I'd be all up for a low-cost, IKEA style house (in my locale the cost of the building is a small fraction of total cost of property in a city anyway). If nothing else, construction work is such a gamble, the variance of outcome of quality is enormous.
The thing that hampers it, as far as I know, is generally quality constraints. Pre-fab houses just tend to be low quality. This is in part self-selecting, there is a stigma to a "pre-fab" or "portable" home, but in part also that somehow building prefab houses to a good standard is hard. I don't just mean colour and feel, but just basics like "not leaking".
The staple of Eastern European bleak suburbs, the high-rise apartment buildings, were all built out of prefab components. These were built in central locations ("home factories"), transported and only assembled on site. These were certainly not created equal, and customer satisfaction wasn't high on the requirements list, but they generally suffered from this kind of problems (leaks, poor quality plumbing / gas connections etc.).
I wonder how this company would tackle these problems.
This is a historical design/manufacturing problem, not a factual blanket statement.
Given the higher quality control standards that would be possible with a modern automated manufacturing process, each individual panel would now be higher quality than the variation of contractors building housing from scratch on-site.
From there, its just a matter of ensuring the final build site is prepped to spec. Leveling and grading, water runoff, etc. This would be the only variation between homes, and could be accomplished by a more highly trained crew with specialized equipment, as this would be their regular job.
In the end, its just a better way to go than building homes from scratch on site.
Yup. People would be surprised just how rough the fit of stuff cut to size and lined up on site. Manufactured frames, panels and modules can be built to much tighter tolerances with the benefit of an orderly indoor environment and often precision cuts from CNC machines too.
My parents used to collect old sears and roebuck catalogs. Looking at the various house kits for sale ($2k at the time!) Was one of my favorite parts of those catalogs. They really sold some very nice house kits.
One detail though, they were really more like house kits, not pre fab homes.
Pre-fab is different, and generally more expensive per square foot than your traditional built on site stick frame house. Until people care about energy efficient homes, they are a tough sell.
The issue is that pre-fab housing is fundamentally about low cost. There's nothing preventing a master craftsman from building the perfect pre-fab, but it will be so expensive that anyone who could afford it would rather buy a "real home".
I'm not sure. I mean, in practice it seems it is as you say, but I wonder if that's necessary. What would pre-fab look like if it targeted a high-quality finish?
First, you'd think high-quality hand-made houses ought to be more expensive than high-quality prefab houses, made in a well-optimised factory process. Cost, quality etc. should just be more consistent.
Second, the amount of general headscratching should be much lower. If I can design the pieces together and the on-site job is just to put them together well, that cuts out a lot of general "how do I connect these pieces" work, not to mention all the painstaking work of laying bricks etc.
Finally, as also mentioned by sibling, the variance of cost should just be drastically lower.
Clearly it doesn't work like that, but I wonder what the root cause is.
What you are calling "hand-made houses" are entirely factory made. They bring the factory in on a truck, and pack it up, but it is still a factory, and the process are not much different from what you would do in any factory. And most of the parts are made off-sight, most of the parts are things like 2x4 that are made offsight in a factory.
There isn't much room for doing more in a factory. Most pre-fab houses are cheaper only because they carefully limit your floor plans and options, and thus can just pay off a few jigs, but there isn't much savings possible there. They also often cut quality to save money.
Is that the US process? UK, I believe, is still a lot of good old fashioned carpenters and bricklayers on site. Mainland Europe is, I believe, further still into that corner. In Poland, use of timber is a bit novel, it used to be all concrete and bricks really not that long ago, and is still the majority.
> What would pre-fab look like if it targeted a high-quality finish?
It's all around you. I don't even have to ask where you are. This has been the dominant construction technology for decades.
You know, those 6-8 story apartment buildings with weird metal surfaces decorating the outsides, which are in wanna-be jazzy colors?
Those are panelized. That's someone playing The Sims on a real building, picking weird textures out of a catalogue and being bored with regular options.
I see ordinary family houses built around me. There's maybe a timber frame (or not). Then there's a bunch of guys laying bricks one by one, sticking some insulation on, putting pipes and cables through it all. Surely some of it is prefabricated, but it doesn't look like a bunch of Ikea-esque bits being just attached together.
When a builder makes a spec house they will estimate the costs to within a very small error every time.
