Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
When I choose a concrete slab foundation, their price estimate tool gives me a range of £NaN - £NaN. Representing currency as a floating-point value strikes again.
Modern concrete with superplasticizers is far superior to Roman concrete.
The greatest limiting factor is not the concrete itself, but rebar. It will eventually rust, causing the concrete to spall and crack. So in most cases it makes no sense to really optimize the concrete lifetime, because why bother?
If you're willing to build structures that rely only on compression and gravity, then we can totally do stuff that the Romans never dreamt of. Just look at any modern concrete gravity dam as an example.
Since it’s a UK company/project they will be primarily comparing to brick costs since that’s what the vast majority of UK houses are (still) built with. They claim comparable cost as brick/block construction. £230/sqm.
They also seem to be touting their accuracy and since plywood is dimensionally stable (well, more so that 2x4s anyway) that’s probably why ply.
Oh man. To me this plywood stuff seems like it might be marginally more durable than 2x4 and sheetrock, or maybe not (worse ventilation etc). So to me it seems like they have just reinvented the American "balloon" construction system, but overengineered, and probably at much greater expense.
It's cut on a cnc router table, which does not handle regular wood very well. The dimensional stability and anisotropic nature of plywood is a better fit for most automated cutting methods. If you try to CNC route most regular dimensional lumber it has pretty bad tearout and splitting unless you use a really fine cutter and go slowly (which takes forever).
Breeze block for the inner skin and red brick for the outer skin is still the standard as far as I see from local housing developments and friends doing extension. Internal dividing walls may now all be stud partitions but wooden structures are pretty uncommon.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
Say the land is 130k in your region. You won't find 3b houses for less than 360k. If you're looking at not so cheap builders, it will be 500k.
I think there's a revolution coming in the way we build houses, it must be - because costs are through the roof. It could be either in the form of prefabricated walls, like we have now trusses, or lego bricks like the OP, or something.
well yeah, because everything is so bespoke: plumbing, electrical, windows, doors, drywall, trimming. I hope to see some kind of evolution of housing where these things are not installed by skilled labor somehow.
Frankly there is zero way to bet a stud wall with a bunch of CNC'd plywood. The key is most of the wall is not made of the stud, plywood requires the entire sqft or m2 to consist of plywood.
R31 exterior foam will rather outperform the WikiHouse blocks due to reduced thermal bridging. And you get a structure that is essentially immune to condensation damage, so you can skip the annoying interior vapor barrier and all the problems that it can cause all by itself.
You're correct - but wait until you meet their other friend "milling the panels." Doing it out of plywood is one increased level of expense and difficulty - machine and operator time is an exponential multiplier. Think about it - you're taking a system that could be a guy with a table saw ripping a piece of ply in a minute tops and turning it in to a guy standing and watching a mill run through a piece of ply in who knows how many passes... it just doesn't make any sense.
Not only that, but in order for the assembly process to work the modules must apparently be "fabricated to millimetre precision". At a certain point, wouldn't this inevitably mean that the QA process would result in some of the yield having to be discarded as unusable after it's manufactured? Seems like a lot of waste compared to conventional methods using (literally) run-of-the-mill lumber and someone's design expertise, though I guess the argument is that architectural expertise doesn't come cheap and using a "framework" scales better in that respect.
In a stick frame building, everything still gets clad with sheathing (plywood) and subfloor (thicker tongue and groove plywood).
Structural insulated panels (plywood/foam sandwiches) have been around since the 70s. They're a useful building technology.
There's no way they can provide an equivalent amount of product to a SIP cheaper. They're operating at small scale, and CNC machining everything which is expensive. The math ain't mathin'.
A 1x6 which is probably thicker is usually around $4-5 a 3/4 plywood at 4x8 is $51 ish, so 8*1x6 ($4.5 at 8ft length) = $36, and $51 for plywood. So no, plywood is not cheaper at apples to apples comparison. If you chop the thickness down you can get it to be comparable or cheaper. But plywood is stronger then a bunch of 1x6.
I think it has been for at least 30 years - perhaps longer. Structural beams were cheaper to make of solid wood when they were still lots of big trees to be had. That's no longer the case.
