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Comment by Seanny123 | Hacker News Reader

After a quick search on prefabricated homes and reading the Wikipedia article, I'm really not clear on what their limitations are. Most of them seem optimized for warmer weather? I would really appreciate some links describing the current state of prefab housing and it's practicality.

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The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house.

There's panelized construction, which is like IKEA for houses. This works reasonably well for rectangular houses. The joints can be a weak point, both structurally and as leak points.[1] Plumbing, wiring, and interior walls are best done at the factory, but that makes the connections complicated.

If you're willing to have exposed bolts and joints, it's easier. Butler Buildings makes industrial buildings and barns from prefab panels of corrugated steel. Those buildings are everywhere in rural America. They're strong, they go up fast, they can be purchased with insulated panels, and they last a long time. You can even get a fake brick exterior and a nice interior. But the result will look industrial.

[1] http://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/PDF/path_panel_co...

> The basic limitation is how wide a load you can move by road and rail. That usually limits you to a double-wide house

It limits the size of the individual module, but I've seen an entire multistory, city-block-size apartment complex built up from trucked in modules; limiting the size of the prefabricated modules doesn't meaningfully limit the size of the final building.

It's amazing to watch! There was a row of townhouses like that put up near my old house. They had a crane and a steady stream of trucks bringing in the modules. Truck shows up, two guys put straps around the module and hook it to the crane. When I was watching, they were on the second storey, so there were two guys on the roof that helped the crane operator drop them in place. Take the straps off, throw them down to the ground, and repeat.

Pretty incredible watching the entire storey of a block worth of townhouses being assembled in an afternoon.

In Sweden, where I live, there are lots of prefabricated houses. An example of what it can look like: https://www.myresjohus.se/vara-hus/annedal/ So it's clearly suitable even for colder climate zones.

You've got to look around. There are a lot of options today. You have everything from Tinyhomes (for which you'll finds tons of manufactures in each country .. easy startup idea really with a lot of shared eco-friendly components out there), to Yurts, to fully finished multi-piece homes that don't look pre-fab at all/you wouldn't know unless the owner told you.

You're not going to find any huge suburban type houses, but there are a lot of small to medium options, all with their own strengths and tradeoffs.

Depends on what you consider a limitation. There is the Broad Group in China which had proposed to build the worlds tallest structure in 90 days. [1] They have pre-fabricated buildings and put up a 57 story one [2] in 19 days. To be fair there is still a lot of prep for the foundation.

[1] Article on the "overly" ambitious Sky City -- http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/china-skyscraper/

[2] The video of them building 57 stories in 19 days -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxwgLYbAk0

Look up Finnish modular homes. They work in climates where temperature goes below -30C.

https://www.huf-haus.com/en.html

I love huf hauses. It's on my list of life-goals

Some are clearly designed for warmer climates, but some are suitable for colder ones as well. I'm here in Norway and my spouse and I have been looking at alternative house building. Prefab has come into our radar more than once.

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