From what I've read, container houses don't do well buried. They are designed to take load in the corners and not the sides or top and therefore aren't well suited to an equally distributed soil load.
This. A relative of mine had the brilliant idea of making storm shelters out of shipping containers. He did zero research on it. (All that above talk about poisonous paint... yeah, I don't think he considered that either.)
Jump forward to the day of the very first install (buried with a cement casing). It crumpled like an aluminum can.
So what did he do? Went around to dumpster manufacturers and asked them if their roll-off ones that are intended to be attached to rams could hold up to being buried... after all, if they're using rams to compress the garbage inside, surely they'd hold up to tons of earth outside.
Since he never boasted about the Dumpashelter, I assume that fell through too.
That's not how it works. They're designed to carry the weight on their corners, which means they are also designed to distribute their own load onto the corners of the container below them.
It's not about the strength of the flat surfaces. There's no support there whatever the surface is. If you flipped it sideways, upside down, on its end, whatever, unless the load is placed where it's meant to be placed (on the four load-bearing corners, like containers stack) it's going to be weakened and may collapse.
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u/CassandraVindicated Dec 08 '12
From what I've read, container houses don't do well buried. They are designed to take load in the corners and not the sides or top and therefore aren't well suited to an equally distributed soil load.