"Printing" Houses

[Vortex2]

Imagine...one day you will be able to rent a machine to print yourself a building out of concrete.

or not?

For me it conjours up visions of Prof. Denzil Dexter in The Fast Show.

D

[Rod]

Do you have to do the design in Illustrator if you choose the adobe option?

I wonder what they use - surely not just 'ordinary' concrete?

[EricP]

It does sound a reasonable prospect. The problem will be the cost of the machine, setting it up and running costs.

[Dave Liquorice]

But if it can build a house in 24hrs the savings in time and thus labour over employing brickies will pay for a lot of machine. It'll weight a bit so the tracks or temporay road it moves long would have to be substantial but one down you "print" a row of houses extremly quickly. Getting it to do the plumbing wiring and plaster finishing does seem to be a bit far fetched though.

[meow2222]

If it reduces construction costs to 1/5th, lets be positively mean and say it saves 40k per build. It builds a house a day, and lets say it does this once every 3 days in practice, allowing time for moving, running repairs, maintenance etc. If it works 50 weeks a yr it will build

50x7/3 houses pa =3D 117 houses a year saving 117 x 40k =3D =A34,680,000 per year. If we require a fairly good ROI of 20% pa then each machine has a purchase budget of 4,680,000/20% =3D =A323,400,000. Now... even without doing some basic sums I reckon one could be built for less than that!

NT

[Clint Sharp]

Don't know but I bet you're not going to get a cheap cartridge at your local Tesco.

[Andy Dingley]

This was happening in the '60s, although the machine was human-driven rather than programmed. There are photos in Papanek's "Design for the Real World" (a superb book that everyone ought to read). As it's a purely concrete structure without reinforcement, it limits you to compression-based structures, i.e. domes and arches.

[nightjar]

I've had plastic product prototypes made using the technology it is based on and they were very impressive.

I don't see any problem with that, provided it is only required to take compressive loads. Some sort of reinforcement would be needed if it is to take tensile loads and overhangs might need shuttering, or to be built up quite slowly, allowing the lower levels to start to go off before adding more.

Colin Bignell

[Tony Bryer]

But AIUI all you're really saving is the bricklaying. There's never £40K worth of bricklaying labour in a house, £4000 is probably nearer the mark.

[Rod]

I wasn't thinking at all of it being an issue with eventual strength - more that it might be too coarse, too sloppy, too thick, or whatever to actually squeeze out and remain in place. In the animation I watched, it looked like toothpaste!

[Andy Dingley]

It barely reduces the cost _of_ 1/5th of a house's cost. Bricks and mortar is the cheap stuff.

[Bruce]

I'm not sure I would buy a set of Tesco "own brand" cartridges ...

[dennis]

If you wanted to build a concrete house in a day you could just make some steel shuttering and cast a house, then move it and cast another. I bet it would cost a few thousands. The foundations to my house were done using a steel former that just bolted together to the exact shape and size.

The real question is will glass reinforced concrete do away with the need for any steelwork?

[mick]

The threat of "Tesco Value" printed houses scares me... :-)

[Bruce]

I think IKEA sell houses, though perhaps not in the UK.

If IKEA made a success of it in the UK, you can be sure that Tesco would follow.

[Andy Champ]

"it will be possible for an automated setup to erect a

2,000-square-foot, two storey house in 24 hours"

So the concrete at the bottom will have gone off enough to support the top of a 20ft wall in

[Bruce]

[Clint Sharp]

In message , Bruce writes

They do sell houses outside the UK, self build ones at that and they look rather nice.

The difference being that I've actually had quite good experiences with Ikea furniture, I've never managed to buy anything from them that I've been less than satisfied with.

[sm_jamieson]

Sounds interesting. Why did they need a steel former, and not just a trench dug in the ground ? Simon.

[dennis]

I don't know, my neighbour (structural engineer and head of building control for the next door council) reckons they bought a job lot of foundations off the contractor so they built the same raft for them all. The different design next door has strip foundations, while the ones like mine have these huge rafts with more steel work in them than some bridges I have seen. If I ever need to move house I could, literally, jack it up and move the whole thing.