When someone hires the same builder to make the same house the price often will be 2x or more of the estimate, but that is because it isn't the same house. It starts with the same plan, but instead of putting the $10 lights in they put in the $300 ceiling fan. Instead of putting in the cheap toilet they put in the upgraded one. They put in the more expensive doors and trim. they choose the more expensive counter tops. they get the more expensive stove. And on and on with many little upgrades, each alone isn't very much money, but the end total is doubling the cost.
If you are willing to stick with the same cheap choices the builder would choose you can build a house for the estimate. It is safe to bet money that you wouldn't.
This sounds like trying to make a big deal out of something that Europe has been doing for years.
Sure, these are "cement like" instead of wooden but otherwise nothing that interesting here. It is common to overskin these pre-made houses with render or bricks if needed for more protection but most wooden framed houses don't get blown down by high winds in Europe, mostly roofs getting blown off from buildings where they weren't tied down properly.
Yeah, I'm interested in what "cement like" actually means. It's possible it might not support venere or siding depending on its properties. Hard to say though since their site is down, so I can't get more info.
Based on their construction video, it appears to be styrofoam with a layer of stucco.
The problem I have with the video is the fact that they're installing these panels on short, thin little stub walls made of concrete. These have almost zero insulation factor. They basically have a large thermal gap under each wall.
I don't know how similar this is to Insulating Concrete Forms (ICFs), but I've owned a house constructed that way and it had considerably better insulation than any stick built I've owned.
It seems this is the inverse of ICF. ICF has the insulation on both sides of the reinforced concrete. This has a thin layer of fiber reinforced concrete on each side of a core of insulation.
You're never going to have a high R value throughout a whole house, the best you can do is to maximize it where you can. Windows and doors provide very little insulation as well.
But this is a solved problem. You build the base of your wall with glass foam bricks or aerated concrete. Pretty standard these days. Or a partially above-grade basement that can be insulated, as is common in the US.
It used to be the most common approach in the United States, because it was so effective, reliable, safe, fire resistant, cheap, and insulating.
Then we paniced because it was asbestos.
This is just an asbestos replacement. You put a shell outside it for impact resistance. This is a bunch of people loudly misunderstanding a simple evolution in a common technology.
>No, Europe has not been doing cement-like prefabs for years. They're not legal in Europe. Concrete prefabs haven't been built in Europe since the Soviets left in the 1980s. What the Soviets were building were prefab rooms, not prefab panels. It's a night and day difference.
Well, I have been working with a firm that made prefab panels houses much later than the 80's, and I don't think they were ever made illegal at least here (Italy) maybe you should restrict your definition of Europe to the specific EU country (if any) where concrete prefab houses are actually illegal.
The OP is for some reason focused on chrysotile (asbestos) panels rather than panels skinned with fibre reinforced cement which appears to be what this actually is. Which is legal and common in European construction, including as prefabricated wall units.
He stated:
> Concrete prefabs haven't been built in Europe since the Soviets left in the 1980s.
but the reference was only to asbestos panels, which are actually not allowed anymore since 1992/93/94 (here in Italy), anyway replacements (not containing asbesto) have been developed since.
I was instead talking of actual concrete (not fiber cement panel) prefabs.
I think you're (pretty furiously) talking past the other user. I agree the "cement like" material one of them uses is relatively unusual, but the article also references Boxabl (light gauge steel panel frames with concrete/EPS infill) and Node (timber framed panels) as other cutting edge startups. The material Vantem uses might be novel, the idea of "flat pack homes" referenced in the article isn't, even if building homes out of masonry and timber cut on site is still far more common and greater use of offsite construction has positive sustainability implications
It's also very common to skim panel/SFS/module type construction with faux-brick skins or render over here...
> I just spoke clearly about real world regulations that you happen to be unaware of, and could easily look up
Coming from a family of structural engineers (specialising in offsite construction, no less) I'm not sure whether to be more amused by the notion that there exists a Europe-wide ban on the use of prefabricated concrete panels, or that broad claims about building regulations are easy to look up!
It is true that many 1960s-era system built structures would no longer be compliant, and that regulations governing things such as insulation of dwellings might make cement panel walls designed to be single-skin suboptimal for many use cases but that is not the same thing as a Europe-wide ban on prefabricated concrete panel systems. There's actually a pretty varied market for them.
