3D Printing Reaches New Heights With Two-Story Home (reuters.com) 48
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.
Concrete sucks (Score:2)
Re:Concrete sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Concrete sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
If the concrete is used on the inside it adds useful thermal stability. It does not "leech" heat at thermal equilibrium.
Re: Concrete sucks (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Shar Pei house? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Three days to "construct" a new home, three more months to wet-sand it. Welcome to the future!
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Too bad you can't 3d print land (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
No American with a family wants to live in an apartment. The walls are thin, home invasions are common, encounters with addicts make the area unsafe, and there is no way to get anywhere. At least with a suburban area, you can get to your car and drive to where you need to be without worry that you will have a knife at your throat the second you step out your front door.
This all sounds like you chose the cheapest ghettoiest complex out there. There are different levels of expensive that apartments can have.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad that you stated the obvious without providing a single solution, while managing to sneak in jibes at city dwellers. If only every person on the planet could have 10 acres to live on; someone else solve that, I just want to sit here with the rest of the gripers and sip our country bourbon.
Re:Too bad you can't 3d print land (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Cost and questions (Score:3)
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)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
But you'd do yourself a favor to better educate yourself on the other points your making as they aren't accurate.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: Cost and questions (Score:2)
Re: Cost and questions (Score:2)
Edison's idea triumphs! (Score:2)
So, Thomas Edison's idea of concrete houses triumphs at last!
https://concretehomes.com/insp... [concretehomes.com]
https://www.concreteconstructi... [concreteconstruction.net]
we don't like your house either (Score:2)
The advantages of bot-construction would seem to be ease of customization of designs and capabilities to do weird shapes, which 99.999% of home buyer won't make use of.
If this doesn't allow me do have a dr Suess / Gaudi house on a beer budget, why even bother?
any shape you want as long as it's round (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pouring is best for big simple structures like bridges and building cores and where you need significant rebar
this is just a beginning (Score:2)
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)
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.)
Re:this is just a beginning - BOXABL (Score:2)
BOXABL is already doing it
https://www.boxabl.com/ [boxabl.com]
There is no 3D printed house. (Score:1)
Re: There is no 3D printed house. (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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
Do these get rebar? (Score:2)
How do they get the rebar into these 3d printed concrete structures? Is there any rebar in them at all?
So... Roughly 2 weeks, if it's on 24/7 ? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: So... Roughly 2 weeks, if it's on 24/7 ? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
plumbing and electirc (Score:2)
Is all of the plumbing and electric surface mounted on the walls then?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Hideous (Score:1)
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.
"New Heights" - wrong (Score:2)
Ugly (Score:2)
These houses are really ugly.