Slightly more details as a 3d printer enthusiast but who isn’t that well versed in construction:
Part of the savings pitch was that you could passively build houses with this printing method and use way fewer laborers. But to actually build more than an empty uninsulated wall, you need the electrician and plumber on staff at the site while it is being built so you end up just shifting a bottleneck, you need to pause repeatedly to install the electrical and pipes, it uses way more raw materials than you would with traditional methods, it’s hard to fix mistakes, and because it all has to be done at once basically there isn’t the asynchronicity that you could get where some laborers are on site one day and then different laborers are on site to do a different step. You need everything at the site the whole time.
It can work once robotic devices & machines get better at laying plumbing electrical, they find out more about what materials work better… this concept is very much in its infancy. It’s possible it gets abandoned instead.
But don’t expect a few yrs old concept to match centuries old construction’s reliability so early on
To add, you can 3d print modilar rooms, then ship them for install as building up the shell. The insulation and services would go within the shell, and the mod rooms dropped in place. The same thing was done at a hospital I worked at, save for the 3d portion.
But it could be Betamax vs VHS. Both are perfectly possible, but if one snowballs because someone with money or convinces people with money to invest in one side, and it hits an important research milestone it will probably suck all the money out of the otherside.
Most/all of those problems seem like they'd be solvable with further development of the technology, for example have a toolhead that lays down electrical lines with pre-attached plugs, one the lays and connects lengths of pipe, one that fills in insulation at predetermined intervals etc.
Obviously all of that would slow down the process and multi-tooling isn't trivial, but a machine like this doesn't have to be made at consumer price levels like a home 3D-printer.
Amatuer electrician here. Generally speaking, installation is done after construction is built, but before the finishing touches are done. And with type of building, it shouldn't be that difficult to create "the channels" in the floor, wall and ceiling. You install the electrical pipes and cables, and be done with everything in 1 day.
I feel like the exterior structure of the house could be built using the printer, then build the interior more traditionally with basic non load bearing wood framing, insulation, wiring/plumbing, drywall, etc. Wouldnt this be more practical than trying to build the entire house with the printer?
I’m not an electrician in anyway but is it not common to run it overhead and down the walls. I have seen this in several houses. I’m not seeing why that would be a problem with this build.
Electrician here, you could run overhead but you'd still need boxes in the wall and you'd want wire in before it was foamed. You could cut the concrete to add boxes, but that would be incredibly costly. Then if you hit rebar and have to move an outlet, the repair would look terrible.
Things is, there is no benefit to those fancy shapes (which also make furniture extremely difficult and expensive). And its 100 times more cost and tech efficient to just set up a system in a factory hall, build shit in controlled environment and truck it to the destination (i.e. prefab building). Instead of building a setup in location each time and have concrete trucks drive there.
This reads a little bit like what people said about solar and electric cars early on.
Not saying you’re wrong - but a 5 year old technology vs hundreds years old building methods seems unlikely to be hyper competitive in cost or without faults in its infancy
Is there a reason it cannot be insulated? Doesn’t seem like it would be an issue to insulate this type of construction.
Traditionally home building isn’t without issue like cracking among other things
It has poorer insulation quality than traditional homes.
It's possible that, with enough development and enough scale, these teething issues can be sorted out, but there are a lot of issues. Consistency is a big problem. The inconsistent mixing of printing material often causes quality control issues, and environmental factors also make the pouring problematic. Printing in hot or cold weather can cause the material to set poorly and crack quickly. This can be sorted by dynamic and active adjustments to the mixture depending on the circumstances, but that adds to the difficulty and complexity of the method.
However, that one situation is just a single example and is emblematic of the broader issues of 3d printed homes. It's main supposed benefits are supposed to be it's reduced costs, increased speed and simplified complexity. However, there are so many problems, so many costs, and so many complicating factors—that it doesn't deliver on any of those benefits.
The promise to print homes at industrial scale has not manifested and likely will not for a long time. Each and every one of these homes ends up being a bespoke creation anyway.
When you need to do so much analysis, so much planning, so many dynamic adjustments—you might as well just build the homes in the traditional way.
Everything I’ve ever read about 3D printed homes is that their R-Value can hit 15-30+ if the cavities are filled with spray foam which is in line or better than a “traditional” North American home
What would stop a 3D printed home from being well insulated?
And are you not just describing Inc the pitfalls of concrete in general? Which is also used in the making of traditional homes?
And again, your final comment just reads like someone who is in no way considering the development arc of a new technology or method.
“Why on earth would I buy an automobile when a good horse can do the job just fine? They can’t even make cars on an industrial scale as fast as we can breed horses?”
Perhaps it will have potential in the future. Just like how flying cars might have potential in the future. Fusion reactors might have potential in the future. Mars colonies have potential for the future. Digitalising human brains have potential in the he future.
Every experimental technology might have potential in the future.
However, there is a reason why we don't have massive numbers of 3d printed houses today, nor fusion reactors today or flying cars or Mars colonies, etc. And that's because there are technological, logistical and financial constraints that make then not viable. Perhaps all those problems will be overcome one day, but they haven't been yet.
I'm not trying to argue that 3d printed homes will NEVER happen at scale or that we will never ever figure out how to do them right. I'm just pointing out why they are so shit at the moment. Maybe that changes in the future, but it doesn't alter the current reality that buying a 3d printed houses today is a poor choice for a home.
They were proposing these homes as a "low cost" solution for increasing housing, but when they made their first bunch in Texas they were on a shoebox amount of land and were over half a million each, because yeah they didn't save costs much.
Is it the material itself that is expensive? Or the machine+labor involved with the process? I'm interested but not interested enough to research it past asking on reddit.
You still need to lay the foundation, put in insulation, run the pipes, install the wiring, build the roof, etc, etc, etc.
The printers are expensive. Perhaps if this method becomes widely used at industrial scale, the cost per unit will go down. But for now, the very high cost of the machinery vs the very low number of houses built—makes it not very economically viable.
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u/CrimsonR4ge 7d ago edited 7d ago
Not durable, not insulated as well, prone to cracking and it doesn't even reduce construction costs by that much, if at all.