Hi, I'm Ben and this is The House I Built out of Shipping Containers. I've been interested in shipping container architecture for quite some time, but I had a really hard time finding good information about how to get building permits or how much would it cost. We did, the research, we documented everything that we did and now we're so excited to share with you what we learned. So check it out. This episode is going to be a little bit on the technical side. We're going to cover all the utilities, plumbing, HVAC concerns that go into setting up a container house. We'll start with how to go from raw land, to a house with utilities. From there, we'll do an overview of the electrical system. I'm gonna show you how I connected this container house to the utility grid.
I'll give a little bit of insight into my thinking for why I chose to be connected to the grid with a battery backup, rather than going all the way off the grid. I'll go over the plumbing systems and how we connected the house to water and show you the heating and cooling systems that we installed in this house. To start how to go from raw land to a house with utilities. One of the most confusing parts of buying raw land is figuring out whether or not it's going to have access to municipal electricity and water. I looked at a whole bunch of different lots at zeros. I talked to the different real estate agents, and I never really got clear answers from the real estate people. They really don't know and they always just say, Oh yeah, you can drill a well, or you could do solar.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Those things are legitimate options, but really expensive and they're not guaranteed. For example, you could hear, oh, you could drill a well, but there might not actually be water under your particular part of land. That was an issue I ran into with the septic is that, oh, you can do this but in that case, that particular piece of land proved to have a lot of complications and it wasn't as straightforward as the real estate agents were telling me. The best thing that I've found is to go right to the local utility suppliers. In my case, it's Joshua Basin Water District. They have a really great map on their website that shows you all the areas that they cover. You can actually put in your APN number for your particular piece of property that you're looking at, and they'll tell you whether or not it can be connected to their water.
So don't take the word from someone that's actually trying to sell the land, it makes them money off of that deal. Go right to the suppliers, find out from them, you will be on hold, it's kind of a pain, but just get that done and you'll have better information. For the land that I purchased the real estate agent said they didn't know about electricity or water, but I looked at actually the satellite views of that lot on Google maps. I could see that there was electrical poles running right alongside, and that gave me a good hint that I'd have access to electricity. I called Southern California Edison, which is our utility provider and they confirmed that they would be able to provide service, although I would have to pay for a new transformer to be installed on the pole near me .
Connecting to utilities isn't free. I had to pay a fee to the Joshua Basin Water District for a new water meter. I had to pay for excavation to actually run the pipes from their meter to the house, and then to pay for different safety features like a backflow protection device and things like that ,that will really make sure that my house is working well with their system. Those are all costs as the homeowner that I had to take on. For the electricity I had to pay for a transformer to be installed on the pole. Now, because the transformer added weight I also had to pay for excavation and for them to add an extra support cable to make the pull more sturdy. And to pay for the excavation from the pole to the house and the wire and conduit that goes into there and, of course, for the installation of electrical panel and all the things that go with that.
So all in all, I spent almost as much money just connecting the house to electricity and water as I paid for the land itself. Let's go to an overview of the electrical systems and how we connected the container house to the utility grid. We located the house about 70 feet from the nearest utility pole. The meter and main breaker panel will be located on the side closest to the pole. All the wiring for the interiors will come off of that main breaker panel and the different containers will be connected via underground conduit. We installed a battery backup system that can provide electricity if the power goes out This system will also serve as storage for the solar panels. Let's go over the process of how we connected the house to the electrical grid. Connecting to the electrical grid is done by running a wire underground through some conduit from the pole to the electrical meter and main breaker panel.
The utility company wanted a straight run between the electrical meter and the pole. This is because the wire they're going to pull through the conduit is really thick and having lots of turns in the conduit can make it difficult. The conduit needs to be about four feet underground, and we need just a single right angle turn to turn up from this trench and into the bottom of the electrical meter. The problem with this is, is that the concrete foundation sticks out past the edge of the shipping container. We're gonna have to dig down into the dirt and then cut a slice into the concrete so that we can get this right angle turn that's flush up against the side of the container. Marco used a large concrete saw to make some slices right into the foundation. And then from there, he switched to a jackhammer to break away the pieces. We could have cast the conduit right into the edge of the foundation slab, but we hadn't had a chance to confirm that with the utility company exactly where they wanted the electrical panel. Cutting this notch into concrete went faster than they expected so it all worked out.
