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Technology

3D Printing Reaches New Heights With Two-Story Home (reuters.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
A 3D printer is taking home building to a new level -- literally. From a report: The enormous printer weighing more than 12 tons is creating what is believed to be the first 3D-printed, two-story home in the United States. The machine steadily hums away as it extrudes layers of concrete to build the 4,000-square-foot home in Houston. Construction will take a total of 330 hours of printing, said architect Leslie Lok, co-founder of design studio Hannah and designer of the home. "You can actually find a lot of 3D-printed buildings in many states," Lok said. "One of the things about printing a second story is you require, you know, the machine... And of course, there are other challenges: structural challenges, logistic challenges when we print a second-story building." The three-bedroom home with wooden framing is about halfway finished and is being sold to a family, who wish to remain anonymous, she said.
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3D Printing Reaches New Heights With Two-Story Home More

3D Printing Reaches New Heights With Two-Story Home

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  • Why would you build a home out of a material that leeches so much heat?

    • Re:Concrete sucks (Score:4, Insightful)

      by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:04PM (#63203534)
      The reality is nobody cares about the heat, or the ecological ramifications thereof. It's quite nice to complain about it when other people build their houses, but when you build your own, you will only care about money. Such is the human nature.

    • Re:Concrete sucks (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:06PM (#63203542)

      If the concrete is used on the inside it adds useful thermal stability. It does not "leech" heat at thermal equilibrium.

    • Maybe its being built in a hellhole like Phoenix where heat is in abundance.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Maybe its being built in a hellhole like Phoenix where heat is in abundance.

        Leeching heat is also leeching cold. So Phoenix isn't it either because if you try to move the heat out, more heat comes in.

        Concrete (and stone, brick) have only an R-value of about 5 or so, so you need to apply insulation on all exterior walls to prevent loss of heat (or cold). It's why wood is a popular building material where you can get it cheap - it has an R value closer to 20 or so, which is why wood framed buildings only insu

    • Its in Houston. They do not suffer from a deficit of heat.
    • How do they deal with bridging? I imagine concrete really sucks in this regard. You need a lot of bridging if the bit between the 2 floors is also made of concrete
  • The walls aren't exactly smooth...

    • Taking into account how they build in USA, it doesn't matter how irregular the walls are if the roof and floor are flat you can fix plasterboard as walls.

      Also, the builder could "flat" the wall later as always.

    • Americans, they will drywall even their log cabins, much more so this.

    • Three days to "construct" a new home, three more months to wet-sand it. Welcome to the future!

    • We used hauled in concrete slabs to construct our plant. They sandblast and smooth them after they're in place. I'd imagine the same will happen here.

  • The root cause of the problem with housing costs.

    • Nope, the root cause is density - lots of people wanting to live in the same area. There is plenty of land in places you do not want to live or work.

    • Re:Too bad you can't 3d print land (Score:5, Insightful)

      by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:50PM (#63203658)

      There is enough land, at least in the US. Their house price troubles are threefold.

      First there is the obvious that nobody really has the income anymore. Real income in the US has been stagnant ever since Reagan times. Or, to put it in fancy words, wages have been decoupled from productivity, and consumer loans have been substituted in to maintain the illusion of purchase power in an environment of rising prices. And before you go all D/R on the Reagan here, while both parties pay at least some lip service to this problem space, this deliberate policy has been happily maintained by whatever party has been in power at any time.

      Second, rising real estate prices has been the traditional model of US household savings. Buy a house in the suburbs, and when you retire, sell it for quite the profit. Buy something in some old folks town and live off the money you made flipping the house. As should be obvious, sooner or later this model was going to sacrifice the next generation's ability to buy their first house for the last generation's ability to retire. I guess someone smarter than me could plot this on a graph for you, but that is not too necessary because of:

      Third, all of the above is not even relevant any more. Ever since the crisis of 2008, residential real estate in the US has been bought up en masse by Wall Street, fueled by free money from the government. There is just no way in the long run for any wannabe homeowner to ever compete with that, and millions of homes in the US have gone, and continue to go, to landlord companies. While this process is not finished yet, the writing is on the wall - home ownership is dead in the US. Wall Street is obviously very happy about it, and if Wall Street is happy, Washington is happy, too. Welcome back to the feudal age, I guess.

