3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
Also, aren't these walls significantly more CO2 unfriendly than lumber, and more difficult to renovate? What if I need to get a builder in to do repairs, is there a concrete wall guy who knows how to repair them?
Can it print multi family housing?
It takes four weeks to print, which seems long to frame a single story three bedroom house. If the home buyer isn't feeling savings, what's the draw here.
3D printing homes is currently a terrible option, but the result is visually distinct which should help sell the homes. It doesn’t need to be good to make someone money.
The benefit of 3D printing is making unique things. If you make the same thing over and over there's way better options.
The quality of timber framed houses can vary considerably depending on who built them.
I would also imagine that a home with a concrete exterior (with appropriate roofing) would be more likely to survive a wildfire, in areas susceptible to those.
Early attempts always look gimmicki.
Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls.
This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change.
Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.
They have evolved into true click and forget machines.
I don't have a 3d printer myself so maybe it'd be obvious if I printed some.
I say most because there are finishing methods which can largely obscure these details and make it less obvious as to which method produced a given part.
When I look at 3d printing advancements, I have hard time not thinking that with scaled up to houses, they wont have similar advancements, with time and resources.
Kind of like Steam Engines. After the Steam Engine was invented, it took many decades to dial it in to the large 'more' efficient models we are familiar with. It seems like large 3d printing will take a similar time period to grow to industrial levels.
Even the Iphone, wasn't that great at the beginning.
Maybe my overall point. They have made an entire neighborhood with a 3d printer. That seems to be now over the hump of proof of concept, and now there can be steady improvements.
In other words, there is little economic incentive to recommend this construction method. Not much in the way of aesthetics either --- unless you want a ranch box.
Superstructure is about the easiest and fastest part of residential construction. Sitework, finishes, and MEP systems are harder, tend to take longer, and cost more.
Anyway, market rate housing sells at market rates no matter how it is built.
I'm perpetually confused on that front - interior, especially drywall, is stupid labor and time intensive (have to wait for taped joints to dry). There should be huge econmomies of scale for prefab walls with electric and ducting built in, yet all we see is this sort of 3d printing stuff.
Where do you store hundreds of running feet of prefabricated wall during construction delays?
How do you move sections of prefabricated wall into and within a dryed-in building?
How do you trim a section to fit and extend another when construction is not ideal?
Who is responsible when something is not right?
And of course there’s getting UL listings for any proprietary electrical connections and issues of inspection for code compliance.
Prefabricated walls are common and are suitable for cubical farms. They tend to cost more psf than regular construction but can be depreciated as furniture and reconfigured more easily than site built walls and fixtures.
Yet, it’s ironic that we still end up with cookie cutter houses, but they are all built as if they are bespoke.
(But also, this feels like a Mythbusters episode challenge, and they managed to get a lead balloon flying).
There’s also the capital cost of the printer, the inherent complexity of pumping concrete, and the material cost of concreter per unit volume.
My opinion is based on my bullshit detector. I worked in a precast plant with its own concrete plant, for a very large home builder, and for and with residential developers as an architect. Sure I might be wrong, but my opinion is formed from directly related experience with the materials and with the industries.
But even on the face the article is talking about moonbases as future projects not suburban Atlanta.
[1] Most likely this project is subsidized with non-commercial resources.
It is all commoditized and builders and trades people have choices about who they work with and long standing business relationships.
The inherent complexity of construction is a job shop scheduling problem which is not just in NP it is NP hard.
With a whole additional dimension of human social relationships and woven in. Everyone is trying to solve their own NP hard problem across a different set of projects and under a different set of constraints.
Right now most new houses have the wood framing CNC manufactured based on plans, shipped to the building site and assembled, then modified as needed by the builder.
Our roofs are almost exclusively steel, which are also CNC cut and shipped to the site and installed by roofers.
I think of it like the satellite industry. Crazy high launch costs and weight penalties make satellites expensive to build. Maybe there’s some rule that the cost of the satellite has to equal to the launch cost?
I think the same things happens to building prices when the land cost and available land is super limited. Construction kind of rises to take a piece of that?
I’m not sure if I’m explaining the idea well.
That said, searching for prefab walls brings up a lot of things, from whole wall panels, to just prefabed wall framing, and of course, prefabed whole houses. So, it's out there, it's probably a matter of what a builder is familiar with and what's cost efficient for a particular job.
This is a demonstration project.
If there were any economic advantage, I would expect them to be eager to demonstrate it.
But such does not appear to be the case. $450-600K for a simple, single story ranch 30 miles outside of Austin is not exactly awe inspiring.
So not only are you framing differently but you can skip the drywall and insulation steps of construction as well. This is the type of finish work you are talking about I think.
And you still have to insulate. Four feet of concrete wall thickness is needed for a nominal R10.
This is true. Do you see any opportunity for efficiencies in rebuilds?
When this technology has become much more established, the "risk premium" can be decreased by a lot. Then one can start to find methods to make the process more economic. And I see quite some potential there, because 3D printing can potentially be done in a much more "automatic" way than other existing house building processes.
But suppose we have a country of aging housing. Could prefabrication techniques result in lower costs when replacing existing buildings without a land transfer?
