Shipping Container Home Solar Panels

BisM

Hi everyone,

I'm currently looking into building a shipping container home and I'm wanting to place solar panels on the roof of the containers. My main concern is because of the containers flat roof will I still be able to use solar panels? I've noticed treehugger tend to show a lot of container homes and so do they, however I haven't seen one with solar panels yet.

Has anyone seen a shipping container home with solar panels or does anyone know if this is feasible?

Vic

Hi BisM,

We have used Cargo Containers as building blocks, here. One application uses three containers, end-to-end. On this row of containers, a stick-built roof was added -- about 75 feet long -- about 5/12 pitch for the roof IIRC.

The Power Room is in one of the containers -- it is a 20 foot unit, cut down to 10 feet, but retained the original doors.

At another location on the property, used a 20 foot container, with PVs mounted on the roof, almost dead flat, primarily out of security concerns. Flat PVs do not self-clean well, but still worked well. Used 20-foot Super Strut lengths, mounted to the container "Pockets" at each end, and bolted the midpoint of the Strut run. This was a semi-temporary setup, while building a cabin at that location, and doing a real Solar Roof.

Not quite a Container home, but some approximation. Love containers -- Single Trippers (containers that Dead Headed to the West Coast and used only once for cargo) are inexpensive, and are usually in great shape -- tight, fairly secure, and inexpensive, "instant" solutions.

A photo or two may follow. FWIW, Vic

BB.

I tried fixing picture size for jpeg... No luck.

-Bill

BB.

It looks like it works--if you click on the image. Perhaps my adjusting the image larger in the Admin Section worked. I changed it to:

jpeg
260000
1100
900



260,000 Bytes, 1100x900 pixels.

-Bill

BisM

Wow guys thanks for the great responses!

[USER="451"]Vic[/USER] - thanks for the information and photos, did you read up on this anywhere or did you already know what you were going to do?

Vic

Hi again BisM,

Did not look around at what others were doing, just looked at the secs, and decided to go for it. Have always thought that containers would be great residential building blocks.

A number of people are stacking them into some very neat buildings. Have fun. Wish I could post larger images ... perhaps later. Good Luck, Vic

BisM

Vic wrote: »

Hi again BisM,

Did not look around at what others were doing, just looked at the secs, and decided to go for it. Have always thought that containers would be great residential building blocks.

A number of people are stacking them into some very neat buildings. Have fun. Wish I could post larger images ... perhaps later. Good Luck, Vic

Ah ok, sounds good. Can't wait to give this a try The images worked for me....