  • Ugh (Score:2)

    by ukoda ( 537183 )
    I don't want the job of breaking out the printed supports, it bad enough with plastic...

  • Cost and questions (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:17PM (#63203572)

    Nowhere in the article is anything mentioned about cost. How does the cost to print this home compare to standard framing? Is it easier to run wires and pipes through this than the old way? Durability can't be answered since this is a new technique, but is anything going to be monitored in this home to gauge how well it holds up? What if you want to add on or remodel this home?

    • Re:Cost and questions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:46PM (#63203648)
      If there were $5 of savings through this process, they would be hammering that point over and over. If the operating crew were smaller than a wood framing crew, they would mention it several times. The lack of any statement about the benefits here is very telling. Technology for technology's sake. If they can do this today, we must be just around the corner from nanobots self-assembling giant termite mounds for us to live in.
      • Or you could google it and find out that indeed it's vastly cheaper to automate a process, and requires less people since the main 'work' is being done by the machine.

      • I think the first examples of almost any new technology are going to be more expensive than the old technology. It takes a while to bring costs down via economies of scale, modified processes...

    • Re:Cost and questions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @03:13PM (#63203708)

      In the video there wasn't any rebar in-evidence. To me that's strike-one.

      In the video there were some vertical cavities/soffits/chases, but their interiors were that same rough-extruded texture as the exteriors are. That sort of thing will thus require special attention when roughing-in plumbing, sewer, electrical, HVAC, and low-voltage. That's strike-two.

      The touted savings of the crew putting the house together is a bit disingenuous. They claimed something like a half-dozen people on the ground. Does that account for the concrete batch plant's staff preparing concrete? How about the engineering sampling for concrete quality as various batches come in? How about setup and teardown costs of the extruder system? How about the costs to pull in all of the infrastructure once the structure itself is intact? Strike-three.

      All that's before considering anything to do with the aesthetics or even the structural stability.

      Typically the most cost-effective method of building houses is to construct pre-fab designs in factories, delivered in modules, that require little more than a roll-up, roll-away truck-crane as far as on-site heavy equipment goes for the above-ground portion, with the designs of the structures being carefully thought-out to minimize on-site workers to perform that final assembly.

      With a good design, the factory producing the modules can either crank-out the same design repeatedly, or can be set up to produce the design-specific modules, with the possibility that the architects/engineers designing the buildings reusing modules across designs where feasible. For those infrastructure systems where mid-span connections may be made, it could be feasible to preinstall these within the modules with common hookup points at borders to adjacent modules. For those systems that need contiguous end-to-end, like Ethernet, it would be easy to prepare conduit paths that could be tied-in when performing field assembly.

      Quality control is much easier to maintain in a central location, if a company is willing to emphasize and pay for it.

      • This definitely won't work in seismically active zones. Not sure how you'd do vertical rebar, but horizontal is trivial to add to the process. Not perfect but easy to see how that helps at least somewhat.

        But you'd do yourself a favor to better educate yourself on the other points your making as they aren't accurate.
    • How's $10,000 for ya?

      linky [mentalfloss.com]

      Obviously this article is very small homes but the printer costs don't really change based on size. 3d printing a house is *vastly* cheaper than traditional builds.
    • Edison sold cast on site "concrete" homes as affordable houses. The forms had to radically simplified to build a singuarly ugly box like tract home. Plumbing and electrical work - repairs of any kind - were a nightmare. This about the time Sears and others were moving towards selling attractive soundly enginered wood frame homes in kit form.
    • No where on the site is a floor plan or a rendering of the finished structure. Which sort of matters to potential buyers. Lenders, zoning boards, etc. There is walled estate home here that suggests a minimum security prison or a sewage treatment plant with delusions of granduer. Not the most welcome of neighbors. Edison`s concrete homes were a beast to repair, plumb and wire. How well is this structure going to to age? Will it still be marketable 15, 20, 30 years down the road?

