New York firm builds 3-D printed home in 8 days

Most homes are built block by block or brick by brick. But a demo house in the Long Island community of Calverton, N.Y., was constructed scan by scan — its walls made using a giant three-dimensional printer.

Construction firm SQ4D built the proof-of-concept demo house to show the public and industry what was possible. Now the company is putting one up for sale — a still to-be-built house in the nearby town of Riverhead, which has been listed on property site Zillow at US$299,000.

With a detached garage, the house will cover some 1,400 square feet.

The footings, foundation and slab, along with the walls, will be entirely made with the 3-D printer.

“We instruct the machine to go around and follow your floor plan each pass as we go by. We're constantly building up,” said Kirk Andersen, the director of operations for SQ4D.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to fulfil their house-sized dream.

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

“We set tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, 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 home.

That is significantly faster and around 30 per cent cheaper overall than a home built using standard construction methods, he said, where labourers need to tow in and stack blocks manually.