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

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

The demo house was built by 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 is listed for $ 299,000 on the Zillow property.

With a detached garage, the house will cover approximately 130 square meters. The pedestals, foundation and plate, together with the walls, are made completely with the 3D printer.

‘We recommend the machine to go around and follow your floor plan every step as we pass. We are constantly building up, ”said Kirk Andersen, director of SQ4D.

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

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

‘We’re putting tracks on either side of the structure where we plan to print. We have set up our giant portal, our large-scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls. ”

Andersen said the actual printing time for the walls took about 48 hours, which was part of an overall process of eight days to build the entire house.

It is generally significantly faster and about 30% cheaper than a house built according to standard construction methods, where laborers have to tow and stack the blocks manually.

“We show up with a printer. “We can replace the labor intensity of those guys and extrude concrete much faster than they can lay the bricks,” he said.

Not everyone in the construction industry was delighted with the prospect, and the process received mixed feedback, especially among older traders, with some skepticism.

“I think people are just unprepared for how this is going to change the construction,” Andersen said. “This is the beginning. It just scratches the surface here. ”