In recent years, the 3D printing boom has shown us that anything is possible. From toys and tools to medical devices, you can basically print anything—even 2,000-square-foot homes.
Hello, Vulcan. At the Wolf’s Ranch community in Georgetown, a city about 30 minutes away from the Texas capital, most of the home builders aren’t human. In fact, they’re actually robots—3D-printing robots, to be exact. One of them, the Vulcan, is more than 45 feet wide and weighs 4.75 tons.
It makes sense. The Vulcan isn’t building small-scale projects, but rather 3D printing homes. According to Reuters, the Vulcan takes a base mix of concrete powder, water, and sand and prints out a home through its nozzle as if it were toothpaste.
“It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” Conner Jenkins, a senior project manager at Icon, the company behind the Vulcan, said. “So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”
The world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood. Icon is an AI and robotics company that uses 3D printing to build homes quickly and at a lower cost. Two years ago, Icon partnered with Lennar, the second-largest homebuilder in the country, to construct 100 3D-printed homes. The project, Wolf’s Ranch, is now the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood.
While the initial costs to build the community were slightly higher than expected, Lennar says it’s seen its costs decrease dramatically. Unlike human workers, Icon’s machines operate 24 hours a day. Each printer can do the work of more than 12 construction workers.
By its second year of construction at Wolf’s Ranch, Icon was using 11 machines and printing out two homes per week.
“We’ve seen our costs go down by half. We’ve seen our cycle time go down by half,” Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC. “This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market.”
What’s a 3D-printed home like? Although the homes at Wolf’s Ranch were made differently, they’re just like any other home, with a few differences. First off, all the walls have rounded edges because it’s simply how the printers work with concrete. It’s also important to recall that like other 3D printers, the Vulcan works by printing layers. As a result, the texture on the walls resembles wide corduroy. The foundation and the metal roofs on the homes are installed through traditional means.
Interestingly, the roofs on the homes are solar-powered via roofs made of metal, which include photovoltaic panels. Icon claims the roof is fire-resistant and that the materials used to make the walls are resistant to water, mold, and termites.