The Economics Of 3D Printing A House

June 18, 2013 in Daily Bulletin

Movoto is a blog that advertizes itself as ‘the lighter side of real estate’. Randy Nelson demonstrated why by looking at the cost of 3D printing a house:

  • The MakerBot Replicator 2 is a $2,199 machine that can be used to 3D print bricks.
  • The materials for a standard brick would cost about $12 per brick and would take the printer 2.9 days to print. In contrast Home Depot sells bricks for 30 cents.
  • To use the machine to print the bricks for an entire average sized house would require over 220 years and $332,820.
  • If you wanted to speed things up, you could purchase 2,000 of the 3D printing machines and have your house built and ready to go in four months…at a hardware cost of $4.4 million.

Find a calculator that allows you to calculate the length of time it would take, and the money it would cost for you to 3D print your own dream house, and why clogged print heads could throw everything off over here.

Source: Movoto

Via: Nick Johnson