The electrical panel is quite heavy so Tony cuts some pieces of two by four that would allow the box to rest at the right height while he drove in self-tapping screws. With the electrical panel in place it was now time to dig the trench. The electric company gave us really specific specifications about the depth of the trench, the fact that it had to be lined with sand and that the conduit run had to be straight except for the right angle turn up into the electrical panel. All this took about two days, but finally we were able to get the conduit turn right up snug against the container. We filled in the space around the conduit with Quick Crete, fast setting cement. This is a premixed cement that comes in 10 pound tubs. Later, we had two additional conduit runs. One is for the battery backup system and the other one is to power the septic pump. The rest of the electrical installation went easily. We Installed outlets, lights, and ran wires, according to the electrical plan. An electrical plan is an architectural document that is used to tell the construction workers where to place all of the electrical components.
If you're using an architect to plan out a construction project, this is an important page to review if you're really particular about where you want to charge all your electrical devices. We also ran wires through underground conduit to connect the containers to each other. I welded up some pieces of steel square tube to make covers to protect these pieces of conduit. Connecting to the electrical grid was a lot of work and it cost a fair amount of money so a lot of people have asked why didn't go off the grid with solar. I'm going to go over why I went grid tied instead of off the grid. Photovoltaic panels or solar panels are really great. There's no moving parts. They last a really long time. And other than just keeping dust off of them, they're virtually maintenance free, storing the energy they produce for a completely off-grid home is the challenge.
There are a lot of battery options on the market. In fact, I'm going to show you a option from goal zero that we use as a small backup system in case the grid does go down, but to truly be full time off the grid, you need to rely on that battery bank for everything. That means you have to size it big enough so it can handle the worst weather that you might expect every 10 to 20 years. That's the inherent inefficiency, you have to size everything for the worst case scenario, but you're paying for that infrastructure all the time. If you're going fully off the grid with all your power coming from solar, you really have to take into account those anomalous weather activities. And not just that, you also have to think about when your demand or your usage might be higher than normal.
If you have house guests over for the holiday, if you size your system for the average day where it's just, you, you might not have enough capacity to have a lot of guests in place. If you size your system for these unusual situations, again, you get this really big system that on an average day, you're not really using it to its full capacity and all of this infrastructure, both the solar panels and the batteries are pricey. When you're designing an off the grid house, you are in the sticky situation of, do I design towards the average and be cost efficient or do I design towards the exception, but then spend a lot of money. A grid type house lets you use the utility grid as a free battery. When you overproduce you sell back the grid and when you under produce you draw from the grid.
This lets you keep your energy storage more minimal and just for emergencies and it really lets you design to the most common scenarios that you're actually living in. If you're interested in grid tied houses with net metering, check out the work of my architecture firm, Zero Energy Design. Grid tied is what we recommend in most cases. What I did for this container house is a little bit different. I'm connected to the grid for all my electrical needs but I installed a small gold zero backup battery system. In this way, if we have a power outage, I can still power a few key circuits in the house, namely the refrigerator, the Wi-Fi and lights and stuff like that. One of the reasons I went with this system is that it was super easy to install, which is what I'm going to show you now.
We're here today and we're installing a new goal, zero product. This is a home energy system and what's really cool about this is that it can provide a battery backup in case the grid goes down. There are a few main components of the system. We have the Yeti, which is the brains of the situation and that's a lithium battery. Then we have the maximum amount of storage that we can get in the lead acid batteries. The last part is a transfer switch so if a disaster happens or just a normal power outage, we'll be able to go out there, flip the transfer switch and be running off of that system. The reason I like the goal zero products so much isn't that they're good in an emergency is that they're good every day.
The whole system is portable and modular so I actually use this system for powering the majority of my construction tools during this build. Nothing needs to be wired together with an electrician. It's all just plug and play. I have used it to charge everything from my power tools to an electric motorcycle. We've only had one power outage in the last 18 months so I'm not getting a lot of value out of that. What I've been thinking of how to take advantage of this system on a more regular basis is I'm going to use it to charge my electric motorcycle and the majority of my power tools that are battery powered. This way I can install three small, 100 watt solar panels on the roof, plug that right into the goal zero. In that way I have a little self-contained system that I can use for these extra electrical needs and I'm getting value every day out of the gold zero system. In addition to having it be there, nice and ready if the utility grid goes down.
This is a very high level explanation. You can go much deeper into this topic and there are cool ways you can model our systems and really figure out what works best for you. I hope my brief explanation was a little bit clarifying. Hooking the house up to water was a lot less complicated than electricity. Once the water meter was installed, we just had to run pipes underground and then enter the container at two different points. We're going to have a single on demand electric hot water heater to service the whole property. We had to run hot water lines back from the heater to the other container. From there it's just about running hot and cold water lines to all the appropriate plumbing fixtures. For the underground pipes that are bringing water to the house we use PVC. I'm really not sure what my excavator and plumbers were thinking, why they just didn't go in a straight line, but it still worked.
