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.
I wouldn't call that an "actual house" since I don't think anyone lives there. But you can walk past it in the neighborhood. It looks nice. Iirc, the company building these has several lived-in houses in a community to get veterans out if homelessness, as well as a village where there was high-magnitude earthquake that levelled all of the houses except the ones that were built by them!
This might be one of those 'we made it look weird so everyone knows what it is and you can feel smug about owning it' things like stupid looking car prototypes, early electric cars (i3), white in ear headphones, recyclables, patagonia vests etc.
I would like to be excited about this, but I feels it's gonna end bad.
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?
Party pooping is what HN is for and why I love it so much. It makes you grounds these pie in the sky ideas in their benefits.
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.
ICON has been building houses like that for a while. You can find walkthroughs of their houses on YouTube to understand what to expect.
https://youtu.be/vcSaUXViD9g
These videos were really neat and I'm much more convinced of the utility of 3d printed houses.
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.
I laughed at the marketing material mentioning a labor shortage as a driver of this technology. As far as I can see, they only print the walls. The foundation, water, electrics, and roof are all handled by labor.
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.
It's probably more accurate to describe this as a new way of pouring concrete than as "3D-printing a house" in full. It's using concrete shot out from a printer head where concrete block or poured concrete might have been used. But most of the materials in the house are the traditional kind and will be installed in the traditional way.
A solution for no problem. Thinking about building couple 80 square meters homes for rent right now and choosing the way I do it. Walls were and are the cheapest component. It absolutely does not matter if I take bricks and insulation. Or a bit more expensive prefabricated panels. Or pick classical wooden house. The costs for walls are less than one fifth. Maybe even 15%.
10-15 years ago prefab homes were going to be the new thing, built efficiently in a factory then inexpensively and quickly assembled on site. And yet the total cost was almost always more than standard construction. Now it's 3-D printing. Ok, sure.
Difference is that the prefabricated construction techniques actually do tackle the entire build, and allow time consuming bits like foundations, roofs, plumbing/wiring and kitchen/bathroom fitting to be done in parallel (it just doesn't scale particularly well to individual homes built on lots where on-site time isn't a major issue; city centre hotels are a different story)
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
One of my former colleagues (Michael Holm, member of the Kefrens demo group on the Amiga ;) was one of the founders of COBOD in Denmark. They have partnered with PERI, Cemex, and GE, and most 3D printed building projects I have seen use their 3D printer.
Yeah, this was my question as well. Obviously wood has its downsides as a building material, but it seems to have some obvious advantages when it comes to renewability and sustainability.
The issue here, along with all 'modern' construction methods (eg sips) is that without 50 or so years of data it's nearly impossible to get home insurance at a reasonable rate, and no insurance means no mortgage.
Seems like an incredible opportunity for a combined fintech/civil engineering startup. You can forego actuarial tables if you have a decent enough understanding of the building process to estimate what the failure modes are going to be.
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
Seems like an opportunity to create an FM Global like company for home insurance.
Basically their business model depends on combining engineering and risk analysis.
All of the examples I can find using this technology are one-story. That's not promising for addressing housing price problems in large cities. But maybe it could be adapted?
My two cents having 0 experience in building construction but having a fdm 3d printer is it's simply a 'market fit' optimization.
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.
Yeh I think that's all the 3d printing homes I've seen.
I think one problem is that the printing setup doesn't have a way to put reinforcement in. I'm not sure if that's a problem for 2 story.
Another thing they seem to have here is the gaps for windows; I think they're doing simple U's for the windows, so can't put anything on top of it.
If it slashes housing prices substantially, then yes. People want inexpensive houses. I'm not really into the idea of buying a house, but I would seriously consider buying one of these if they were inexpensive enough.
Much as this is innovative I cant help but notice there isn't any insulation in these homes.
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.
I wonder what it takes to change the layout of your house. Removing a wall seems a lot more difficult when there's 6 inches of concreate than a traditional home.
Stupid question: Why use Gable roofs? Looks? Gable roofs keep snow off your roof which could cause dangerous load. Why would that be necessary in Austin or FL? Can we please just have 14ft ceilings instead? (I am typing this in FL next to a useless fireplace).
