web site (www.quigs.org), early photos were not from a digital camera. From 2003-2005 or so I used a cheap digicam, which I periodically disassembled to clean out the dust. Many of the later shots are from a Nikon Coolpix 7700, which is decent enough for an advanced PAS camera. My favorite, however, is my Olympus. This is a shock and waterproof (to 15 feet) pocket-sized snapshot camera that takes excellent pictures for its size and price. I realize that excellent PAS cameras are a dime a dozen but obviously having one that's waterproof is a really good idea on a boat, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the underwater shots turned out. The color was always off but ACDSee was able to correct it automatically almost all the time.

This camera is 7.1 megapixels, which is important on a boat. The one thing I've learned about snapping pictures on a boat is that it's very difficult to get a level horizon. You usually want the horizon in your frame for reference, and to balance the color of the water, but the boat is always moving. So you're probably going to go back later and rotate the picture to make the horizon level. Any good photo software will let you draw a horizontal line on the picture and rotate the shot to the line. The problem is that you then have wedge-shaped dark areas outside of the original rectangle, which look strange. So you crop, which is where the 7MP comes in handy.

The rule is: don't use zoom unless you have to, because you're probably going to rotate and crop the photo anyway. Lots of MP also helps because it's often difficult to frame your subject well when both you and the subject are moving in 3 dimensions. So zoom out, shoot the whole shebang, and crop to your heart's content.

The only absolutely required accessory for the Olympus is the float strap. You could make your own, but it's pretty cheap to buy. It would be a shame watching your nice camera disappear into the murk at the bottom of the lake, no matter how many exciting mayfly larvae pictures it snaps on the way down.

18 knots

Mat, Mary, and I went sailing on a very windy day on Lake Erie and hit close to 18 knots in gusts; the fastest the boat has ever gone. This was with a reef in the main.

Mat managed to snap a picture over 16 knots but we were all thinking too much about death at 18 knots to bother with the cameras. It was sort of like, "We're doing 14 knots! Wow, now 15! Hey, 16! Oh shit!" It's amazing how the boat just takes off in a gust instead of heeling. It's different from boats that I'm used to in that the maximum speed is more consistent and easier to attain. Tom and I once hit 12 knots in the old Avalon (Ericson 28+) surfing down a wave, downwind, on the way back from the Farallones. Generally when you ask a sailor who hasn't spent any time on multihulls what's the fastest he's ever sailed, that's the number you'll get: spinnaker up when maybe it shouldn't have been, high wind, surfing down a big wave, we hit X knots for a moment, maybe 2 seconds if you're lucky. Then maybe they hit it again 10 minutes later. While the Farrier has speed peaks in gusts, it's that consistent 15 to 16 knots that makes it a completely different ride than a monohull (although I suppose some dinghy sailors experience the same thing).

We lost one of the leeward float hatches so we had to tack and limp home, and had a nasty encounter with some idiot fishermen on the way.

I'm not good enough at sailing the boat to even know for sure what point of sail we were on. Somewhere between a beam reach and close reach. In 25 knots of wind, when you're moving at close to 18 knots, your apparent wind is pretty high and pretty far forward. It would have been very interesting to compare our trim with other boats nearby, but we were the only sailboat on the lake that day. We weren't thinking too much about sail trim anyway.

Lake Erie vs. SF sailing

People in California frequently ask about sailing on Lake Erie. The best I can say is: if San Francisco is a 9 out of 10 on the Universal Sailing Scale, then Lake Erie is about a 4. This is not to say that it's bad, it's just that the weather is extremely unpredictable (even on a good day, especially on a good day, there's a significant chance of thunderstorms and very high winds). A big factor in my rating SF a 9 is consistency. The weather there isn't always great (it can be very chilly in summer) but at least it's predictable, unlike most of the rest of the country where you're better off flipping a coin than watching a TV forecaster. It's one of the only places where you can plan to go sailing next weekend, and almost always actually go. When I first moved to California, a flyer circulated at work for the department's spring picnic. (Pre-Internet, which dates me, these things were actually printed on paper, that stuff we used to get from trees). I said to the woman, Mei, who was passing out the flyers, "June 14th. What's the rain date?" She gave me a blank look. "What's 'rain date'?" It was one of those "Who's on first?" sort of moments: she had moved to California from another country and, while her English was probably better than mine, she simply had never heard the phrase before. "The rain date. When is the picnic if it rains on June 14th?" She said: "It's not going to rain on June 14th! It doesn't rain in California in June!" That's when I knew I was home.


Many times, while sailing out of Sandusky Bay, I had the disconcerting experience of being less than a mile from a boat close hauled on the same tack and sailing in a completely different direction, or sailing in the same direction and on a completely different point of sail. I thought this only occurred in small mountain lakes until I experienced it myself. There's also the frustrating experience of being totally becalmed and watching boats sail less than a mile away, but at least as often you have the opposite experience of sailing slowly past a fleet of motionless boats. In all, sailing on Lake Erie is a challenge, which is probably why several recent Olympic sailors have hailed from Ohio. Sometimes, though, you don't actually want a challenge. On those days in SF we could leave South Beach and scoot across to the Estuary, or east of Treasure Island, or just head south towards Hunter's Point, and we were guaranteed a relaxing sail. Other days we headed straight into the Slot. On Lake Erie, you don't choose.



The other hitch with Erie is that it's the shallowest of the Great Lakes. This combined with its 100-mile east-west fetch makes for some short, steep chop if the wind is in the wrong direction. Worse were the light air days when the huge powerboats would come out and churn it up. Think of a 6-knot ebb moving out the Gate against a 25-knot northwesterly, and you get the idea, except it's the entire lake, not just one patch. One of the weaknesses of a small, light trimaran is that you tend to slam from one float to the other in a chop, especially under power, and the wind tended to be fluky on the lake so I was forced to motor more than I like. Granted, in a monohull you would probably be rolling just the same, but with more momentum, and without the jerk as the formerly airborne float hits the water. So we left the motor off unless we were completely becalmed and had to get home. Even in a couple of knots of breeze the Farrier will move along at a few knots, with the leeward hull skimming the water and the windward hull safely above the chop. Sometimes that's the nicest sailing since Tanya could lie on the net reading and I could putter around the boat with the autopilot steering.

Also, there were lots of knuckleheads on the lake, like the 6-pack fishing boat skipper who was "trawling", nobody at the helm, dragging some kind of submerged box with no markings, which we tangled with at 16 knots. Yikes.

Of course, then there are the midges. Once Lake Erie was a mythical environmental dead zone: there was so much pollution that the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland actually caught on fire, so needless to say there weren't too many insects, fish, or birds. It's been cleaned up since, and with the cleanup have returned tiny flies that live as larvae in the mud for 17 years before hatching and descending on the coast to disrupt traffic, cause brownouts (pdf), interrupt baseball playoff games, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

On the other hand, Erie beats trying to sail in, say, Kansas, hands down, and there aren't a whole lot of days on San Francisco Bay when you can't decide whether to take your t-shirt off.