The world's largest 3D printer is building cozy homes from wood
cnn.com
cnn.com
When I see 3D printing construction compared to precast modules I simply don't see a future where printing a whole building is price or labor saving.
As seen in other environments, 3D printing lets anyone design and build for their own use case. People are not all about practicality, they want to like their environment too and being able to bring up your house exactly the way you like it is great.
That may be the case but fundamentally buildings are built to a code, which uses a design pattern (GoF book is literally inspired by architecture), so is repeatable. Customers will ask for bespoke features but none of that scales or even requires 3D printing. And the inventors, so far, are trying to woo investors by suggesting this tech is cheaper than traditional construction and/or scalable. And it so far it hasn't addressed any of that.
If you’ve watched a house, or any structure, go up, you know that building the basic structure happens remarkably quickly. This seems to replace framing, roofing and siding. Maybe drywall too?
But you still have all of the expensive/slow stuff like plumbing, electrical and finish carpentry that still has to be done.
I did some research on modular construction recently to use in a talk about modular software design. This tech is getting really cool!
You can nowadays get hotel modules that are full pre-built suites. Comes with all the plumbing, electricals, even furniture. Bed and everything already bolted into place. You just lift it to your hotel’s superstructure, plug in a water pipe, an electric connection, and a sewage connection. Boom. New suite added.
I’m sure similarly pre-fab modular family homes exist. We have the tech, question is whether we have the demand.
They've existed for longer than I've been alive, and they're called "mobile homes" - but they have a bad reputation.
Actually, sorry, I'm wrong - they're not modular in the way you describe.
It was actually super impressive. Once the site was prepped it went together in the space of a few weeks.
I've also seen this done where the walls were cast concrete using molds placed on the large and flat foundation floor. Still went up alarmingly fast. It does make me wonder if similar balloon techniques are worth re-visiting for domestic architecture. Either way, it's amusing to see such a rapid construction technique used to warehouse and bootstrap a completely different rapid construction technique.
> Majority of the project time was leveling, compacting, and foundation.
And drainage. It's amazing how much time and construction effort goes into "make water go down the hole".
Building a structure is a lot more than framing. For our project, the framers were on site a few weeks out of the six-month total.
I think modular pre-fab building is a much more effective strategy for this segment of the market. Perhaps 3d printing techniques can increase productivity there, but I'm not quite show how.
Especially since it's unlikely that we can address the housing shortage by building single-family homes.
It could cost $250k to legally build a sandcastle in Vancouver.
So things like property tax during the build period, as well as sales tax and service tax charged by the builders contractors. The study assumed a 5 year build period and multiplied all yearly property taxes by that amount. It also tacked on things like the vacant home tax and speculation tax which are not applied to properties under construction. Many of the taxes and fees are also scaled to the square footage of the house. Lastly they also included things like sewer hookup fees, which is really not an unnecessary cost for a builder to pay.
Permit fees are too high, and maybe we should exempt a lot of them given the current crisis, but this study is aiming for a quick headline. If you dig into their analysis it is a worst case scenario for what a house would cost for a foreign speculator who left the house vacant before flipping it and didn’t qualify for any homebuyer tax exemptions.
A lot of those taxes and fees wouldn’t apply to a sandcastle is what I’m saying. The $250k figure is the number they quoted for a $900k 2-bed new-build condo in a transit corridor. Even in their own study the lower cost housing units were coming in at half that.
Not enough physical resources?
People working in the wrong jobs?
Or just, we won't?
Presumably this thing doesn't print pipes or electrical wires, so it seems like there's still a need to address those issues.
Honestly, maybe they're getting better, but when I researched 3D printed houses about a year ago I was a little disappointed to see how little the 3d printing actually bought you. It still seemed like an awful lot of human labor was involved in the process, to a point where I'm actually not sure that the 3D printing actually saved time or money. There's a lot more to a house than the walls, but the 3D printer can't really help with anything but walls.
I think where automation would really shine for this tech is to incorporate conduit, plumbing, doors, and windows to the wall construction. I'm imagining something like a massively scaled-up pick-and-place crane carriage on the printing gantry. So the print head sweeps out of the way, parts and other sub-assemblies get placed where needed, crane sweeps out of the way, then printing resumes.
If we could, if nothing else, get all the plumbing installed automatically I think that the value add of 3D printing might actually start being worth it. As it stands right now it kind of just feels like a novelty that doesn't actually save time or money.
While there could be, in theory, technically less human labor involved with the printing (though as someone who has spent way too much time fixing 3D printers after they break I'm skeptical of that), it might not actually save any time compared to just having a contractor or handyperson just do the actual labor.
