Then the old is almost certainly more valuable, because the navigable
Then the old one is almost certainly more valuable, because the inevitable teething troubles have been gotten out.
Wait… Is your assumption of “house” maybe a different one than mine? I know there are places in the world where houses aren’t built to last much more than a few decades, like the adobe/mud buildings of the desert or the wood frame in the USA.
Where I come from houses tend to last two centuries or more.
@Jasper_Janssen Where you come from the cost of building a house the old way continues to rise (it is called inflation, goods cost more over time). That is the reason housing prices haven’t fallen. Price follows the inflation line.
Market forces will kick in, when building a house of the same size, costs 60% - 85% less.
I think this technology has the very real potential to upset the cart. We have to remember that this tech is in its infancy. The cost of a 3d printed home now will be orders of magnitude greater than it will be in he future. Think cd’s, dvd’s, and every other new tech. As it matures the cost plummets.
@Nathan_Eames My blog post points that out, that it will decrease in price over time as the technology matures.
Here are some numbers, I posted them before in the comments above. (they are just for the walls of a 20 x 20 foot room)
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Concrete cost between $75 and $90 per Cubic yard depending on grade.
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With the contour crafting machine and a 1/2 (0.5) inch wall thickness (3 walls total). Two straight walls and 45 degree cross member ends up being roughly (1 + 1 + 1.414) * 0.5 = 1.707 cubic inches of cement, per square inch of vertical wall space. If the wall thickness is greater than I estimate just change the 0.5 above to what ever it actually is.
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one cubic yard of cement can create 189.8 sq ft of wall.
(36 in x 36 in x 36) in / 1.707 in^3/in^2 / 144 (sq inch / sq ft)
What that means is the walls for a 20 ft x 20 ft x 10 ft (400 sq ft) room costs under $400 USD ( ~4 yrd^3 of concrete ) to print out.
400 sq feet is the floor space for a standard 2 car garage.
@David_Fuchs the thing is, all you can expect to automate in that way is the walls, the bare structure. That doesn’t decrease the total cost of a house by very much.
@Jasper_Janssen I am at the beginning of an article about the costs for 3D printing a house. I came up with the cost numbers for the walls in 15 - 20 minutes after a comment here.
Give me about a week and I will have a full cost break down for a generation one 3D printed house. The only parts I am having issues with, is how to do the roof with a small theta (angle), and if the the slab (foundation) can be honeycombed.
A cool thing I discovered today is, honeycombed cement actually floats and they made boats out of cement during WW II. I think that might be another interesting 3D cement printing article, floating cities.
First generation very well might use cement. However, it might morph into foam plastics (think ICF’s) as well as other materials. As far as the limitations of the structural construction only, I believe that is extremely short sighted. Stucco could easily be applied to the exterior and plaster to the interior. These are easy fixes. Flooring could be solved in a variety of ways.
The electrical and plumbing are some of the biggest expenses in a house and it looks like those would be easily solved as well.
@Nathan_Eames As energy costs come down. I see 3D printing of house moving toward more natural materials. melted sand, packed earth and clay, etc.
The flooring can actually be done with a roll process or press process on cement to make it look like cobblestones, slate, or bricks. Altering the composition of the cement -cal- can make the material look like gray-black marble or granite.
The electrical and plumbing I am going old school on in the article. 3D printed conduits (inside the walls) to run, wire, and flexible copper tubing. Generation one after all. Gen two automatically installs both.
Land is on average about a third of the cost of a house because people spend about 2/3rds of their budget on the rest of it. Upscale custom homes have fancier fixtures, flooring, cabinets, windows, lighting, & other options, rather than 10 times the square footage of a basic house.
You certainly could build a 100K worth of home on a 500K lot, or put 900K worth of options on a 50K lot, but buyers won’t pay significantly out of line with the rest of the neighborhood.
I imagine the biggest disruption would be on the low side of things – If you can print a 2400sf masonry house for the price of a cheap mobile home, you aren’t going to buy the mobile home. For the expensive lots, any savings in basic construction will be spent on fancier finishing options.