2. Single family home construction in the US is highly prefabricated. You can go into any Home Depot and get lumber, fasteners, fixtures, appliances, and anything else you need to build a house. All of it movable and installable without much mechanization beyond a truck (and Home Depot will rent you one of those).
3. Tearing down existing houses for replacement only makes economic sense in two cases. The first is when the value of the land justifies more expensive construction (e.g. MacMansions). The second is when redevelopment is not for the market (e.g. Habitat for Humanity).
4. It is a mistake to look at construction as inefficient. Construction is just one component of real-estate markets.
5. We have very efficient prefabricated housing. It tends to look like mobile homes.
6. Wealth preservation is the primary function of the real-estate industry. Buying and selling for profit is the low end. The real money in real-estate resides in income producing property not single family houses.
Interesting you chose “MacMansions” as the example instead of increased density. In my (very) urban area they tear down single family homes and replace them with 6-9 town homes.
Building a six pack is driven by the same basic economic condition, the existing building is economically obsolescent.
https://www.lennar.com/new-homes/texas/austin-central-texas/...
Just as a random example, this is a comparable house (bigger in fact) and selling for $365k.
https://www.redfin.com/TX/Georgetown/346-White-River-Dr-7862...
I think this is a really cool technology but it’s not competitive yet.
Another way to pad your profit margins would be to raise the asking price of the $360k home by $100k. There is a reason people aren’t doing that.
Amazon deals in commodity goods that are easily substituteable.
Housing is different because every single one is unique (by virtue of location) and also incredibly scarce (again, location).
Housing markets tend to strongly fight any tendency towards underpricing. When a house is underpriced, buyers will get into a bidding war and push the price back into the fair market price.
Look at the results in Florida where the only houses left standing after hurricanes are the ones which are built with ICF (insulated concrete forms)
So for the same money I would argue you are getting a better product. That’s also saying nothing about a more consistent build quality. Timber framed houses vary a lot in quality depending on the crew who built them and the quality of the materials used. Framing with a robot means that there is far less variation in quality, vs framing with crews of humans who are often paid a little as possible and told to work as quickly as possible.
With concrete, you have to wait for it to set before you can print on top of it. D
The most inherently sensible home would be protected from wind (derecho, hurricane, and the uncommon tornado), fire, flooding, and severe heat and cold (and associated climate control costs) by building mostly underground on flat, stable, high ground.
Anyway the modification of them is addressed in some of the videos in the show house. Essentially you use a circular saw with masonry teeth to cut new holes, they provide shade-matching grout to fill in an old hole. It's less flexible than sheetrock but about what modifying a cinder block wall would be. Unlike most cinder block commercial buildings, the wiring is inside the wall and not in an exposed conduit, there might have been one exception in a bathroom or something.
Over all, to my non-professional opinion, it seemed more expensive than traditional "stick built" but also higher quality, probably worth it if you wanted a high quality structure.
I have also visited their site in South Austin on St. Elmo, and the small "tiny houses" they built in the Community First village for the ex-homeless, but I wasn't able to go inside those.
My overall impression is that it's a great technology that will be used for more and more structures. Thus far I think they have been too traditional in their floor plans, they have been focusing on showing that they can build real up-to-code houses that banks will accept as collateral. Hopefully with their new cheaper printer, maybe in some area outside of HOAs and zoning, they can starting making some more interesting houses -- like round towers Victorian style, for example.
OTOH, imagine a home that's not prone to termite damage. That would be awesome. Makes me want to build any sort of house, underground or not, with any material that's not wood.
PS: I left ATX last year for the rest of the triangle by hill country and right around the 100th meridian west that's much less expensive and less prone to storms.
If I had the luxury of time and money that's the kind of home I'd build out, probably with a few Maginot line type turrets peeking out from the "roof".
I kind of like the idea of the conjoined egg-shaped rooms, but not the practicality of cylindrically- or compound-rounded walls.
Okay, I name compound curves. Can I do that with drywall?
You can’t make a compound curve out of sheet material. Drywall can bend in a single axis only. If you add a second axis (compound curves) it won’t really work. Think about trying to drywall a sphere. The best you can do is a high poly sphere.
They have videos discussing how you would add a light switch or remove one -- basically a mansonry hole saw, and matching grout to fill in.
It seemed slightly more trouble to do modifications than a cinder block wall, but the quality and strength was much higher. I went with low expectations but I was impressed.
I didn't see any walls at the stage of construction where I could see what the insulation was, whether is was expanding foam or fiberglass.
So the electricians and plumbers would all come in after the wall was printed, and saw through it all? Sawing, adding and then filling it back in sounds like lots of work to me. With stick-frame, wiring and plumbing are still a significant cost, but the actual hole-making part would be a small proportion of it.
> requires fewer workers
what TFA didn't say, and which I'm sure is also true, is that the workers can also be less skilled.
I found it fascinating that interior walls are also concrete, and wifi signals are blocked. I betcha cellular doesn't fare too well either, and not easily fixed with multiple access points.
Unless the houses can sell for half of traditional housing costs their main market will be building houses on the moon.
I can't believe I find myself saying this, but it would have been much nicer to just build nice condos in the middle, and use the rest as shared greenspace.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Lennar+at+Wolf+Ranch/wolf+ra...
Relevant to central Texas in the summmer: 115° bike rides do not sound fun.