Once we got close to the surface, we switched to copper and installed the shutoff valve. Then the pipe goes up into a T that goes to a hose bit on one side and into the containers on the other. I've soldered copper before and it's a little bit tricky and because this is all going to be inside the walls and I don't want any leaks, I left all of the pipe sweating to the experts. The plumbers actually started on the ruffins before we even started on the framing. They came back periodically, as we framed out the walls that would support the shower heads, the supplies for the laundry machines and the hot water heater. The backend of this 20 foot container is going to be used as a laundry and mechanical space. After putting up sheet rock, we installed a ream on demand hot water heater, and it's been fantastic.
I was a little concerned at first because of the distance, but it all works really well and we've got plenty of hot water. Let's talk heating and cooling. We're going to use mini-split ductless heat pumps to both heat and cool the house. There are two major components to the system. The outside part is called a condenser. It is a fan and condenser coils that either extract heat from the building or add it back into it. This is done through tubes filled with working fluid and no air is actually blown into or out of the building. The inside unit is called the air handler and that uses the working fluid to either blow hot or cool air. Multiple air handlers can be connected to a single condenser. In the main unit I have two air handlers, one in the living room, one in the bedroom and they're connected to a single condenser.
The guest room has a single ceiling mounted air handler and the less often used office and storage space has two wall-mounted air handlers. All three of these air handlers are connected to a single condenser. Having two containers on a single condenser involves digging a trench and running the lines with the working fluid underground. The design of the system and the installation was all handled by Home Depot's Home Services Team. They send a team out first to measure the spaces and find a good place to install them and also to check out the amount of insulation that we're using so they could appropriately select components that would work for this house.
The installation team worked really fast and was able to install the whole setup for the whole property in just one day. The only thing that has to pass through the wall from the inside to the outside are some electrical wires, a hose to get rid of condensation and a couple of thin copper tubes that are insulated for the working fluid. Mini-splits have no ducts so they avoid energy losses associated with the duct works that central forced air systems have. Duct losses can account for more than 30% of energy consumption for space conditioning, especially if the ducts are in an unconditioned space, such as an attic. I wanted to use them for the container house though, because they don't take up a lot of space and they give you a lot of design flexibility. I didn't want to have to cut through more metal joist or lower the ceiling so that I'd make room for the ducts.
The installer hid all the lines and cables inside this nice housing. We used a channel at the bottom of the container to tuck away the set of lines that run to the second air handler. These mini splits come with a remote control that allows you to raise and lower the temperature and they have a variety of other settings as well, but we really wanted to take this up a notch. We installed these eco b smart thermostats, which give us all sorts of great control options. I'll put a link to these and the other systems that we used in the description box below. I've really liked the functionality of the mini splits and the wall mounted units don't really bother me, but some people find them a little bit visually obtrusive. What we thought would be cool is that for the smaller 20 foot container, if we tested out this brand new offering from Mitsubishi, and that is a ceiling mounted air handler. That involves dropping down the ceiling and we just did that with some two by fours and plywood.
I wouldn't want to do this for the whole 40 foot container because that's actually going to be living space, but here, the only area that I'm actually going to need to lower the ceiling is right over the bed and that's going to make it this really nice cozy nook. I took the disadvantages of this system and turned them into an architectural feature. I highly recommend mini split ductless systems for remodeling or for small homes that you're building from scratch. Not only did I use them here in Joshua Tree, I used a similar Mitsubishi system in my Boston loft as well. You can request a free consultation by calling 1-800-Home Depot and their experts will provide multiple options that are right for your home and that climate that you're in.
You wouldn't want cool or warm air coming right down on top of the bed, but don't worry this air handler actually shoots the air out at an angle so it's actually going past it. If you're in the bed, you won't get hit directly by the airflow. I know that was a lot of technical information. In the next few episodes we're going to get back to finishing the exterior of the house, painting it and start getting into the interior design as well. Sorry about the delay in this video, I've been really busy with the other homemade, modern stuff and a few other projects that I got going on, but I should be wrapping up the rest of this series within the next two to three months. If you're interested in the architectural drawings for this project, I'll have a link to where you can get those in the description box below. I'm starting to put together a list of all the commonly asked questions.
One of the last videos that I'll do for this series is just a Q and A session where I'll go through and answer all those commonly asked questions. Keep them coming in the comment section. All right, that's it for this episode. Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications. I don't have a regular posting schedule. If you want to know when a video goes live, click that notification button so you'll get notified. I'm never going to be spamming out this account. The videos are going to come few and far between. So it's pretty safe to hit that bell. Alright, bye.