A container with no power in it is a very good shed. A container with power in it is a workshop, a studio, a cold store or an office. Getting from one to the other is where people either spend sensibly or make an expensive mess, and on the blocks around here it comes up on roughly one job in three.
The Northern Rivers has an unusual number of properties where the useful part of the block is a long way from the switchboard. Hinterland blocks behind Nimbin, The Channon and Dunoon. Long driveways off Kyogle Road. Farms on the flats where the shed is four hundred metres from the house. And a genuine local culture of building your own things, at your own pace, starting with a steel box and finishing years later.
So the question arrives constantly, and it usually arrives in the form of "can I just run a lead out to it". Sometimes yes. Often no. Here is the whole picture, including the parts that make the job cost more.
Fixed wiring is licensed electrician work. Not a grey area, not a matter of confidence, and not something that changes because the building is made of steel and sitting on sleepers rather than bolted to a slab. In New South Wales an electrician doing that work issues you a certificate of compliance for it — ask for it, and keep it with the block's paperwork, because it is the thing that answers questions from an insurer later.
A container makes this more important rather than less, for one reason people often miss: the building itself is conductive. A timber shed with a fault in it has an insulating structure around the fault. A steel box does not. Anything fixed in a container gets earthed and bonded properly as part of the installation, and that is a straightforward job for a sparky and an impossible one for anybody else. The wiring rules — AS/NZS 3000, if you want to look it up — treat it as exactly the kind of enclosure it is.
What you can do yourself is the planning, and the planning is where most of the money is won or lost.
If the container is going somewhere within reasonable reach of an existing switchboard, this is almost always the right answer. It is the cheapest power over any length of time, it runs a welder and a compressor without argument, and there is nothing to maintain.
The two things that decide whether it is practical are distance and what is between the two points.
Distance costs money in a way that surprises people. Over a long run the cable has to get physically bigger to deliver usable voltage at the far end, and the price of cable does not rise politely. A run of thirty metres and a run of two hundred metres are not the same job with a different length; they can be different jobs with a different cable, a different protective device and a different price. Get your electrician to walk the actual route before you settle on a location for the container, because moving the container twenty metres closer to the house occasionally halves the cost of powering it.
What is in between matters as much as how far. A clear grassed run is straightforward. A run that crosses a driveway, a creek line, an established garden or somebody else's easement is a different conversation, and on the hill blocks around Uki and Kunghur, rock a spit down turns a morning's trenching into a two-day job.
Everybody starts here and there is nothing wrong with it for what it actually is. A lead from the house runs a light, a battery charger and a radio perfectly well, and for a container that is genuinely just storage, that is often all that is ever needed.
Where it falls over is motors and heat. A drop saw, a compressor, a welder or a fridge draws hard on start-up, and a long lead delivers less voltage at the far end than it received at the near one. The tool starts sluggishly, runs hot, and wears out early — and the lead runs warm too, especially coiled on a reel, which is how most of them are used. Beyond thirty or forty metres, plugging power tools into an extension lead stops being a saving and starts being a slow way of destroying tools.
The other objection is the one that matters more. A lead run permanently across a paddock or a driveway, exposed to sun, mowers, vehicles and stock, is not temporary wiring any more, whatever we call it. If the container is going to have power in it for years, have it wired for years.
This is the option people are most enthusiastic about and most likely to size wrongly, in both directions.
The right way round is to start from what you are actually going to run, not from how big a panel you can afford. Write the list. Lights, a phone charger, a laptop, a tool-battery charger, a small fan: that is a modest system and solar does it beautifully, quietly, with no trench and no cable, on a block where running a supply out would cost thousands. Add a fridge and it grows but stays sensible. Add a welder, a compressor, a table saw or anything that heats — a kettle, a heater, a hot water service — and you have left the territory where a small standalone system is the economical answer. Those loads are short, brutal and expensive to store.
