California Plans World's First 3D-Printed Housing Community, Powered by Solar and Tesla Batteries (msn.com) 75
"Mighty Buildings is using robots and 3D printers to build a $15 million community of homes in California," reports Business Insider:
Mighty Building's upcoming project in Rancho Mirage, California will have the title of "world's first planned community of 3D printed homes," according to its maker... The tech-forward housing development will consist of 15 homes across five-acres. This $15 million project will be built using the Mighty Kit system, which utilizes prefabbed panels to create custom homes.
Through this system, gone are the days of concrete. Instead, the homes will be based on Mighty Building's 3D printed proprietary Light Stone Material, which sets its shape upon UV light exposure, according to the company. The printers also rely on "robotic automation" and robotic arms, the latter for functions like quality control scans, Ruben told Insider in an email interview...
The 3D-printed homes won't look any different than a traditionally constructed mid-century modern home. The 1,450 square-foot homes — which will be placed atop 10,000-square-foot plots of land — will come with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. If that's not enough space, the homes will also have a separate 700-square-foot two-bed, one-bath unit. Looking to take advantage of the California sunshine? The backyard will feature a swimming pool and deck, but this outdoor space can be upgraded with hot tubs, firepits, or open-air showers...
The homes will be "zero-net-energy," relying on solar and optional Tesla Powerwall batteries for power. Electric vehicle chargers also come optional.
This development should be completed next spring, reports Business Insider — adding that the company "is already in talks with a 'number of developers' for potential future communities."
Through this system, gone are the days of concrete. Instead, the homes will be based on Mighty Building's 3D printed proprietary Light Stone Material, which sets its shape upon UV light exposure, according to the company. The printers also rely on "robotic automation" and robotic arms, the latter for functions like quality control scans, Ruben told Insider in an email interview...
The 3D-printed homes won't look any different than a traditionally constructed mid-century modern home. The 1,450 square-foot homes — which will be placed atop 10,000-square-foot plots of land — will come with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. If that's not enough space, the homes will also have a separate 700-square-foot two-bed, one-bath unit. Looking to take advantage of the California sunshine? The backyard will feature a swimming pool and deck, but this outdoor space can be upgraded with hot tubs, firepits, or open-air showers...
The homes will be "zero-net-energy," relying on solar and optional Tesla Powerwall batteries for power. Electric vehicle chargers also come optional.
This development should be completed next spring, reports Business Insider — adding that the company "is already in talks with a 'number of developers' for potential future communities."
And pixie dust... (Score:2, Insightful)
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which sets its shape upon UV light exposure
More like epoxy, off-gassing endocrine-disruptors while it cures.
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In the end, the space is then able to be built for a fraction of time, effort and cost of stick-built homes.
In the end, they're charging $1,000,000+ for these things. A million bucks for a 2150 sq ft box in Rancho Mirage, where you can get a 4 bed 6 bath 3,608 sq ft "stick-built" home with a three car garage, pool, hot tub, rooftop solar, etc for $900,000. [realtor.com]
I wish them the best of luck. But if they die, I doubt it will be because of regulators and politicians.
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And ongoing maintenance costs are also significantly reduced, as the home is energy-independent.
How wold being energy-independent affect the maintenance costs? If you slapped solar panels and batteries on my 50-year old house to make it energy-independent, it would have zero effect on my maintenance costs.
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I'd like to see more from this company as to air quality measurements inside these units. Could be it's fine...could offgas something nasty for decades. They don't say much about what exactly is in their material, or at least it wasn't something I readily happened across on their website.
I live in a very old house (where I am no doubt being poisoned by some ancient no longer used construction material, but...) and I can still smell the glue drying just walking into 5-year-old buildings at work, because my
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This is an example of what linguists hypercorrection [wikipedia.org].
Many but not all style guidelines call for hyphenating words that are strung together to make compound adjective. So under these guidelines you'd write "It was a five-acre plot," but you'd still write "The plot took up five acres." "Five-acre" is an adjective, but "five acres" is a noun phrase.
