Facit Homes claims to be the first company in the world to digitally fabricate a bespoke home on-site. The company has developed a process (D-Process) whereby it delivers a compact mobile production facility (MPF) to the construction site, equipped with all the materials and machinery required to transform a 3D digital design into a physical building. “We are the first company in the world to have successfully trialed manufacturing a house on-site,” Managing Director of Facit Homes, Bruce Bell told Gizmag. “We bring our compact high-tech machine to site and make it there and then—its an amazingly efficient way of designing and making a house.”
Facit Homes first designs the house using a 3D computer model, which contains every aspect from its orientation, material quantities, even down to the position of individual plug sockets. The patented “D-Process” then transforms the 3D digital designs into the home’s exact physical building components, using a computer controlled cutter. These components are usually made from engineered spruce ply and are light and easy enough to then be assembled together on site. Since the components are produced on demand, costs are kept to a minimum and lead times are eradicated. “It's not a building system but a way of working,” said Bell.
This unique construction method provides on-site quality control, predictability, cost effectiveness, speed, a low carbon footprint and flexibility. In addition each project possesses an individual design and layout that reflects the needs of its future occupants.
Each Facit home incorporates a thermal envelope, where the home's “chassis” (more like a car than a traditional wooden frame) is airtight and stacked with insulation. This ensures that the home conserves energy and minimizes heat loss. “If you want to get geeky that's 0.14 W/m²/K heat-loss co-efficient for floors, walls and roof,” said Bell. In addition each home can be designed to feature a solar thermal system and photovoltaic panels.
Home owners Celia and Diana of Hertfordshire, UK, were the first to successfully have their home built using the on site D-Process. Their modern two story home features natural unfinished materials to blend in with its rural context and large south facing windows which are triple glazed to maximize heat retention in cold weather. Furthermore the entire 200 m² (2,153 ft²) house only requires a heating system with an output of just 4 kW, equivalent to a single radiator.
Facit Homes were also behind the design and construction of Villa Asserbo in Denmark, in partnership with Eentileen architects. This 115 m² (1,250 ft²) home was built from 800 sheets of sustainable plywood and features a series of angles, pitches and covered verandas which take advantage of natural light and the surrounding woodlands views.
Facit Homes is planning to establish a Danish branch, and has "lots more" homes planned for there and the UK.
The video below explains the D-Process further.
Sources: Facit Homes and Eentileen, via Fast Company
Prefabricated house building, not even remotely new.
It's not the prefab aspect that's novel (hell, we had prefabs all over the UK after WWII) but that the house is basically created from scratch on site by a machine brought to the site specifically for the purpose of spitting out a house.
Probably because it's actually incredibly inefficient.
Oh, wait. Already been done by Sears Roebuck & Co. from 1908 through 1940. Somewhere around 70,000 to 75,000 homes were produced by Sears. That's around 2,100 to 2,340 home per year. Any other company produced that many homes a year, even for one year, let alone 32?
With the way Sears did it there was no waste at the build site like there would be with Facit Homes process.
The number of homes under construction with Facit's process is limited to the number of mobile facilities they build.
I don't know if Sears homes' components were made in a collection for each house or if they made stocks of many common pieces which were drawn from to assemble a package for a specific design.
May have been a combination with stock components produced in bulk and pieces unique to each design or not used in many designs made as needed.
When Facit cranks out 2,000 homes in a year, then they'll have something to crow about.
The first thing we noticed is the tendency of factory produced homes to lack appeal or character, which is down to the nature of the factory itself- the factory as opposed to the building site has an overhead; heating, water, rent, cleaning etc. The building site is free. This means that in order to compete factory has to continually turnover and produce homes thus reducing the relative overhead - this in turn leads to standardisation to aid production. Which leads to thousands of identical homes which history shows are not popular - people want choice, want individuality.
We realised that there is very little differentiation in prefabrication between fabrication and manufacturing - in that a house can be made in a factory but if it's made by hand then it's going to be very expensive. It is utilising manufacturing processes that truly has an effect on cost, and in the 21st century that means digital manufacturing that has no 'tooling'. So rather than trying to radicalise the traditional construction processes we decided to integrate technology into exiting on-site methods. In this way we gain the most out of the manufacturing tools but without the factory overhead, or transport logistics and taking advantages of low cost local labour.
And yes we still have to fit plumbing, electrics, MVHR etc but in order to improve and guarantee the installation we make the frame aspect much more advanced - we call it a chassis, like the you would find on a car - pre routed channels for cables ducts etc, ventilated cavities integrated in to the panels, falls for drainage designed in, interfaces for window fitting, joinery around bathroom fittings, stair case caracas - everything is included in the monocoque chassis - this is a big advance on stick built frames which tend to be fairly basic.
Waste - we sell back our timber off-cuts back to the same timber supplier, who burn it in a CHP plant to make more timber, which we buy.
Cost - We guarantee that like for like the homes we are making currently cost less than the competition - that means bespoke, super insulated, air tight quality homes.
We would love to have the opportunity to build 2000 homes and prove that we can also do that for less than the competition too! ..... Watch this space!