Perhaps your condescension towards the OP was not fury, but merely an attempt to bolster your apparently weak credentials as an expert in European construction. I recommend you discard that strategy in future :-)
> In my opinion, what you did here was to say "your claims don't hold up when someone replaces the thing you were talking about with a different thing."
Someone more familiar with European offsite construction techniques would interpret the OP's point that low rise construction from manufactured panels like the three different companies mentioned in TFA (two of which do not involve concrete walls) is not a "hip" novelty in Europe, and that timber-framed panels may incorporate a variety of facade systems used to provide equivalent weather protection to cement-like facades [also similar ease of assembly for the most part]. They are, in fact, very similar approaches to speeding up onsite construction
I'm not sure my remarks to that effect involved more reinvention of the original argument than your extended analogies to software and 1950s construction.
> But sort of the core concept here is that once it's cement-like, that's no longer necessary
Cement like material does not have the aesthetics of brick. Which is the chief reason to prefer a panel with a brick-like cladding instead of a lower cost alternative panel. Which is why brick-like skins have a place in panel wall based construction.
The technology required to build energy efficient housing has been available for many decades at least. What is missing is the political will to require energy efficiency.
Longer than that. It was already becoming the in thing in the 1970s. Sure there have been advances since then, but "super insulated" houses built in 1978 would still do well against todays code. (they wouldn't meet them, but they wouldn't be much worse)
The first world housing issues are more about land and zoning than construction, but for energy efficiency and climate change and just cheapness, mass produced
factory built homes are a great solution.
McDonalds, Starbucks etc. seem to have moved to this model, new standalone premises go together like Lego.
I mostly agree with you on land - but my understanding is that there are laws put in place that make modular construction de facto forbidden in most jurisdictions. Perhaps this falls into your definition of zoning or perhaps it doesn't. But I imagine if these were lifted systematically you'd get bigger investment.
>One notorious regulation that could go up for review is a longstanding rule that manufactured homes must be delivered with a chassis still attached, even if the homes are built in place permanently.
Unfortunately, as the largest owner of agricultural farmland in the US, Bill Gates is unlikely to try and tackle the underlying tax policy that rewards land hoarding/discourages building.
A land value tax would hit his portfolio pretty hard.
The zoning/nimby issues are derived from cost/sale price of land being driven ever further up. This is partly due to a spillover from historic levels of wealth inequality but its also due to land untaxing (e.g. prop 13).
Were land made into more of a liability the lobbying to inhibit development to keep land values up (zoning/nimbyism) would end up being pointless and would probably dry up.
Those SF homeowners who want to keep their area "single family homes only to preserve the feel of the area" are simply trying to inhibit development to keep the value of their leveraged investment stable.
Flip the switch to turn land into a financial liability and all that ends along with the land hoarding that has inhibited property development for decades.
It would have to be done nationally, though - and that would mean, among other things, deliberately crashing Bill Gates' agricultural land investments.
a land value tax wouldn't crash bill gates' ag land investments because ag land has relatively low value, so will also have relatively low tax. whether it would makes those investments net negative or positive is dependent on the specifics of the investments.
i'd disfavor a national LVT however, as i disfavor more power being concentrated in fewer hands. it should be a state level concern at most.
It would be nice if we didn't have such a herd mentality and some companies decided to revitalize some of the old rust belt cities by creating jobs there. There's some tech presence in Pittsburgh. Some of the smaller cities could benefit too though.
I don't think the problem is herd mentality. If you open an office in Silicon Valley you've got local talent for all types of positions, proximity to funding, and in general somewhere executives and upper management (likely) want to live.
Rust Belt cities don't really offer the same advantages. They might have cheaper rent but that doesn't help if no one wants to relocate to there. No company wants to be on the hook for revitalizing a city.
There are a lot of people who want to live there. Sure more people want to live in the Valley, but there are still a lot of smart people who don't. And also a few people who moved to the Valley who want to get out. Most of this is about family - it is very hard to move to a new city as your family support network is gone. Those who had a bad family life growing up don't care, but those who had a good family life will accept a lot of pain to stick with family. (I live 300 miles from my family, I'm jealous of my siblings who call grandma for an emergency babysitter at the last minute)
With remote work there is no reason you can't hire people who want to live in whatever rust belt city, and there are a lot of them. Just giving good salary to people in rust belt areas would go a long way to helping those cities.
