What Could Go Wrong With 3D Printing Houses? Here Are 7 Funny (And Relatable) Possibilities…

Imagine a future where your dream home isn’t built brick by brick but printed layer by layer. The 3D-printed house revolution promises to solve housing shortages, reduce construction costs, and speed up the time it takes to go from blueprint to backyard BBQ.

But before we get too excited and start cranking out houses like oversized Lego sets, let’s ask an important question… Will concrete printers come with the same frustrations as regular printers?

Anyone who’s wrestled with a paper jam or begged a printer to stop demanding magenta for a black-and-white document knows all too well that printers often have a mind of their own!

So let’s examine how 7 common issues people have with regular printers could really make a mess of things if it happened with the ones they use to print houses:

1) What if Fixing Paper Jams Isn’t Your Jam?

What if you’re halfway through printing a three-bedroom ranch and the machine stops? Perhaps it’s the concrete equivalent to a paper jam!

You could look at the control panel or open up the machine to see if something is lodged inside. But the pro move here is to walk away until someone else comes along and tries to use it, realizes the machine is jammed, and fixes it.

2) You Can’t Just Run To Staples for a New Cartridge…

It’s a total pain in the neck having to run to the nearest office supply store when you run out of ink mid-print using a traditional printer. But you’d wish it were that easy to get refills for your 3D printer if you run out of concrete in the middle of printing a kitchen!

3) Magenta Is Low!!!

Regular printers have a ridiculous obsession with the color magenta! You could print 99.8% of things strictly in black and white, yet somehow magenta is always low, and it doesn’t want to let you continue printing until you address this urgent matter. Despite the fact that concrete houses will all come out some shade of gray, it wouldn’t be surprising if these new fangled printers also insist on taking a break until you feed it some magenta.

4) Your Home is Buffering

Everyone’s been through the experience of trying to print some important documents and your computer says the job is “in progress” yet nothing is being printed. Unfortunately you’ve got like three quarters of a piece of paper stuck coming out the printer, so you’re stuck having to choose between trying to be patient and wait it out, or trying in vain to cancel the print job. If this happens when you’re printing a concrete house, you might as well just skip ahead to the ultimate solution, which usually ends up being to just reboot the entire computer.

5) Starting Update…NOW!

Software updates are necessary from time to time, but they never seem to happen at a convenient time! Hopefully any concrete printer updates will happen before it starts printing a house, but if not, hopefully it won’t take the half an hour they always seem to take when you’re in a rush.

6) When the Cancel Button Kicks in Too Late…

Sometimes there’s a long lag between when you click the cancel button on the printer, and when it decides to finally follow through with the command. But by then you’ve already hit the print button a few more times, and now you’ve got three sets of the same thing in the printing queue. Not a big deal when you’re talking a few extra sheets of paper, but having three extra walls printing out of a concrete printer probably will be!

7) Goes Rogue and Prints Blanks

Ever had a printer randomly spit out 50 blank pages for no reason? Now imagine that, but with concrete. Just a big pile of windowless, doorless slabs of concrete piling up on the lawn…

While printed houses hold tremendous promise, let’s hope the tech wizards behind them have learned from the woes of their desktop counterparts.