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 – its walls were used with a giant three-dimensional printer.

The demo house was built by the construction company SQ4D, to show the public and the industry what was possible. Now the company is selling one – a house still under construction in the nearby town of Riverhead, which was listed on the Zillow property website for $ 299,000.

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

“We instruct the car to go and follow your route plan on each passage as we pass. We are constantly building, ”said Kirk Andersen, Chief Operating Officer for SQ4D.

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

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

“We set pieces on each side of the structure where we intend to print. We set up our huge gantry, our large printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls. ”

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

It is significantly faster and about 30 percent cheaper overall than a house built using standard construction methods, he said, in which workers have to pull and stack blocks manually.

“We present ourselves with a printer. We can replace the labor intensity of these guys and extrude the concrete much faster than the bricks can, ”he said.

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

“I think people are not prepared for how this will change construction,” Andersen said. “This is the beginning. It just scratches the surface right here.”