Cost Efficiency of 3D Printing Housing
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Cost Efficiency of 3D Printed Residential Housing
Jakob N Bouna
University of Michigan
ENG 125
Dane Anderson
10/31/23
Cost Efficiency of 3D Printed Residential Housing
Introduction
For almost 3,000 years, homes have been constructed using a technique known as framing: having a team of eight to twelve men erect the outline of a home using timber, which is eventually finished with drywall, insulation, siding, etc. The amount of time required to frame a 1,600 to 2,200 square foot home can vary drastically from a few days to a few months depending on the size of the team and building plans (felixhomes, 2023); however, prior to 2015, engineers only focused on optimizing the efficiency of framing. Having been developed since 500 B.C., expansion has come to a halt. Within the past 40 years, additive manufacturing (the process of joining materials layer by layer to produce a three-dimensional object) has completely revolutionized almost every form of physical creation, with construction being no exception (Kumar & Prasad, 2021). In December of 2015, the first 3D printed home was constructed in Russia, providing a proof of concept to the rest of the world that the next step for construction was in 3D printed structures (Leigh, 2015). Since then, the additive manufacturing sector has become fascinated with the new technique and has praised it as the future of construction due to its cost efficiency. While it is widely accepted that printing a home is cheaper and faster than typical methods, the magnitude of these differences are disputed and
therefore raise the question: How cost efficient is 3D printing residential real estate when compared to the customary framing of a home? When considering the price to 3D print a home,
one may be tempted to only consider the cost of the act of printing when compared to the act of framing; however, it is crucial to understand that printing a house not only takes the place of framing, but also removes any need for siding, insulation, drywall, and certain support
structures (PCA, 2013) because even if the actual printing is not much cheaper, the amount saved over the project as a whole should be factored in considering the savings are directly related to the printing process. While numbers wildly vary, the cost of 3D printing a 2000 square
foot home (average U.S. home size as of 2023) ranges from $125,000 to $175,000, roughly a quarter to half the cost of building a home of the same size with conventional processes (Farell, 2022).
Raw Materials
When considering the cost of a 3D printed home, there are three main components: material cost, labor cost, and indirect savings, and in today’s market especially, material cost is what prevents most from building. According to a team of researchers from the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, the amount of wood required to frame an average 2000 square foot home is roughly 23,000 board feet (one board foot is a piece of lumber 12 inches by 1 inch by 1 inch). As wood is a part of a global market akin to oil and microchips, its pricing can shift very quickly, and as of November 5, 2023, the price per one thousand board feet is $550. To find the material cost of framing a house, one must multiply the
cost of timber by the amount of timber required, leading us to a modern-day material cost of $12,650; it should be noted this cost is strictly in terms of wood alone, disregarding all other future costs such as drywall, sheet rock, insulation, etc., as these are not directly comparable and will be mentioned within the “future savings” paragraph below. Since the process for framing a home is largely standardized, prediction of material need is relatively accurate as the only true variance from home to home is size, rather than technique. When 3D printing however, there are no standardized procedures or methods, meaning that some structures may
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have eight-inch-thick walls (Karki & Munir, 2021) while others have four (Allouzi & Al-Azhari, 2020). For the purposes of this analysis, an assumed thickness of eight inches will be used to offer liberal cost estimate to represent the lower limit of cost efficiency. When considering a home of the same size, since concrete is used in a liquid form, it is sold is units of cubic feet; as well, it’s price is a part of a smaller, far more consistent market that is currently hovering around
$6.30 per cubic foot. On average, a basic 2000 square foot home has 2160 square feet of wall space. This leads to a volume of 1296 cubic feet and a total concrete cost of $8164 (Karki & Munir, 2021), a material cost 64% that of its equivalent in wood. The numbers mentioned above
are generalizations, and it should be noted that not all scholars follow the same guidelines: A group of researchers comprised of members from the School of Civil Engineering at Dalian University and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the New York Institute of Technology compared multiple different types of concrete such as Lavacrete, D.Fab, and Cybe Mortar to determine their specific strengths and weaknesses. After running tests across all three proprietary mixtures of concrete, each had proven to possess characteristics that made them appropriate for specific uses, which means that a home in Florida that needs to be shielded from a hurricane may use D.Fab while a home in the arid deserts of Texas may require Lavacrete. A large majority of the information surrounding concrete costs are generalized to offer a better and more whole understanding of the discipline as due to the wildly different construction methods, it would be otherwise impossible to gain any form of general knowledge surrounding cost structure; However, this does not mean that either side is wrong, rather that they serve different uses. Where as one scholar may write in general terms to provide their audience with an introduction to the field, more specific scholars using different and specific
concrete mixtures serve a different audience, one that is searching for a deeper understanding, possibly in relation to a specific project.
