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

(Reuters) – Most houses 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 was possible. Now the company is putting one up for sale – a house yet to be built in the nearby town of Riverhead, which was listed on the Zillow real estate website for $ 299,000.

With an independent garage, the house will cover approximately 130 square meters. The shoes, foundation and slab, along with the walls, will be entirely made with the 3D printer.

“We instructed the machine to turn around and follow its floor plan with each pass that we pass. We are constantly improving, ”said Kirk Andersen, director of operations at SQ4D.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to realize their dream the size of a home.

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

“We set up banners on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant portico, our large-scale printer comes and goes, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all of its walls. “

Andersen said the actual time it took to print the walls took about 48 hours, part of an overall eight-day process to build the entire house.

This is significantly faster and about 30% cheaper overall than a house built using standard construction methods, he said, where workers need to tow and stack blocks manually.

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

Not everyone in the construction industry is enthusiastic about this prospect, and the process received mixed feedback, he said, with some skepticism, particularly from older traders.

“I think people are simply not prepared to know how this is going to change the construction,” said Andersen. “This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface here.”