There are smart people that live in rust belt cities, there's just fewer of them in any given city than in all of the Bay Area. For a company it'll be harder to keep that rust belt city staffed. It's also unattractive for employees to move there since there's fewer tech employers. In the Bay Area someone can walk out of Google and find a job pretty quickly with the same length commute. If someone relocated to Cleveland they can't necessarily do the same thing and face a prospect of relocating again.
Remote work is one way rust belt cities can revitalize themselves. There's a lot those cities can do to attract remote workers even if they're not attracting the companies themselves. Their states need to help by harmonizing some employment and tax laws with the states where tech companies are based. No one is moving to Cleveland if a "no working for competition" clause in an employment contract is legal in Ohio.
Side note: I don't mean to pick on Cleveland but it's sort of the rust belt poster child.
That's basically the herd mentality I'm talking about - people wanting to live in the same areas. People don't want to live there because nobody is moving there and making improvements. It's easier to just move where everyone else is moving.
> That's basically the herd mentality I'm talking about - people wanting to live in the same areas.
Call it what you will, but people generally want to live around other people - preferably people they care about but at least people who are not dangerous to them or impose much social or financial cost on them.
> People don't want to live there because nobody is moving there and making improvements.
Actually many previously declining places have reached critical mass and people are making improvements and attracting more people. But those places (i.e. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati), are sucking up most of the interest and creating their own gravity, leaving little left for Youngstown and Flint.
> It's easier to just move where everyone else is moving.
Of course it's easier - it's simple economies of scale. People seek access to physical and social resources. Raw land or emptied cities and towns with crumbling infrastructure don't provide that.
Productivity increases in urban centers. Bigger, the better. At some point negative externalizes and bottlenecks that limit growth but if those would be solved, the potential upside could be even greater.
For human capital the benefits from labour pooling and matching and knowledge spillovers are enormous.
Costs of materials follow real estate prices therefore it's always beneficial to seek ways to build homes cheaper.
Zoning and nimbyism, while contributing factors, are not the root cause. It's the idea that real estate should be seen as an investment - it gained popularity in China in recent years, causing a lot of unnecessary construction and spilling over to the rest of the world.
Fortunately(for us at leat) there are early signs that this scheme is collapsing:
Funnily enough in my neighbourhood (Eastern EU) there's already a:
- Block of so-called "microapartments" - units too small to be legally considered housing. This one was started before the respective law was changed due to an explosion in such projects.
- A project which took people's money in 2019 and then... never did anything. It's not even a hole in the ground - it's the previous building still scheduled to be demolished.
Apparently the madness also spilled over outside of China.
You're first comment is a pointless argument to the statement "As you might have heard, we’re in the midst of a housing crisis" which is simply stating a fact not the reason behind it.
You then switch to a sarcastic comment making light of what could be a horrible situation if you can't find a job because of where you live.
The Gates Foundation is doing something, who did your comment help?
The GP is talking about the biggest problem that America has now: people can't afford homes.
The article it trying to hook the reader by promising to tell them about this problem. What follows is implicitly delivered as a solution to this problem.
GP is correctly pointing out that it's not a solution. They are further lamenting that the current solutions to the problem (earn little of commute a lot) are sub-optimal.
The Gates foundation is doing something, kudos to them, but they are unlikely to make a dent in solving this problem.
"The Gates Foundation is doing something, who did your comment help?"
I think they're comment is valid conversation.
The Gates Foundation is likely more interested in the company's impact in South America, or in being climate friendly. I don't see anything in article that actually makes the case for why these would help alleviate the housing shortage. Maybe the could, but the info on that isn't in the article.
If you have any background on the Gates Foundation it should be easily implied. If not, here's a quote. Also, the article talks about low cost housing in South America. Housing is another topic the gates foundation typically focuses on.
"Breakthrough was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 to invest in sustainable energy and emissions-reduction technologies"
Why build factories in the Dakotas? Wouldn't it be better to build them somewhere more accessible to the east coast when shipping something so big and heavy?
Also, Vantem's website seems to be having issues. It would have been interesting to see what these houses can look like other than the "modern" gray thing in the picture, as well as get more technical info.
That makes sense. But then still, why not have something in say KY or WV? Plenty of chicken houses and stuff along the east coast, and they tend to be temperature sensitive. And there's still the human housing market there too.