Strange size (Score:2)
The ratio of lot size to house size seems strange to me.
Maybe it's just where I live, but I'd expect more than 1,500 sqft on a quarter acre. Especially before I'd pay for amenities like a pool.
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FWIW, I live in a ~2,300sf house on a ~17Ksf lot (0.4 acre). I like that there is plenty of space between my home and my neighbors. Even after adding a 500sf ADU next to our back yard pool, it still seems super spacious.
And in that part of California, land is relatively inexpensive.
Re: Strange size (Score:1)
15 homes in 5 acres means less than a quarter acre per house, remember, this includes driveways, roadways, sidewalks, etc.
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15 homes in 5 acres means less than a quarter acre per house, remember, this includes driveways, roadways, sidewalks, etc.
The last town I lived in had a 5 acre per lot minimum. So 1 house every 5 acres...
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15 homes in 5 acres means less than a quarter acre per house
math fail.
Depends on whether the math includes space for offsets, setbacks, leeways, right-of-ways, sidewalks, roads, infrastructure, city parks, schools, commercial/grocery, as well as the parts of land that cannot be developed... along with the many other things that can make neighborhoods more attractive to some buyers.
Re:Strange size (Score:5, Interesting)
The ratio of lot size to house size seems strange to me.
Maybe it's just where I live, but I'd expect more than 1,500 sqft on a quarter acre. Especially before I'd pay for amenities like a pool.
As the population density increases, property prises rise. E.g. in Oslo , Norway - while not as bad as San Francisco/Silicon Valley - most of the time an "older" house is sold, the purchaser is a developer who splits the property and builds new houses in the old garden.Sometimes tearing the old house down (to get room for even more houses), sometimes not. This doesn't mean the houses will be cheap to buy either - I've got a small one (145 sqm) with a tiny strip of garden around it and that's about $1.5 million. It and two other houses is built in one old garden.
Compared to prices a couple of decades ago, this is absolutely, completely and utterly insane - and I'm not just talking about inflation here, but counting number of yearly salaries that adds up to the price.
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Re:Strange size (Score:4, Informative)
I don't really know why home prices are so insane in most of North America. I am now building a new 2400 sq foot house in Central Europe and the total cost is less than Euro 200,000. The quality of the building (concrete, steel, 150 mm insulation, triple glazing, underfloor heating...) is also much better than an American toothpick home. The same size toothpick home will cost 3 to 10 times more in Canada (I used to live there) - depending on the city.
Property prices in desirable areas.... the old adage "Buy land, they're not making it anymore" applies. In desirable areas, the property price dwarfs construction costs. This is not only in North America, but also in desirable areas elsewhere... e.g. Oslo, Norway (which I know best). Pretty much all the land not built on is protected, so the metropolisation megatrend makes prices go sky high.
If I wanted to live somewhere small I could get property almost free and buy what I wanted. Not so in larger urban areas where I can use my skill set.
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I'm not sure how true land value eclipsing construction costs is universally.
There have been a lot of numbers thrown around where I live in the affordable housing debate, and the construction costs make housing even on free or less desirable lots prohibitively expensive.
Even increasing the population density doesn't help much. They recently liberalized zoning here to where you can build triplexes pretty much anywhere and the cost of building them makes the resulting units somewhat marginal in terms of mark
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I'm not sure how true land value eclipsing construction costs is universally.
/quote>
Absolutely, that why I wrote "desirable areas". This could be popular urban regions, beach regions etc. Here, property prices are sky high - in other, more remote areas you will not recover even the construction costs when selling a house you built.
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I don't really know why home prices are so insane in most of North America. I am now building a new 2400 sq foot house in Central Europe and the total cost is less than Euro 200,000. The quality of the building (concrete, steel, 150 mm insulation, triple glazing, underfloor heating...) is also much better than an American toothpick home. The same size toothpick home will cost 3 to 10 times more in Canada (I used to live there) - depending on the city.
Is that including the land or just construction? Where is it?
