3-D Printed Houses

The dream of building houses with 3-D printers…it is like a slow moving train wreck within a dream.

The basic problem of building a house in the West is that the building materials now represent less than 20% of the finished cost – the rest is labour and layers and layers of services, many driven by regulations not related to making your house better or cheaper.

So the basic idea is this. If you could sit a big 3-D printer on a block of land and print a house in a day the cost of labour and services to build your house would shrink because these are, to a large degree, proportional to the time it takes to complete the house.

Even if the materials for 3-D printing a house cost more you may still save money.

But there is one little problem for 3-D printing a house…and it’s called gravity. Most of the ‘structure’ in house elements are designed to provide strength in the vertical direction (against gravity) whilst minimising the volume and cost of building materials used.

So most of the so-called 3-D house printers actually aren’t – they are printers for ‘house components’. The components are printed on their side in factory and then used to build a house later on, where they are deployed at a 90 degree angle to that which they were printed.

If one prints a house in-situu, to achieve any sort of reasonable cost, you would need one of these three scenarios:

1. An instantly setting material so you can create void spaces to save material costs where you don’t need material. This is really what is needed and a very tough technical challenge.

2. A ‘dual’ printer which prints a supporting filler to support the strength member material while it sets or dries. This support material may double up as an insulator; this only works for walls but not for span members. For span members the filler would need to be removed afterwards.

3. A solid wall where the material is somehow super-cheap and light; light enough and strong enough to create spans. This is the hardest. And again for span members it would have be supported by a filler.

This is what you call a ‘patent spoiler’.