3D-Printed Homes for Sale in Austin
lennar.com
lennar.com
They just pour the concrete on. There's no compaction or smoothing. So you don't get a flat surface. A "print head" that compacted and smoothed to make a flat surface would be more useful.
Like this simple curb making machine.[2] This is the size for making garden boundaries. A bigger machine with automatic guidance is [3]. This is making a mall parking lot. Both of these will make a nice, flat concrete surface.
[1] https://www.iconbuild.com/updates/icon-unveils-its-next-gen-...
Currently they are not selling 3D printed homes, they are selling the "novelty" idea of one since they don't show any real one built, only crafty 3D renderings with photoshoped people. That's "normal" for your regular cookie-cutter development because everybody knows what to expect from those types of homes, but in this case the risk seems too high and I'm sure this is a pay-now-get-home-later type of deal.
Also, what's the problem 3D printing the walls solves? That's an infinitesimal part of building a home and from a cost perspective it barely moves the needle.
Sorry for the "party-pooping" but this looks like me selling a house that I've painted with my bare hands with no brushes, only knuckle painting.. cool, so what?
One thing I would say is that the price of concrete, lumber, other materials used and labor have been skyrocketing. At some point in the future, 3d printing may be utilized to great cost savings.
I wanted to see how they did wiring and plumbing.
The Icon team that's actually building the houses seems like they're really intelligently applying the 3d printing as a technique. They're actively experimenting with figuring out where in an overall build it makes sense to use it and how best to handle the realities of adding in electricity, plumbing, windows, etc.
It's pointed out several times in the videos that we in the US are building residential housing predominantly out of wood framing just because we historically have had so much wood around.
We watched 2 guys frame two three story houses next to us over the course of several weeks. They each had a house and would help each other at certain stages.
Precut lumber and prefab parts in exact amounts were dropped off on pallets daily and a cherry picker with a forklift end was brought in to put the pallets on the second and 3rd stories.
Once these houses were framed they had another duo each for water, electrical, drywall, etc.
It was incredibly efficient imo. They had a staging area for the entire neighborhood where the pallets were dropped off and one guy driving around delivering pallets to each team.
This just tackles the low rise exterior wall bit - usually a fairly quick and uncomplicated bit of the build with a lot of options - and more specifically replaces the quick and basic technique of pouring concrete between wooden boards with highly sophisticated machinery and tight tolerances. The one thing it does do very well is permit complex shapes that basic poured concrete casting or off-the-shelf cladding can't achieve - but sculpted forms in concrete is a pretty small niche in residential construction, and much more of a high end architect request than a baseline for building homes efficiently
Having a new house built now and of the roughly 7 month schedule, framing, sheathing and wrapping with WRB is less than 2 weeks.
"... the cost of trucking [the modules] to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong."
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/8/6/17656118/fast-apartment-resid...
If you're thinking of making a conventional home, it'll be considerably cheaper making it the conventional way, 3d-printing it will no doubt be substantially more expensive.
But the reason why one would want 3d-printed homes (i.e. just the first-floor wall structure) is because of some interesting possibilities: extremely high energy efficiency without effort, unique designs that can whether extreme climate events, air quality (concrete doesn't invite mold like wooden structures do!) and other nifty things like futuristic and organic designs, curved and sloped walls.
I'm pleasantly surprised by what ICON has accomplished. I see potential for this to become valuable when making bespoke energy-efficient and densely-packed neighborhoods. And I think after more ideas and workflows emerge to wrap up and finish a full house, it might become a commonplace technique for developers to make use of.
concrete absorbs water.
Btw these "layered" walls would be terribly unhealthy to live within due to dust collection over time.