Couldn't find anything on Vantem's site describing how plumbing and electrical go in; it was not possible to see on timelapse either. They had an elevated floor, so maybe the utilities went in there? But it's also used for multi-story, so it can't just be that...
With concrete blocks you would cut a chase in the wall, but the primary rigidity seems to come from the panels on either side, so that seems like it might be a bad idea...
Theres a tinyhome builder making using ESP 8x16 tinyhomes for 20k. They call them The Incred-i-box. They justed started to offer solar setup in the tongue box as an option to make it offgrid worthy.
They built a large assembly line building so they could start creating many homes per week. Been fun to watch them get their factory built, and each assembly section going, floor, electrical, plumbing, walls, roof, etc.
The youtube channel has been pretty good on showing the progress.
> The panels were designed as a replacement for brick and cement, which are expensive, difficult to make
How much is it? At our place (developing country, heavily depends on imports of everything, but private entrepreneurs somehow mastered the production of "difficult to make" bricks) a traditional 2 floor, 200 sq. meters (~2153 sq. feet) brick and mortar building with reinforced concrete belts (seismically active zone here), insulation, finishing & decoration will cost:
1. $80k if you don't want to take part. You give the money, the architect asks what you want and does the rest.
2. $40k if you hire workers for every stage of building yourself.
3. $20k if you can also make some work yourself, delegating only qualified work.
Is this technology going to be cheaper? Or is it like those California kennels for homeless $40k apiece?
As an avid reader, I anticipate the feedback as "unlikely to scale, since the centralized productivity gains don't outweigh the diminished flexibility and substantial transport costs".
This is a recurring theme with prefab system he analyzes, they scrape by employing labour arbitrage at a cheap production site, but do not unleash the productivity gains we associate with industrial production.
The most a prefab can hope to achieve is attack maybe 30- 40% of the total costs in that pie chart. You cannot prefab electrics and plumbing, foundation, landscaping, permitting etc. So even if they crush it and get 100% improvement on their products compared to on site build, that's still a 20% at best overall cost improvement.
Bit with that comes the risk of a new and unproven system, costly coordination issues that are easy to rectify in the traditional method -
but if the wrong prefabs are shipped across the country you are dead for a few weeks, since the next stage cannot start.
Prefab wall panels are a thing, but I'm not sure I've seen ICF-form style ones. I have to imagine this should be able to do pretty much what ICF construction does but faster. On the other hand, I imagine transporting the forms is cheaper than transporting actual panels.
I'd rather look into innovative formwork construction and cast-in- place concrete (pr slap labels here: concrete-like, energy-efficient green, zero-emission, insulated).
It doesn't cost that much. The land costs a lot, and permits can cost a lot. The labor isn't that much, and materials are cheaper than ever (though most houses in the past were built with free labor with material prepared on site and so you don't realize how much it costs as nobody was getting paid)
The labor is low because it's minimum wage based for hard work (where I am at in Texas, it's basically all foreign labor, legal and not). Paid a respectable wage, this labor would be expensive. But it's exploited.
I can recall when architecture made to last was something to be proud of. Nightmare waiting to happen if you live in a Tornado, Earthquake, Hurricane etc zone
We haven’t built residential structures for longevity since WW2. Nearly every home built after 1945 is garbage compared to pre-war homes that have been taken care of.
The irony is that in 100 years you’re more likely to come across a home built in 1920 than in 1980. And there’s a few reasons why.
Old homes were overbuilt. The engineering wasn’t good enough to really know what they could get away with.
Old homes are built with old growth wood. This can’t be had today. This wood is incredible and is naturally rot resistant. Taken care of it will last many hundreds of years.
Plastics. They really came into their own during WW2 and found their way into construction because they work for awhile and are dirt cheap. So we have cheap windows, cheap siding, flooring, etc. Gone are the days where great materials were necessary and abundant so adding a bit more craftsmanship was marginal.
Buy a pre-war home and invest in it. Keep the original windows and restore them.
Survivership basis. There were a lot of bad houses made before WWII, but they have mostly been torn down. The better quality houses are still around.
That and most people don't have a clue what makes a good house, and look at the wrong thing. You see a large post and don't notice the hidden beams that are not strong enough. Modern houses are built to stand up to much strong wind forces than the houses of old, but all that quality is inside the walls where you can't see any difference. In many cases they difference is something you wouldn't even notice if you could compare the inside of the two walls side by side.