It’s not just for snow. In general, moisture management is a huge deal in construction, and having a surface that naturally causes water to go away rather than collect is a boon. You CAN do flat roofs but they are more expensive and complex and require more maintenance, so you for residental applications the trade off against useble roof space doesn’t make sense.
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've been invited in the building of several masonry homes. 3D printing is mostly good for putting up walls. Walls are quick, easy and require relatively little skill if you use modern thermal bricks. Comparatively, just about every other element is much more trouble.
so... there's nowhere here where i can buy one of these homes. i think it's more accurate to say "real estate developer wants your email so they can maybe send you info about when 3d printed homes will be printed, but probably also to send you spam."
It might have been a few months ago, when prices of lumber reached their historical peak. Concrete houses are more expensive than wooden ones because of the material and labor costs. "Printing" might save something by removing some labor but the machine they use is not free so you need to amortize its cost. And the walls are a small part of the cost of the house so even if this construction had been significantly cheaper, it would be a small difference in the total cost.
They didn't disclose but I am guessing average compared to market. They're not cheap but they seem to be good quality. ps - median price of a home in Austin is $624,000
City of Austin should require a fully "paid up in advance" insurance fund to completely protect all buyers (and sellers to buyers no matter how many times in future) for the full current value of the purchase price - - against cracks in slab, walls, structural failure, etc.
You're right. The best way to make housing affordable is to require developers to pay even more money. That will make the house cheaper, and not more expensive.
Animats|3 years ago
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-...
[2] https://youtu.be/A06vfELMIK8
[3] https://youtu.be/UCgma2_u_E8
throwawaymaths|3 years ago
rasz|3 years ago
PedroBatista|3 years ago
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?
rhodorhoades|3 years ago
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.
dmitriy_ko|3 years ago
DougWebb|3 years ago
https://youtu.be/_MsOXrprYXs
https://youtu.be/QCWKJvsqjb4
https://youtu.be/N47Mhc7QEds
michaelbuckbee|3 years ago
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.
bradknowles|3 years ago
cptskippy|3 years ago
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.
tomcam|3 years ago
015UUZn8aEvW|3 years ago
alangibson|3 years ago
newaccount2021|3 years ago
[deleted]
lnsru|3 years ago
listenallyall|3 years ago
notahacker|3 years ago
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
carapace|3 years ago
"... 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...
_aavaa_|3 years ago
jacobgorm|3 years ago
jacobgorm|3 years ago
Btw these "layered" walls would be terribly unhealthy to live within due to dust collection over time.
timbit42|3 years ago
shiftpgdn|3 years ago
jlkuester7|3 years ago
throwawaymaths|3 years ago
woleium|3 years ago
WJW|3 years ago
redanddead|3 years ago
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
mike50|3 years ago
scythe|3 years ago
GaelFG|3 years ago
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.
trebligdivad|3 years ago
alexvomwald|3 years ago
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?
ceeplusplus|3 years ago
daenz|3 years ago
saos|3 years ago
KaiserPro|3 years ago
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.
daenz|3 years ago
0. https://youtu.be/QCWKJvsqjb4?t=549
lancesells|3 years ago
bilsbie|3 years ago
alexvomwald|3 years ago
It's a bit long but worth watching if you're interested in this technology.
ransom1538|3 years ago
pmichaud|3 years ago
pottertheotter|3 years ago
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.
pandaman|3 years ago
Oarch|3 years ago
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:
https://www.minimass.net/
kaycebasques|3 years ago
alexvomwald|3 years ago
aaaaaaaaaaab|3 years ago
I don't see how this is any better than prefab concrete panels.
alangibson|3 years ago
skybrian|3 years ago
retrocryptid|3 years ago
dubswithus|3 years ago
pandaman|3 years ago
turtlebits|3 years ago
millzlane|3 years ago
pj_mukh|3 years ago
saos|3 years ago
Dylovell|3 years ago
gigatexal|3 years ago
lttlrck|3 years ago
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.
euroderf|3 years ago
ada1981|3 years ago
alexvomwald|3 years ago
allset_|3 years ago
alexvomwald|3 years ago
iso1631|3 years ago
stevespang|3 years ago
sbierwagen|3 years ago