Shipping Containers - Structural Engineering

Does any one here have any hands on experience designing the structural requirements for a shipping container home? I have experience doing residential structural calcs in Los Angeles, CA and would love to try something new, however, I don't know much about container home design in California. Any info anyone could shed would be awesome.

I don't have an answer to your question, but I actually have a question to your question. Lol.

Structural engineers are used for residential? What kind of houses? How often? I was really curious about that actually.

Could you PM me with more information? I'm interested in your project and would like to help you out. Thanks.

Check some of the survivalist message boards. More than a few of those guys have tried that route.

Generally, the impression I got was they weren't very cost effective as abodes. That isn't what they are designed for, and adopting them to meet the IRC is a real PITA.

I've dealt with turning them into workshops and temp housing. Its not fun depending on where you're at if you have to meet code criteria.

As Capt stated, the survivalist boards have a lot of configuration information and there are several websites based around container homes.

I've seen quite a bit of websites out there however none really seem to address the challenge of meeting California Building Code, also they reference ISO stds to show the strength of the containers but don't explain that the ISO testing of those containers assumes a shipping application and pretty much go out the window when you start cutting wholes in the thing.

Only 2 options i see is to either build a FEM model of the container (alot of time/money) with modifications or design a SMF skeleton and essentially ignore the strength of the containers and treat it only as a building envelope.

I'll reiterate, you are looking to do something with it that it was never designed to do.

Yeah, you pretty much have to start from scratch. If you do that, why not use materials that are known entities?