The reason it's cheaper is that everyone is broke (unless you're counting Austria or Switzerland as Central Europe), and in the locations which aren't broke, like Prague or Warsaw, prices are through the fucking roof. Like legit worse than most Western prices. A small apartment on the outskirts of Prague can easily be $400 which is nuts when the average income is like $20k before tax.
The reason is that it's desirable location compared to some vill
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This is a silly argument. You can build houses with the materials you indicate (as well as many others, brick/mortar, rammed earth, and composites) in the US at or below the cost you quote. The big difference (and I suspect you know this) is land.
And I don't understand the animosity towards stick built houses. They can/do last for hundreds of years, they cost less and are quicker to build using less environmentally impacting material (as long as you aren't using old-growth lumber or something).
Wooden, stick built houses is the normal way of building houses, duplexes etc here in Norway as well. Those are usually very high quality, and the national building standards (mandatory) ensures that they confirrm to very high quality norms, both for the people living it in and the environment.
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Countries really need to tackle this issue. I would suggest two things.
1. Heavy incentives for businesses to move away from over-crowded areas and to allow as much remote working as possible.
2. Minimum sizes for homes that prevent too many tiny houses and apartments being made.
In the UK houses have got too small to actually live in. Some stuff is just broken, like most modern garages are too small to actually fit a car into so are essentially storage cupboards. Other stuff is just impractical, like kitchens
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2. Minimum sizes for homes that prevent too many tiny houses and apartments being made.
That's like the opposite of the density you'd want for more affordable housing though.
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Land prices are driven up by the ability to wedge too many small homes in. If a given area of land can only have one home rather than 2 or 4 it becomes less valuable. The actual material cost of building a larger home isn't much more, it's mostly land prices.
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Land prices are driven up by the ability to wedge too many small homes in. If a given area of land can only have one home rather than 2 or 4 it becomes less valuable. The actual material cost of building a larger home isn't much more, it's mostly land prices.
But then fewer people can actually live in a place they want to, thus only the richer ones would be able to afford to anyway. Unless the new low-density suburban hellscape is sufficiently unattractive that nobody wants to live there, of course.
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Land prices are driven up by the ability to wedge too many small homes in. If a given area of land can only have one home rather than 2 or 4 it becomes less valuable. The actual material cost of building a larger home isn't much more, it's mostly land prices.
While the total cost of the house sold will be less than the price of all the houses that could be built, the unit price for that house will be higher - as the demand is the same while the supply is lower. Thus, you're not fixing any pricing issues for people wanting to live somewhere.
That said, you avoid the entire area turning into a densely built, not-enough-room-for-the-inhabitants slum over time.
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It's not just 1500 sq ft. It's 2200. The property comes with a separate 700 sq ft ADU (aka a "granny flat") as well.
Leaving you lots of space for amenities.
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Having more square feet than you need just means paying more for it, and then paying more to condition it, and finally paying more to maintain it.
I'd rather have a pool than a bunch of space I don't need that just entices me to buy more shit and stack it up.
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3D printed, eh? Should be pretty cheap then (Score:1)
About 25,000 bucks for the whole thing sound about right?
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About 25,000 bucks for the whole thing sound about right?
For just the roof on the 700SF mother-in-shack option? Maybe.
Fifteen homes (Score:1)
Fifteen pre-fab homes for $1,000,000/each, and all fifteen will be wedged into 5 acres?
So the appeal is what? A pre-fab house on 1/4 acre of land that runs on batteries and is recharged by solar panels.
The only interesting thing is the possibility that the rooftop solar panels on these small houses can generate enough electricity on an average day to power the home for 24 hours.
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Fifteen pre-fab homes for $1,000,000/each, and all fifteen will be wedged into 5 acres?
So the appeal is what? A pre-fab house on 1/4 acre of land that runs on batteries and is recharged by solar panels.
The only interesting thing is the possibility that the rooftop solar panels on these small houses can generate enough electricity on an average day to power the home for 24 hours.