  • So, Thomas Edison's idea of concrete houses triumphs at last!

    https://concretehomes.com/insp... [concretehomes.com]

    https://www.concreteconstructi... [concreteconstruction.net]

  • In future, most house "components" will be factory built and a giant robots will assemble them like lego blocks. The components might even come from foreign countries driving down the costs even further.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 )

      In future, most house "components" will be factory built and a giant robots will assemble them like lego blocks. The components might even come from foreign countries driving down the costs even further.

      Have you not heard of manufactured homes. The future is now. I lived in one for about 10 years, there are some interesting compromises, but the insulation was amazing, I could keep that place warm with a few candles. (Tested during a 3 day power outage.)

    • BOXABL is already doing it
      https://www.boxabl.com/ [boxabl.com]

  • Any kind of a building incorporates literally hundreds of different components and materials. These 3D printers only print the walls of a building. Therefore they only "3D print" a single material out of those hundreds, in this example a brick wall. And they are not even structural since they do not have any kind of strength (lack of rebars) for lateral forces (earthquake?). The wall finishes are extremely rough. It will take way more effort to get them to a nice smooth finish. If you want to keep them as i

    • Well, the article and video are a little short on details. And, no image was provided to show what the expected product will look like when completed.

      However, we do know they will be using a wood frame, I presume, for the interior. And, I suspect they will finish the walls with either concrete, stucco, or brick.

      They didnâ(TM)t, exactly, show the construction technique. But, they claim it is designed to withstand the harsh weather conditions in Texas. Whether that means âoeearthquakeâ resis

      • the costs are vastly lower than traditional methods. Any automated process will be faster and cheaper than the manual equivalent.

        The issue is whether the benefits of automation overcome the tradeoffs. In most cases they do significantly; ex: the Industrial Revolution. These are simple walls, so it's not hard to see why automating it makes sense.

        The one thing concrete houses won't deal with is seismic activity. And thanks to fracking and oil drilling even TX has that problem now.

        It's not remote

  • How do they get the rebar into these 3d printed concrete structures? Is there any rebar in them at all?

  • Using premade concrete blocks, I've seen a team of 2-4 masons raising the same kind of building in about 2-3 weeks (with about the same amount of work left, e.g. 95%).

    Don't fool yourself, these "concrete 3d printers" bring no improvement to construction. They're just expensive toys funded by idiots who have no grasp on what it really takes to build a completed house.

    • You'd have railed against those new fangled horseless carriages wouldn't you?

      suggest you do some research as these are cheaper and faster to build than traditional methods. Will they be mansions? nope, but cheaper housing is needed in most places.
      • I imagine you're American, and as such not really familiar with CMU construction. There's a reason it'so widespread: it's both cheap and fast (and the resulting wall is ready for the next phase of construction with the steel reinforcement in place).

        You don't get an improvement with every tech gadget that comes up. There's a reason why we've been hearing about 3d printing buildings for more than 15 years and nothing has ever come out of it.

    • There are also construction robots that can lay CMU. Might need a different one to set precast planks, but the 3D printing approach isn't exactly novel or even that good.

  • Is all of the plumbing and electric surface mounted on the walls then?

    • Probably mostly run though the interior framing walls. With this type of 'printing' horizontal conduit/pipe can easily be incorporated into the wall during printing.

      Same way they print windows in them. When you get to the top of the window space you place a board across to have the next layer sit on.

  • This building is not just hideous but it takes about 13 days to print the house. I'm quite sure a good team of 4-5 framers can build it quicker. Same goes for concrete. Couple days to create the moulds and another couple for the curing per story. I fail to see the advantage of this.

  • Pretty sure 3D printed materials have gone to space.

  • Ugly (Score:2)

    by indytx ( 825419 )

    These houses are really ugly.

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