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

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

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

With a detached garage, the house will cover approximately 130 square meters. The foundation, foundation and slab, along with the walls, are made entirely with the 3D printer.

“We instruct the machine to walk around and follow your map as we drive by. We are constantly building, ”said Kirk Andersen, SQ4D’s director of operations.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to make their dream as big as possible.

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

“We put tracks on each side of the structure where we want to print. We 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, part of an overall eight-day process to build the entire house.

That’s significantly faster and about 30% cheaper overall than a house built using standard construction methods, he said, requiring workers to manually drag and stack blocks.

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

Not everyone in the construction industry is thrilled with that prospect, and the process has received mixed feedback, he said, with some skepticism, particularly from older tradesmen.

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