How Do I Keep My Container Home Warm?

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Updated On: August 23, 2019

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You may have seen our previous post about strategies to keep your shipping container home cool during the summer. Now we will look at how to heat your shipping container home during the winter. Although shipping container homes are awesome, they aren’t magical. During the winter, just like any other building, they can get cold.  Here are some strategies to ensure your container home will be warm during the colder months. Together these approaches will help you keep your container comfortable all year round.

Open Your Curtains

Even on a cold day, there is still some warmth to be received from the sun. Most people think they should keep their curtains closed all the time to keep the heat in, but they are missing out on the warmth provided by the sun coming in the windows.

Close Your Curtains

Don’t forget to close the curtains once the sun has set for the night and lose any heat built up during the day. If you are in a very cold location, invest in some winter curtains. These are insulated so you have an additional buffer between your warm air inside and the cold air outside.

What About Those Wooden Floors?

Sometimes certain things can just make you feel cold and wooden floors are certainly one of those things.

Many shipping container homes have wooden flooring because they are easy to clean and very long lasting. But, in the winter they don’t provide any warmth.

Cover the wood floors with a lovely thick rug during the winter. Not only are rugs nicer to feel under your feet, they will also help retain some of the heat.

Reposition Your Furniture

It’s surprising how many people have their sofa next to a drafty window. Simply rearranging your furniture can provide a massive heat boost. Any furniture which you sit on for long periods of time, such as your dining room chairs or the sofa in your living room should be positioned away from external openings and placed closer to heat sources.

Wear Warm Clothes

Quite often people focus more on heating their homes up than they do on heating themselves. It’s much easier and quicker to warm yourself by wearing long sleeves, socks, or a sweater. Wearing additional layers is the cheapest way to stay warm during the winter and it’s also really snugly. Other simple things like eating hot foods such as soups or casseroles can warm you from the inside. Don’t forget to have hot drinks like coffee or hot chocolate!

Get a Wood Burner

Wood burners can provide an incredible amount of heat in a very short amount of time. Just a few minutes after lighting they can be generating more than enough heat to keep your living room warm. Not only do they heat up quickly, they are inexpensive to operate, especially if you are using wood which you gathered yourself! Wood stoves aren’t very good at heating your entire house, though. You can however slightly mitigate this by closing the doors to the rooms you don’t want to heat.

Close Doors to Unused Rooms

There is nothing worse than heating up a room which nobody is using. It’s quite easy to walk out of a room and forget to close the door behind you. However, this is a sure fire way to keep the overall temperature in your container home steady. Make sure the heat in your house only spreads to the rooms you are actually using. Just before bedtime, open the bedroom doors to allow the heat to enter so that your bedroom will warm up.

Double Glazing

If you’re in the process of constructing your shipping container home, consider using double glazed windows. Although they are more expensive, it will reduce the amount of heat lost through your windows and also provide a sound buffer to unwanted noise outside.

Seal All Leaks

Make sure that you seal any gaps which let air escape your building. These are most commonly found around your external doors and windows. Using silicone caulk to seal these areas is a quite straightforward DIY job.

Get A Portable Heater

A last resort is to use a portable heater to give you some extra warmth. These only heat a very small area and so aren’t ideal for heating a whole building. They are a fire hazard and cannot be left on overnight.

We hope that these ideas will help keep you and your shipping container home warm throughout the winter!

If you have any other great tips about ways to keep your container warm, feel free to let us know in the comments below.

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12 Responses

  1. I am planning on having electricity in my container home and was wondering about radiant heat panels. Has anyone tried those to heat a container home?

    1. Yes, most portable heaters as mentioned in the article are radiant heaters. A radiant heat panel would just be a more permanent version of that.

  2. Why can’t a furnace be installed in a container home? Better yet, why not floor heat? I’m seriously considering a multiple container home, but if it can’t be heated like a normal home, that’s a real turn off. I would also want A/C, since the climate I’m moving to can be 100 degrees or 0 degrees.

    1. Your heating and cooling options somewhat depend on your design. For a furnace with air ducts, you need somewhere to run the ducting: you’d either have to elevate the house on piers and run them under the floor or build a secondary roof on top of the container to give a utility space above the ceiling. Radiant floor heat is a good fit for containers, and most container homeowners have A/C (though usually not central A/C, for the same ducting reasons as mentioned with the furnace).

      1. You can always do overhead units above doors, they run about 1-3000$ each and require drainage for moisture. They do heating and cooling for each individual room

  3. Hi,
    I’ve recently bought a 40ft shipping container used, standard. This evetuated from having no abode. Moving the shipping container to my land is the first step. Too difficult for the truck as my road is rural and a 1km long. Since the truck driver couldn’t place container where I wanted it
    I have reverted to pulling the container by 20 ton digger. I’ll keep you updated with progress!
    I live in Tauranga one of the biggest ports in NZ so seeing these is a daily vision, but to show what they can be made into opens a whole world of creativity. Also I am Maori, on Maori land. Instead of my people living in little batches, cars etc. This to me seems affordable, do able, environmentally safe, and the creative building of the space is, well! Learning heaps, hopefully to make it easier to home our whanau.
    Mauri ora
    Aroha

    1. Sounds great. Yes, a lot of people overlook the difficulty of getting a truck with a 40ft container on the book to your building site. A good access road is a must: what is acceptable for your personal car may not work for the big truck. Please do keep us posted on your progress via our email address (see the ‘Contact Us’ page at the top). We hope our articles and resources are helpful for your project. Best of luck!

  4. Hey Tom a couple of ideas you might want to add for ways to stay warm in your container home hey that rhymes.
    Wear warm clothes inside. So many people could lower their heat bill if they would wear warmer clothes in their homes.
    Cheap Solar system saw this work in MN on a zero degree day we got 80 degree heat.
    Used an old dryer motor built a couple of solar boxes used old windows and spray paint the whole thing black you can make them out of any wood but thicker is better to allow some mass effect heating. connect as many boxes as you want together using either insulated dryer vent or large diameter PVC 4″ minimum. Pick up a cheap thermostat and set it in the box. We pumped this through a garage but it would work better directly in the house. Put the blower in the house when the tstat hits your desired temp you pull the warm air from your solar boxes and you get free heat as long as the sun is out. Make sure you put a way in your heat distributor to insure heat won’t flow backward through the system. Using spare parts and stuff you find this could be built for less than $100.00
    Dave

  5. We are working on a quest container-home and are wondering about insulation and condensation? We live in Michigan where it’s often just 10 degrees – 30 degrees in winter and significant moisture too. We don’t know about using batted insulation (inside) and with a vapor barrier (Plastic) facing inside after installing the batted insulation or leaving the paperface toward the inside and then plywood/drywall, whatever we decide to use. Also have considered spray foam and didn’t know if that should be inside or externally on the unit. Externally will NOT be pretty to finish off but. . . what are the choices here?
    Kaye

  6. Hi, interesting. But i think the most important thing one can do regarding keeping livingspace warm is isolation ect. What should you expect to do regarding siding/isolation if you live in a colder climate like Canada or Scandinavia. Is it possible/reasonable at all?

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