You need a foundation if you don't want your home to sink, unless you want to larp as the unabomber you'll need electricity and plumbing installed, in the case of shipping containers there's a risk that the paints and metals inside there aren't really meant to be inhaled by humans for prolonged periods of time (which is not an issue if you're only in there for a few minutes a day to load and unload boxes, but might be an issue if your plan is to sleep there). There's a cool novelty to some of this stuff, and that might be worth it for some people, and I don't really want to tell people how to spend their money, but it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
This isn't to knock prefab homes as a concept, there are plenty of really good ones and they're not necessarily overpriced, but those are basically still just regular houses with pre-cut and pre-measured materials, and there's no delusions that it'll lead to a house being built overnight.
I can get an empty shell built for €100k, double that if you want the interior finished, add another €200k around here minimum for land and connecting utilities.
The physical structure of houses themselves are already pretty cheap, it's everything else related to them that makes them expensive.
We're also famous for our "Sears homes", which ironically would be illegal under the modern interpretation of the codes to construct.
Given that I don't think the prejudice is against the materials themselves, bringing the manufacturing on site to fabricate a home is more likely to get new laws written against the process than to fix housing in areas that don't feel they have a particular deficiency of 3D printed homes.
Side note: 3d printing is awesome tech. While its not exactly super eco friendly, its a big help for rapid prototyping. I currently have an ender 3 pro which I upgraded with a touch sensor. Its not working due to issues I can't figure out....but I think it has a motor or alignment issue....but the 2 prints I have successfully done were amazing.
The Amish would like a word with you lol
But I don’t use my 3D printer for things I can order off Amazon or that I need 1,000 replicas off that I can get injection molded. I use it for unique designs and prototyping or one-offs. I think that is where “3D printed” homes will find their niche too.
Every single one of these construction-tech products fail to address actual problems and bottlenecks in the construction process, ultimately creating just novelties dreamt up by someone who has never set foot on a job site.
The wood frame is one of the fastest parts of structure, I am able to frame 300-900sqft ADUs (accessory dwelling units) in 2-3 days with help or 3-4 days solo, which is 24-48 human hours. The lumber is ordered and delivered by truck, it requires no special equipment, only really needing a battery operated miter saw, nailer, impact driver, measuring tape, speed square, string lines, levels, hammer, and sunscreen.
What takes a long time is everything else:
* Foundation is 85% site prep, 10% coordination of materials/subcontractors/inspection, and 5% of actual work construction. Draining and grading is overlooked or under considered most often leading to settling/cracking or outright failure of the foundation system prematurely.
* Plumbing needs to be involved between every single step, beginning from after the site is graded to after wall coverings are up and fixtures are ready to be installed. DWV (drain waste vent) is critical to get right as shit only travels downhill.
* Electrical is time consuming, has expensive materials, and is getting saddled with even more requirements of diminishing returns. 200A main panels are the norm basically all new construction is 100% electric. You are running 10/3 wire (3 conductors of 10AWG + ground) at $1.30/ft for a clothes dryer, 6/3 at $5.50-6.50/ft for both your electric range hookup and EV charger, 8/3 at $3-4/ft for your HVAC, dedicated 12/2 circuits for each of your microwave, refrigerator, dish washer, garbage disposer, etc. all circuit breakers that service circuits in dwelling area must be arc fault protected (which means your breakers went from $10-20 each to $40-80 each). I won’t even go into solar and how much of everything must be solar ready.
* HVAC is straight forward for new homes, provided the unit/s is/are sized appropriately.
* Wall covering (usually drywall) takes a long time with many passes to affix, tape, and sand wallboard
* Vapor barriers on the outside require basic knowledge to get the install right - which is sadly not always present for the build
* Exterior cladding can take many forms from shiplap siding (cedar or composite), masonry board, a masonry product like stucco, vinyl, or just a tongue and groove primed siding board.
* Roofing is easy and fast but costly
* Final utility hookup is fraught with slowdowns and annoyances, requires certain inspections to be done (but not all) and unless you have someone’s desk phone at the utility to help you out, it’s a crappy process to navigate.
* Landscaping and other finish work takes a while
The elephant in the room, however, is always the going to be related to the red tape. Permitting accounts for a significant chunk of the cost where a new single family home might incur $90-$130K in just permit fees alone (in Sacramento where I’m located, which is on the medium/low end for California). The process is becoming so convoluted and draconian that you need literal consultants to tell you where to burn piles of cash that add comparatively little value to the overall project and just drive costs up unnecessarily. Having safe buildings is important and there is value in getting an third party check work for correctness, but something is wrong when my $85-$200K construction project doubles because it’s literally illegal not to pay this. Because this cost does not scale linearly with the size of the build, most developers build the largest sized home they can for the plot as that’s the best value relative to permitting costs. Affordable housing to-own is never going to be within reach with the way this is setup.
But, at least right now, all the 3d printers do is extrude walls and floors. What percentage of actual home labor is involved with the rough framing of the walls and floors? Certainly not "zero", but you still need to clean up everything, install drywall, paint everything, install plumbing and electrical, etc. I think the idea that we're going to be able to use 3D printing to address the housing shortage is a cute but kind of naive idea.