I kind of doubt "interesting" will be the word that electric and gas company executives are using once entire towns of solar-powered homes start decimating traditional revenue streams.
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I kind of doubt "interesting" will be the word that electric and gas company executives are using once entire towns of solar-powered homes start decimating traditional revenue streams.
That's what service/connection fees are for unfortunately.
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The only interesting thing is the possibility that the rooftop solar panels on these small houses can generate enough electricity on an average day to power the home for 24 hours.
Is this somewhere that has perfect weather so they won't have heat and AC to power?
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Tiny Boxes... (Score:3)
Tiny Boxes,
On the Hillside,
And they're all made of ticky-tacky,
And they all look them same!
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With 3D printing they don't *have* to be the same. In fact every one could be unique.
But having them all identical makes planning to finish the houses simpler, with every house requiring exactly the same plumbing, wiring, doors and staircases. In fact a lot of the parts of the houses that aren't 3D printed could be prefabricated.
But I bet you could do that with software. You could devise a system which simulated a village whose architecture evolved naturally over decades or centuries, with everyone using
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So, yes, less snarky and more on-topic, I actually worked on design software for a somewhat similar technique some 30 years ago.
It was for tilt-up building (commonly used for warehouse and industrial buildings) panels that they were building in a factory and transporting to the building sites - rather than the traditional build-on-site.
I don't remember that there was any automation. Just a system of forms that the workers placed in the factory prior to pouring the concrete. There were various options for e.
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3D printed buildings could have the opposite effect, because changing the design is as simple as updating the CAD file, i.e. you don't have to re-tool your assembly line or produce new construction plans.
Color me a coward. (Score:2)
This project makes a lot of sense if you goal is cheap and green at any cost.
I live in a house that is not far from being a solid concrete walled building, rock and lime mortar with foot thick or more walls. Such a house is a bear to heat. (Yes, it does get relatively cold in Southern California. It also dribbles miserably here, we get another 1/4" tomorrow.) It is also a monster to cool in the simmer (sic.)
Now, this can be mitigated by using hollow cement blocks or two thin cement walls with insulation bet
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Hardly Affordable - Durability questionable (Score:3)
Look at the artist's rendering (Score:2)
Re: Look at the artist's rendering (Score:1)
It is utterly weird to me, an unamerican, that somebody would call a one-room building a "house". That's a shed!
And yes, those should be easy to build with a brick laying machine and such.
And I doubt the foundation is 3D-printed.
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One room?
"...will come with three bedrooms and two bathrooms."
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That's why I'm skeptical of 3d printing - extruding the walls may seem like a great idea and maybe there are some interesting forms it can produce, but is it really any better than other construction techniques?
What, no "AI" and Bitcoin currency? (Score:2)
Are the houses at least as condescending, and useless as, and looking like iProduct-likes?
I hope California realizes (Score:1)
I hope California realizes that most plastic depends on oil. Let alone all the inputs that go into building a solar panel factory, and the toxic chemicals that go into making solid state panels. Hope they weren't trying to be green or anything.
Why does nobody push solar *thermal* energy that anyone can build ????
1450+700 square feet per unit (Score:3)
Not a solar power expert but will roof mounted solar panels be large enough to generate the power needed to run AC for 2150 Square feet from March until November (average high over 90 about half the year!)? Also, each unit has a pool which draws a bit of power.
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desert (Score:2)
Who wants to live in the desert? This must be for retired Tesla drivers that like to bake in the sun. Maybe the only place that has enough sun year round to make it work.
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Do you go outside in Summer (other than to go between air conditioned spaces)? I do like the cable car ride up the mountain, where the temperatures are less likely to kill you.
Try the coast.
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As someone who grew up in the desert, I think you're nuts. I moved away in 2008, and I would never go back. I now live in a place with rain, and seasons, and greenery. It's lovely! The desert is hell.
Poor bed adhesion? (Score:2)
Yeah, um, better solve the bed adhesion problem in earthquake country.
Affordable Housing? (Score:3, Interesting)