Printed in days, one house: New York firm takes 3D printing to the next level

(Reuters) – Most homes are built block by block or brick by brick. But a demonstration house in Calverton, New York, was built scan by scan – its walls were made using a giant three-dimensional printer.

The demonstration house was built by the construction company SQ4D, to show the public and the industry what is possible. Now the company is putting one up for sale – a house yet to be built in the nearby town of Riverhead, which has been listed on the Zillow real estate site for $ 299,000.

With a detached garage, the house will cover approximately 1,400 square feet (130 square meters). The footings, the foundations and the slab, as well as the walls, will be entirely made with the 3D printer.

“We have the machine go around and follow your floor plan with each pass as it goes. We are constantly building, ”said Kirk Andersen, COO of SQ4D.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to make their home-sized dream come true.

“We took the idea of ​​a plastic desktop 3D printer and wanted to make it a lot bigger and spit concrete,” Andersen said.

“We place tracks on either side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, our full scale printer back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls.

Andersen said the actual printing time for the walls took around 48 hours, as part of an overall eight-day process to build the whole house.

It’s much faster and about 30% cheaper overall than a house built using standard construction methods, he said, where workers have to tow and stack the blocks manually.

“We present ourselves with a printer. We can replace the labor-intensive work of these guys and extrude the concrete a lot faster than they can lay the bricks, ”he said.

Not everyone in the construction industry is thrilled with the prospect, and the process has received mixed reviews, he said, with some skepticism especially from older traders.

“I think people are just not prepared for how this is going to change construction,” Andersen said. “This is the start. It only scratches the surface here.”