The problem with this kind of innovation is that it's improving what's already one of the fastest and easiest parts of building a house. Digging foundations, plastering the walls, doing the plumbing, doing the electrics and laying the flooring can all individually take longer than the bricklaying, and are much harder to automate.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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It’s like they forgot precast exists
Guessing you didnt read it, because its in danish.
The article specifically mentions that this technique uses 30% of the material that would have been used for precast.
But what does that mean for strength? I also see surprisingly little "armouring". Not sure how that's called in English - the metal wires in-between.
I'm not sure about this company but there's one in the US that has an embedded nozzle laying down steel cabling inside each concrete bead.
I'm just guessing, but it is probably reinforced with fiberglass or a similar fibers in the cement.
Rebar. Yes, there is no rebar and these houses are cracking and falling apart.
One of the things that this project is testing is how the foundations are made. They do not have to clear the trees to dig and level out the area to fill in loads of gravel just to make a concrete pour. They are somehow able to make the foundations around existing structures like trees and on somewhat uneven ground.
This machine looks much bigger than a wheelbarrow, and you still need to dig the foundation, so I don't see how it could possibly need less space to be cleared than just pouring concrete into a hole would.
It runs on tracks, so it might be slimmer on the ground level than the conventional construction vehicles. Sure a wheelbarrow is smaller, but I don't think that's a realistic option, lol.
When I've seen foundations for homes get poured and they haven't been on a large construction site that's already been flattened (where the ability to work around things like trees wouldn't matter), it's been done by having one or two builders fill up a wheelbarrow with concrete where the concrete mixer lorry could drive to, then wheel it to where the foundations were being poured and empty their wheelbarrows into the foundations.
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3D-Printed Houses Are Already Failing - Megaprojects https://youtu.be/nRLqld_jD_g
I watched this video a couple weeks ago and it's pure click bait. He discussed one single instance where a known scammer takes advantage of a poor community and doesn't do what he said he would. The video completely ignores all the progress the printer manufacturing companies are making and only devotes like 60 seconds at the very end to mention that the industry is improving rapidly.
Here's a Tested video from last year where Adam visits one of the manufacturers. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=orurGdrlzIs
Tldw cracking in the concrete and quite scammy companies.
3D house printing has been a scam from day one. Not cheaper, not faster, not more reliable and they cannot be altered or upgraded in the future. Questionable R values.
These turds got pinched out but will all be knocked down in a decade.
As far as I have seen it's very finicky. The concrete mixture is very special because normalnconcrete is not made for stacking layers and it's also very sensitive to the weather. If it's not exactly right it will start cracking.
I am not sure if anyone could yet demonstrate it at scale while being cheaper than traditional building.
You are correct. I watched one being built. It is only the walls, for one thing, they still did foundation, roof, interior framing the old-fashioned way. The concrete was trucked in on pallets and mixed on site and it looked like a ton of work, and the machine was always breaking, it looked like.
Honestly don't know why they don't print the concrete forms in plastic and inject concrete, injectable cast concrete has been a thing for like a hundred years. You could do your raceways and plumbing runs and all then fill.
Honestly don't know why they don't print the concrete forms in plastic and inject concrete, injectable cast concrete has been a thing for like a hundred years. You could do your raceways and plumbing runs and all then fill.
That would be a lot of waste plastic. Concrete is very heavy. That means the form hast to be extremely tough. For plastic that means a lot of plastic. At a certain point you won't win anything there either.
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"Der terk er jerbs"
~ Brickies
"Deh derk eh durrrr!!!"
By all accounts I have read that didn't come from the company selling them, these constructions are terrible.
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Can anyone tell me now this compares in efficiency to traditional building? It looks like a lot of setup
Not sure about speed but I imagine it could be pretty speedy, if for no other reason than the fact that it can run with much fewer workers and probably also running during the night. I mean even if it was half as slow as manual labour, if it ran for 24 hours, it would still be faster overall.
But another point is that it uses much less material, 70% less according to the article. I suppose that helps with costs and CO2 emissions.
That makes sense. 70% less material is a staggering amount, that would probably offset if it ran on literal coal and steam. Maybe. That's hyperbolic but you get what I was thinking of.
If you're switching to concrete, emissions will be worse than pretty much anything else you could use. Concrete is already responsible for some 8-12% of all global CO2 emissions.
What do you mean switching? Think this is more about using less concrete than stopping to use it entirely. That also helps, but yea it's a problem.
Most houses around these parts are made of wood, not concrete.
In Denmark it's usually bricks (very common and traditional) or other stone like materials or concrete. Never understood why there is this difference across the world in how houses are usually built, but wood seems a very... Temporary material for something like a house? I've lived in buildings from the 1910s, I can't imagine anything made of wood lasting that long.
If they're taken care of properly they can last centuries
My house is wood and was built in 1923.
Houses are made of wood in the US because we didn't chop down our forests in the 1500s. European houses generally fall into the category of 1000+ year old stone or modern brick
In any part of the world that gets earthquakes, brick is an incredibly unsafe material.
Wood is incredibly strong relative to its weight, but most importantly it’s flexible and resilient.
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US defaultism
A lot of the rest of the world build with brick and mortar.
Honestly, this would be a really cool way to build Cobb houses, which are very environmentally friendly, have fantastic insulation, and are some of our oldest still standing structures, iirc. Good hat and boots (roof with overhang and foundation), 3d printed Cobb walls, and a lime coating, and I could see this really making housing costs a lot lower in certain communities.
Biggest downside to Cobb from my research is just that electrical and plumbing typically needs to be running conduit on top of the wall, instead of inside the wall, if you want the option to upgrade or change it later.
I really don't understand why people don't go for prefab walls instead. Am I missing something? It sounds to me that creating a house out of composable units that contain insulation, wiring and plumbing makes more sense.
The article says this uses only 30% of the concrete you'd otherwise use. Presumably prefab would use more.
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