So the honest split is: solar is excellent for light, comfort, charging and running electronics. It is a poor value proposition for heavy intermittent power tools unless the system is big, and a big system on a shed you visit twice a week is money sitting idle.
Here is the thing that catches people out in this climate, and it catches them out because the obvious spot is the wrong one. The inside of an unlined steel container on a still February afternoon in the Tweed or Richmond valleys gets very hot. Batteries do not like heat. Heat is what takes years off a battery, and it does it invisibly, so nobody connects the dead battery in year four to the wall it was mounted on.
Practical version:
A generator earns its place as a top-up rather than a primary supply: the welding day, the concrete pour, the fortnight the power is out after a storm.
Two things about generators and containers, and the first one is not negotiable.
Never run a generator inside a container, or in a doorway, or under an awning against the doors. Petrol and diesel generators produce carbon monoxide, which you cannot smell and cannot see, and a container is a sealed box. People have died doing this in ordinary sheds with better ventilation than a container has. It goes outside, well clear, downwind, with the exhaust pointing away from the opening — and it stays there even when it is raining, under its own cover.
Fuel does not live in the container either, or at least not with everything else. Jerry cans in a hot steel box alongside your tools is a bad arrangement, and if there is any real quantity of it, it is a conversation about proper flammable-goods storage rather than a corner of the shed.
One more, since it comes up: if the generator is going to feed the container's fixed wiring rather than just have things plugged into it, that changeover is electrician work too. A generator wired in badly can push power back where it is not wanted, which is a genuine hazard to somebody else.
This is the part worth reading twice, because all of it is cheap now and awkward later.
A sealed steel box in a subtropical climate drips on the inside. Warm humid air gets in every time the doors open, the roof cools overnight below the dew point, and moisture forms on the ceiling and falls. It happens in a brand new container as readily as an old one, and it has nothing to do with whether the roof leaks.
For storage that is an annoyance. For an installation it is a design input. Do not mount a board, an inverter or a power point directly under the middle of an uninsulated ceiling. Use external-grade fittings rather than the cheapest indoor ones. Put a drip loop in any cable coming down a wall. And insulate the roof if the container is going to hold anything that minds moisture, which includes every piece of electronics in it.
The longer version, including what actually fixes it and what only appears to, is in our guide on condensation, rust and a Northern Rivers wet season.
This district loses power. Ex-cyclones, east coast lows and ordinary summer storms take lines down across the hinterland most years, and rural feeders are not the first ones back. A container with a modest solar setup, a battery and a light in it is genuinely useful in that week — it charges phones and tool batteries, it keeps a light on, and it does not need fuel carted to it.
One hard rule to finish on, because it is the one that has consequences. If a container has had water through it, everything electrical in it is out of service until a licensed electrician has been through it. Not dried out and switched back on. Not "it seems fine". Water gets into fittings, switchboards and cable ends and does damage that is invisible from the outside, and steel that is wet inside is a conductive enclosure with a fault in it. Turn it off at the source and get someone qualified through it before anything is energised.
And to be plain about the related question, since we are asked it constantly here: a container does not keep rising water out. Watertight is a claim about rain arriving from above. Water that rises reaches the bottom of the door seals and gets in, and an empty container is buoyant enough to float. We have written the whole of that out in containers and flood risk on the Richmond.
If you tell us what is going to run in it, we can get the container specified for the job before it goes on a truck. Ring 02 6622 1322 with the address and a rough list, and we will tell you what to ask your sparky for as well.
The honest answer to the question we are asked most often on the Northern Rivers: what watertight actually means, why an empty container floats, and what a container genuinely offers on low ground.
What a delivery truck actually needs: run-in length, bearing ground and clear air above the spot. Written for Northern Rivers driveways, river flats, sand and hinterland tracks.
What each grade actually means, what is checked and what is not, and how to work out which one your job genuinely needs rather than which one is cheapest.
One call, one delivered number, cartage included.