That's a good point about survivorship bias but I do wonder about it. There are vast swaths of homes out East that are all pre-war. They're in places where people took care of the homes though and have had them updated over the years. In essence, any home is slowly being rebuilt from the day it is finished. And if you don't take those steps then the home falls into disrepair and can't really be reasonably saved.
We saw a lot of this when people wanted new homes in the new suburbs starting in the late 1940's. The pre-war homes were sold to poorer people who couldn't afford or didn't understand they had to repair the homes. They were quality homes but many of them have been knocked down due to that.
And yes, there were also kit homes and other cheaper construction. Homes with dirt floors, no plumbing, etc. My grandmother grew up in a small 3 room home with outdoor plumbing and she had 7 siblings - no one can imagine living like that today. It would be considered inhumane. So yeah, that kind of stuff is gone too.
But even the highest quality construction today pales in many ways. For instance, top of the line windows from Marvin aren't as good as the windows that exist today in many pre-war homes. So long as they have been restored, weather stripped, storm windows added, etc. That 100 year window will continue to outlive the highest end windows from today's top brands, if it's maintained.
Except when they weren't. For example, brick foundations that preceded reinforced concrete haven't held up well. They generally all need to be replaced at great expense.
> Old homes are built with old growth wood. This can’t be had today. This wood is incredible and is naturally rot resistant.
As you say it can't be had today and there aren't enough old homes in places people want to live to make it matter.
> Taken care of it will last many hundreds of years.
But the whole point of old growth wood is that you don't need to take care of it as much since it is pretty resilient to getting wet.
It's newer wood and manufactured materials that often need more care since they are less resilient.
Also, prewar homes use huge amounts of energy for heating - which is a big reason the old growth wood lasted: it was being blasted with heat from the inside the whole winter, so condensation got dried out (the people too).
> Plastics. They really came into their own during WW2 and found their way into construction because they work for awhile and are dirt cheap. So we have cheap windows, cheap siding, flooring,
There are incredible fiberglass and UPVC windows being made today by companies like Marvin and Schuco. Yes, there has been a history of poor quality manufactured building materials, but some of the most reliable components today contain plastics.
> Buy a pre-war home and invest in it. Keep the original windows and restore them.
The reality is that people buy homes for location, and the period of the home is a usually a secondary consideration.
> There are incredible fiberglass and UPVC windows being made today by companies like Marvin and Schuco. Yes, there has been a history of poor quality manufactured building materials, but some of the most reliable materials today are plastic based.
I have the highest end Marvin windows (Ultimate double hung sash windows) in the addition part of my home and they don't compare to the original windows IMO. They're great, but I expect in 100 years they will have been replaced and the original windows will still be hanging.
> But the whole point of old growth wood is that you don't need to take care of it as much since it is pretty resilient to getting wet.
I'm just saying, typical home maintenance. Replacing the roofing, keeping gutters clear, etc.
> The reality is that people buy homes for location, and the period of the home is a usually a secondary consideration.
Totally. There are a lot of areas that are a mix of old and new. I'm just saying, given the option and things being equal, I'd almost always select the old home.
Well first off the strategy will be to embrace the LEGO like assembly method but to extend it with a few other useful connectors that people will find really useful, and in a decade should be able to extinguish the old fashioned Boxen.
I'd be all up for a low-cost, IKEA style house (in my locale the cost of the building is a small fraction of total cost of property in a city anyway). If nothing else, construction work is such a gamble, the variance of outcome of quality is enormous.
The thing that hampers it, as far as I know, is generally quality constraints. Pre-fab houses just tend to be low quality. This is in part self-selecting, there is a stigma to a "pre-fab" or "portable" home, but in part also that somehow building prefab houses to a good standard is hard. I don't just mean colour and feel, but just basics like "not leaking".
The staple of Eastern European bleak suburbs, the high-rise apartment buildings, were all built out of prefab components. These were built in central locations ("home factories"), transported and only assembled on site. These were certainly not created equal, and customer satisfaction wasn't high on the requirements list, but they generally suffered from this kind of problems (leaks, poor quality plumbing / gas connections etc.).
I wonder how this company would tackle these problems.