@David_Forrest Using your logic …
"If you can print a 2400sf masonry house for the price of a cheap mobile home, you aren’t going to buy the mobile home. "
If you can print an inexpensive, eco-friendly, palace, with 25,000 sq foot of floor space in a neighbor hood with 5,000 sq ft homes … You are not going to buy the 5,000 sq foot home.
Make one think doesn’t it?
If you can print low cost housing that’s nicer than what is currently available and do it quickly can that help elevate people above their current economic level.
@David_Fuchs Concrete boxes as floating house foundations is already pretty standard, and particularly for that basic sort of box structure I’m not remotely convinced that 3D printing it is cheaper than simply setting up molds in wood and doing the same. You have to do both in drydocks, which is expensive, so maybe if you can save time… but I’m not sure whether you could.
As far as 25000 sqft… that’s not going to happen. Square footage is limited by the size of the lot, not by cost of building.
Also: maintenance. People don’t want 25.000 square feet of floors to keep clean. In the long run, roombas can mitigate that a bit, but of course it’s not just floor space, there will also be walls, and ceilings, and presumably there will be things in these rooms (or else why have the space at all?), all of which need dusting or other cleaning.
Jelle, American homes don’t have to switch en masse for this to have a huge effect on the market.
All new tech is usually more expensive than existing at first, but first adopters help drive that price down.
This tech also reduces the barriers to entry in the construction field which would lead to greater competition and lower costs.
@Jelle_Boomstra It’d make more sense in countries or areas that at least traditionally use stone, brick or concrete construction, I’d say. Some areas of the US do fit that profile, of course.
Thing is, I very much doubt whether (for a long time) printed concrete molds will be any cheaper or easier or quicker than regular old plywood molds, if you are wanting just straight slabs. What 3D printers can bring to concrete, far cheaper than traditional methods, is unconventional shapes, that are not simple boxes.
That’s going to revolutionize something – but at least for the first decade or so it’ll be architect-designed very high end homes on a lot of land. With land prices as they are now (and they’re only going up with increasing energy costs![1]), rectangular boxes are just far and away the most efficient spaces. Mass-market furniture, at the moment, also – IKEA Billy doesn’t fit all that well into a lighthouse, or a Kubuswoning. So you need custom furniture as well – again pointing to expensive homes.
[1] As energy costs go up, people want to live closer to their jobs, and until working from home truly revolutionizes jobs, that means closer to the center of the city. Which means more demand for the inner-city and even inner-ring-of-suburbs land. And those are already the places where skyscrapers, rowhouses, or McMansions[2] are the order of the day.
[2] Very small plots with the largest house you can build on it that is still considered freestanding – with a foot of land on either side, usually.
I’m wondering how many people in this conversation have actually been in the construction industry.
I have. On both materials side as well as the installation side.
@Jelle_Boomstra I do not feel ashamed in any way. It is mean to be a conversation starter. Even though this technology is still in development. The only thing that is new about it is the use of concrete.
What is slowing this project down is the same thing that slows down any university project, grants and funding, publishing delays, and students wanting a degree.
If you got a bunch of maker together to design the house printer, it would be built in a couple weeks.
@David_Fuchs one thing that isn’t possible, though, is to make ferroconcrete. You’d have to manually lay down horizontal crossbars every few layers and insert vertical irons through the cavities before you fill them, and even then you still haven’t tied them together properly.
You can make good stuff with unstrengthened concrete without steel — Rome’s Pantheon, 2000 years old, is to this day the largest concrete dome without steel or iron — but I’m not convinced about a regular house, particularly the joins between the slabs.
@Jasper_Janssen Replying to (1) FYI if you chart out the trends and the technology in the development pipeline, you find that in about 3-7 years electrical energy cost are going to start going down. In 4-9 years they will be half to a quarter for home based energy generation. This is with technology already developed but not implemented. MITs vertical zig zag solar cell is a perfect example.
Throw in things like graphene or buckey tube based Li-ion batteries and you put a huge dent in the cost of transportation. All we need is the bulk cost of buckey tubes or graphene to come down.