I also suspect that the mostly-hollow walls have a decent R-value on their own.
I do wonder how this competes with straw bale / rammed earth, shipping containers, and other recycled, rapid prefab building manufacturing.
"Making cheap houses for the poor" seems to be a common design+architecture firm/student theme - does anyone know of any success/failure stories where these "cheap house" designs were applied in real life?
On labor? Much cheaper. And labor is typically the greatest cost.
A lot would depend on whether there was a local concrete industry.
Edit: I'm not so sure that this is all that "eco-friendly" either -- cement production requires a lot of energy.
That said, concrete is very durable (if made and poured properly) and might be a win in the long term.
It seems people often over estimate the hard costs of construction in the first world. It's cheaper than people think.
In 2005, at the height of the building boom (labor was scarce) in Southern California, I built a 400 sq ft detached garage: Stucco, rolled composite roof, concrete slab, drywall, swiss coffee interior paint, garage door, and 30R insulation in the ceiling (well insulated).
Using all contracted labor.
Total cost: $5,500.
IOW, not much more than this 3D printed house. Building a house in 2.4 hours is the impressive part.
Maybe there are alternative ways of increasing the tensile strength of the material that lend themselves to this sort of manufacturing. Incorporating some sort of fibrous material into the mix maybe?
Water isn't cleaning the fecal bacteria off the toothbrush you keep in the same room as your toilet, your wall-to-wall carpeting is full of food crumbs that roaches love, etc.
as far as carpeting, sure it holds junk more than hardwood or tile, etc. But nobody's saying these folks should shag out their floors.
I also think this has a few advantages over tilt-up:
1) The resulting product is lighter, since the walls are mostly air rather than concrete. I suspect they could manufacture small houses at a factory and transport them by truck, without the construction overhead of other prefabricated home systems.
2) The end product probably insulates better. With the right internal design to try to limit air movement (and thus natural convective losses), these walls look like they could have a decent R-value.
3) Less space is required to print in-place or construct a manufacturing facility. Tilt-up requires enough space to pour the wall forms around the building in addition to room to utilize cranes and cherry pickers - an in-place gantry system for printing a house should only take (house+gantry) footprint rather than (house + height of house).
Ah sweet: Future of Construction Process: 3D Concrete Printing
Guess where you can find that on the front page?
RYOT is exactly what an ideal news site should be.Hope it succeeds.