Please no. Mortgages inevitably get resold to investors. The last thing we need is another 2008 because half the new houses built start crumbling after 10 years
1. opportunity for the maker to have their own financing programme, and hopefully be very affordable for the avg person, maybe even programmes for the poor, another for young families
2. If this kind of house works well and sells, it won't be the bank that funds it... they'll spin up or buy out a fintech start-up that takes on "riskier" mortgages
lots of opportunities everywhere, but we should have way more of these 3d printed homes. it should be accessible to all for a fraction of the price of a "traditional" home in the same way that prefab homes which are now overvalued and overpriced were for our parents. we need this tech to be open sourced
It's a pretty new technology, at this point I think you can mainly hope to sell them to enthousiasts. Why bother with the increased complexity and risks of handling more height ? No one would buy multistories building with unproved technology, we have to wait year to see if the structure is really stable 'on often surprisingly complex real conditions'. And probably like 'small' 3d printers : the more maximum volume you want to print, the more cost heavy is the printer.
I'm pretty sure if it prove itself efficient over time, they will try to develop multi-stories buildings.
A current battle in 3d printing :
https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/crowdfunding-campaign-la...
This kind of printer have been theorized to be able to be put on cranes and one day print buildings.
One of the biggest home builders in the US announced a 100 home community in Austin and homes are expected to be available for sale soon.
What are your guys thoughts? Do you think a 3D-printed home would be a good investment?
And under circumstances of any substantial demand for their services, they don’t have incentives to change — they make more spending a predictable amount of time on activity they know how to collect fees for.
You could take all the city zoning/codes/ordinances away today, every last one, and you’d still have this problem (and lose whatever regulatory benefits might come with them).
Sure, you have 6inches of concrete, but that just makes it more expensive to build.
From what I can see, its probably cheaper and quicker to pour ICF(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form). They are basically uber insulative, super quick to build, and support multiple floors in one pour.
The only way I can see the "3d" printed approach being either Eco(cheap) or Eco (earth friendly) is using doing a rammed earth/adobe system. At least then you only really need to dig up earth, power the machine, and boom, you have walls.
It's a bit long but worth watching if you're interested in this technology.
With gable roofs you can put mechanical systems / ducts up there and use it for storage, especially if the attic is within the envelope of the home.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/3d-printed-buildi...
There's also a lot of potential for 3D printing in construction in general. This 3D printed beam idea certainly seems interesting and worth testing out:
I don't see how this is any better than prefab concrete panels.
For a small house, we (two of us) might spend a week and a half installing the hardwood floor, doors, baseboard, window trim, crown moulding, closet shelving, stair trim, etc. as well as the inevitable custom bit of this and that that always takes forever because they weren't accounted for in the drawings or a prior trade screwed something up (we don't do stairs, railings, or cabinetry; those are all done by other specialist tradespeople). For a large custom house, we might be there for a month.
Now multiply that by every step of the process: excavation, foundation, concrete floors, framing, exterior windows and doors, roofing, wiring, water and waste plumbing, HVAC ducting, gas plumbing, back-framing, drywall, taping, floor installation, tile work, trim, kitchen installation, stair installation, back-trim, painting, plumbing and electrical again, exterior siding and/or masonry, landscaping, connections to city services, paving, overhead garage door installation, and so on. That's a lot of people doing a lot of highly-specialised work, and structural framing is a tiny part of it.
So yeah, I'm not building my own house anytime soon. I'd sooner do a live-in renovation because those tend to be much more limited in scope. And there won't be a single breakthrough that makes building houses cheaper, because the work is by necessity highly variable and dependent on geography and local factors.
As an aside, ever since woodshop in middle school (and one time volunteering with Habitat for Humanity), I've had so much respect for carpenters... the ability to provide an essential human need (shelter) out of trees is nothing short of amazing. And it's such artistry... there's just something deeply satisfying, almost profound, about creating works that persist beyond the computer screen. Guess the grass is always greener, huh?
Anyway, almost a bit sad to hear you're leaving the field, but totally understand your rationale. Tech is so cushy it often feels like cheating. And web dev is one of those few industries available to the average person without any special birthright or education, just a few months of training. Our society doesn't have many of those.
I hope you find a fulfilling new career soon!
The cement industry is one of the biggest producers of CO2 - trees capture CO2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...
Supply issue has nothing to do with the raw materials. This is not the way.
But if 3D printing can make homes easier to build and cheaper then perhaps we can build more and help increase supply lowering housing prices.