Differing Labor
When constructing a home, the largest cost incurred by the general contractor is that of labor, and with the current labor shortage spiking skilled and unskilled wages, maintaining worker efficiency is of the utmost importance to both investors and builders. According to the Economic Research Institute, the current average wage for construction workers within the United States of America is $27 an hour, with $30 being a current high and $23 being a current low. The current average wage for a construction foreman is $40 an hour, and the current average for a general contractor is $57 an hour (ERI, 2023). While there are an overwhelming number of combinations of man hours and workforce size used to construct a home, on average, a standard 2000 square foot home requires: 8000 manhours from construction workers (split between an average of 5 workers per day for a total of 1600 manhours per worker), 1600 manhours from a construction foreman, and 1600 from a general contractor (Adams et. Al, 2009). This means that in total, the labor cost alone for the construction of a 2000 square foot home is $371,200, with 86% of the cost in labor alone. This is where 3D printing a home truly cuts costs, and that is because where as a regular home may take upwards
of 8 months and up to 30 salaries to pay, a 2000 square foot home can be completed in just 16 days; as well, the printing of the home only requires 2 workers when using printers such as Maxi Printer
, a robotic arm style printer that can be easily transported on wheels and set up in less than an hour (Kauppila, 2023). The actual printing of the home only takes 3 days, and holding all other jobs constant, the cost in labor of building a home drops to $113,920, less than
one third of the cost when using traditional framing. This factor in the cost of the home is typically the most widely debated because it is a conversation that was present before printing homes was even a possibility. Now that there is a whole new sector of construction work, the discussion surrounding the cost of labor has become even more contested. According to writers for Forbes Home: Nick Cellucci and Rachel Abraham, a 2000 sqaure foot home takes approximately 22 different subcontractors (plumbing, electrical, carpentry, etc...), and roughly an average of 40 workers total (Abraham & Cellucci, 2023), whereas Paul Emrath of the National
Association of Home Builders Discusses Economics and Housing Policy (NAHB) states that a home of the same size would be built with an average of only 21 construction workers (Emrath, 2015). This extreme disconnect is likely due to fact that not all clients constructing a 2000 square foot home spend the same amount of money. If you have a large investor looking to build a housing development in less than 4 months, they likely have the ability to pay for all the extra labor requried to complete such a large project in such little time, as opposed to a working-class family who has just enough to build their home in 10 months, but for a far lower cost. When considering a 3D printed home’s construction labor, while there may be less workers, it can also be argued that the workers would need to be trained in operating the machinery, which depending on the printer can possibly result in higher-than-average wages due to their skill being more in demand. While the divide between voices is considerably distant, these only apply in extreme situations, and in general, the actual cost of labor can be measured with an industry median. As long as the median cost of a 3D printed home is consistently lower than the median cost of a regular home, it can be derived that the printed home is more cost efficient by the same proportion.
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Future Savings
As stated earlier, the average home takes on average 22 different subcontractors that include: security system installation, carpeting, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, technology, foundation, drywall, masonry, concrete, roofing, countertops, ceramic tiling, flooring, painting, landscaping, kitchen cabinets, exterior doors / windows, framing, siding, interior doors, carpentry (Abraham & Cellucci, 2023). This is the third major cost that printing a home removes,
as when printing in concrete, you remove the need for any sizable HVAC, drywall, masonry, painting, exterior doors / windows, framing, siding, and insulation. When 3D printing a house, the house is framed in concrete, and both the interior and exterior walls are made up of this framed concrete, meaning that unless there is a desire from the client to install siding or drywall, there is absolutely no need for either. The same goes for insulation and HVAC, as concrete as opposed to wood has a specific factor known as Albedo level, which essentially measures how energy efficient concrete is. In the case of printing homes, specific concrete mixtures can have an Albedo level of 0.8, removing the need for any insulation and lowering the
power of any HVAC system required to control the temperature of the home. This not only reduces the cost of constructing the home, but will also highly benefit any future owner as theyr
energy bill will be significantly lower than average (PCA, 2013). Along with this, the concrete frame of the home serves as the homes visible walls, and with this comes a removal of any drywall subcontractors, and more importantly any purchase drywall. On average, a 2,000 square
foot home requires roughly 8,000 square feet of drywall. According to today’s drywall pricing, this will cost roughly $24,000 (Method, 2023). Immediately, almost a tenth of the total cost of the home is eliminated, and this trend continues with respect to siding, insulation, carpeting,
paint, etc. It should be noted that due to price discrimination and bulk purchases makes these savings slightly diminish depending on the amount of homes and size of homes constructed; However, as mentioned earlier this diminishing saving only takes place in extreme situations as the median situation is one of a family building a single home in which they reap the full benefits of a more cost efficient building method.
Conclusion
The construction industry is one that is extremely difficult to generalize from, as it varies so heavily is every single action from purchasing a plot of land to selling the completed home. While there is a set precedent for the procedures involved in the construction process, the actual number of workers, efficiency of each worker, and technology available for higher efficiency can be wildly different. This however does not mean that generalizations cannot be drawn, as in the case I have illustrated above, it is imperative to the general upbringing of automated construction to have generalized examples. In the example of a 2000 square foot home, discourse does not occur for the question of if 3D printing a home is cost efficient, rather for the question of how
cost-efficient 3D printing a home is. Since the cost of building a home often shifts due to differing markets, the compiling and analyzing costs present in a home's construction, while applicable specifically for modern markets, can still provide use to future research, as due to the extreme closeness of traditional and automated construction techniques
they often share the same movements in supply and demand. These even shifts are what will allow future scholars to continue patterns demonstrated in today's text, specifically in reference to the cost of a 2000 square foot 3D printed home being almost a quarter the cost of a traditionally built 2000 square foot home.
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