This week we return to Green Acre in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Formerly a trailer park, Green Acre is Mikey Sklar and Wendy Tremayne’s sustainable homestead and soon to be eco-hotel. Mikey and Wendy give us the low down on how shipping containers insulated with papercrete can be efficient, effective, comfortable and green guest rooms. Stay tuned for our next Green Acre adventure as we dig into 100 lbs of newspaper to create a slab of papercrete.
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Technorati Tags: Wendy Tremayne, Mikey Sklar, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, eco-hotel, green acre, green, sustainability, sustainable, shipping containers, reuse, recycle, ryanishungry
How totally cool. Go Mikey and Wendy! Can’t wait to visit.
Very cool idea with the containers.
Mikey’s office is like Hiro Protagonist’s
This is amazing. I am a design student and for my senior project I am going to design a hotel out of shipping containers, and I love what you guys are doing. Any advice you might have to offer would be fantastic. Great job and I look forward to seeing what else you two come up with.
wow!
My friend Joanne & I have been discussing using shipping containers for various things (like homes!) for a few years now, it’s great to see folks actually doing it!!!
Best of luck to you and maybe we’ll drop by sometime.
Dave
Love it!
My brothers friend has been doing lots with containers at his refugio/campground in Oahu, HI (Malekehana)
I bought a 85 house no insulation and want to “seal the perimeter” with papercrete.
Peace
Phil
Hey phil, you should follow Mikey and Wendy’s Papercrete project at http://greenacre-hotsprings.blogspot.com/. They good people to get advice from.
My neighbors build a storage building by placing two large shipping containers about 30 feet apart then poured a concrete floor between the two containers. They then build a gable roof over the entire structure and formed a workshop/barn type building. Now, I wish I hadn’t bartered away the trailer I had. Ah well, there’s always another one waiting to be repurposed.
hey Josephine, i would love to see any photos of their set up. Also, I wonder how they keep it cool in the winter with all that metal. I know Mikey solved it with the papercrete.
i’ve been toying with the shipping container idea for a while now, and after seeing that someone else had the idea for papercrete-insulation, my determination is that much more. Since it would be used more as insulation and less load bearing, would increasing the the paper/concrete ratio increase the R-value? I know that less concrete would be less stable, but we’re just trying to stay cool, right?
Yes, increasing the paper to cement ratio will increase the R value. Also replacing sand with perilite or pumice as a light weight aggregate will also increase the insulation. Be careful how much portland you use. If you are doing block work you really cannot go below a 1:1 (portland/paper) ratio by weight. I do in my mixes, but I am also using lime, sand, and cactus juice. Plus my structures for the papercrete are made of steel.
I think if you want to keep a shipping container at a reasonable temperature the following works well:
- spray a light coat of papercrete directly on the container (everywhere)
- shade the container from the South, East, and West with trees that drop the leaves in the winter or shade cloth.
What, type(s) of foundation…(s) have you seen used for container homes?
The foundation we used was quite inexpensive and simple.
We dug holes that were 2′ deep and 18″ in diameter at each of the footings. We filled the holes with concrete and added rebar and weld plates so that there would be something to attach the containers too. Using sono tubes can help make these footers neater.
When the containers were delivered we (a week later) we placed them so that each corner hit a weld plate in our concrete footers. I then used some 1/4″ angle iron to weld the container to the foundation. This prevents them from floating away.
You could pour a more elaborate foundation, but this is the most common system I have seen. If you are going be stacking containers bring a structural engineer in for advice on a foundation. They will probably only bill you for 30 minutes of time if you know the weights of your containers.