Remember when doctors made house calls? If you answered ‘yes,’ you are likely a Baby Boomer and that memory is seeded in your youth. Beginning in the 1960s, house calls became a relic owing to the growth of hospitals, integrated healthcare systems, and expanded road infrastructure, placing the travel burden on the patient and not the other way around. But instead of improving overall efficiencies, this paradigm shift simply transferred the costs of transportation from doctor to patient.

This isn’t to say our society should return to this practice wholesale. We’ve grown too complex and cumbersome to turn that ship around. But there is inherent value in it, particularly if that doctor is servicing a smaller community. Such an arrangement is efficient and less costly. And when considered in terms of transportation, it becomes an effective measure for community healthcare providers to reduce their scope 3 emissions.

Home deliveries

Facit Technologies is in the business of house calls. Only instead of healthcare, their service is building homes. The UK company, which is the new sister brand of Facit Homes, has developed scalable versions of a mobile micro-factory that produces precision-cut timber building components—with assembly instructions printed on the panels—that are used to build high-performance homes onsite. According to their website, one micro-factory can manufacture up to 100 homes per year at “a fraction of the capital cost of traditional factory-built homes.”

Oliver Thomas, Facit’s design technology director, says, “We think of a home as a complete product, in that each home is made of the same constituent parts. The same foundation, roofing, heating, windows, doors … and this all revolves around our Facit Chassis Printer (FCP). This is the key thing we manufacture.”

From homes to technologies

Facit Technologies’s forebear Facit Homes was founded in 2007 by Bruce Bell, “born out of the frustration with the status quo,” according to its website. This business manufactures one-off, high-end sustainable homes, on average about 400 square meters (4300 square feet) in size. Thomas describes the approach as “an alternative to the architect-contractor model.”

“We are a one-stop shop,” he says. “We design it, take it through planning, manufacture the components, build it. We take the stress away from the disjointed model.”

The price of each home is £3200/square meter (approx. $300/square foot). This is a little on the high end, until you factor in everything from windows and cladding, plumbing, electrics, floor finishes, utilities, underfloor heating, MVHR (mechanical ventilation and heat recovery) systems, and the use of the Chassis printing system, all of which is included in the pricing model.

“It’s everything. We are the contractor on site,” Thomas says. To date, Facit Homes has built 28 top-of-the-line homes.

While 28 homes built in the last 17 years isn’t a lot, particularly for a company that works “twice as fast” and saves its customers “around 20%” on costs compared to traditional methods, the homes themselves are quite big, and each one is a couture build.

The folks at Facit Homes knew, with the right adjustments and configurations, that their technology could be put to better use.

Scalable mobile micro-factories

What began with a single CNC machine loaded onto a shipping container and delivered to a building site—used for Facit Homes projects—has evolved into Facit Technologies’s compact micro-factories. The company has designed three scalable models, with all requisite materials and production platforms loaded into 1, 2, or 3 containers, capable of designing and building 10-15 homes, 60-80 homes, or 80-100 homes per annum, respectively. Each mobile factory can produce a neighborhood of diverse townhouse and multi-family housing types (up to 5 stories) while cutting down transport-related emissions up to 90%.

Unlike a CNC router, the FCP features a continuous self-feeding system that speeds up the manufacturing process and virtually eliminates the risk of human error. The information printed onto each CNC-cut panel includes mechanical and electrical layouts, product details, assembly instructions, and QR codes. The parts are then automatically moved to a buffer rack.

As for remaining parts, Facit Technologies’s homes are built atop AFT (Advanced Foundation Technology) slab foundations, which Thomas describes as “precut insulation systems” that are both customizable depending on site conditions and compliant with Passive building standards. Wall and roofing insulation systems vary. “The components are agnostic to type,” Thomas says.

The standard thus far has been Ecobead for single-family homes and blown-in mineral wool likely becoming the standard for future larger homes, but Thomas adds that they’re keeping their options open. “As we scale up, we’ll probably move to an open-panel system where you don’t have to blow it in.”

Given that each Facit home is its own distinct product, the company isn’t married to one insulation technology or type. Like their supply chains and production, their chief concern is reducing embodied carbon.

Right amount of automation

Greater efficiencies aside, the company doesn’t intend to build out a completely automated operation. “Whenever you automate anything, you realize that 100% automation is never the answer.” He estimates an acceptable automation threshold to be between 70-80%.

“We haven’t automated everything, and with good reason.” Leveraging technology from UK-based robotics company Tharsus, the FCP has automated various manufacturing tasks that were once the purview of human laborers. The actual assembly of each home, however, still demands the use of skilled and unskilled labor alike, which is clearly a plus.

Thomas also applauds the fact that the construction industry is gradually transitioning into a “technology-driven industry,” which has the benefit of attracting new demographics of builders. “You’re much more likely to be on-site with an iPad than walking around with concrete on your pants.”

How it works

The FCP is loaded into one of several shipping containers; timber parts, a sub-assembly station, and various building components are loaded into other containers; and the entire operation is trucked to a specific site, where the micro-factory is built.

This “port to site” operation reduces fuel, shipping costs, and construction time. And with the aid of robotic unloading, CNC cutting, and manufacturing, as well as 2D-printed assembly instructions on the plywood panels, it also saves on training and labor costs.

“All the components are modular, but they are also parametric,” Thomas says. “They can flex, which means we’re not constrained to a particular shape or size of a house.”

The problems Facit Technologies is aiming to solve are multifold. As the company sees it, with good reason, the UK’s housing crisis cannot be solved with traditional labor-based construction methods, using prefab methods or otherwise that rely on so-called fixed factories.

Manufacturing factories with fixed locations “have failed,” he says, “because you can’t just pack up and move your factory. You’ve got to service the debt that you created from building the factory … but our machines, you can just pack them up.”

4.3 million homes needed

This new venture, which was formalized only last June, is poised to significantly scale up its customizable home-building model while accommodating a larger subset of homeowners. Facit Technologies differs from other prefab, modular or volumetric designs, observes Thomas. He instead labels it a “BIM to manufacture” setup. “We can model the house down to its nuts and bolts, which means we can cost it with incredible accuracy.”

Great Britain currently has a housing backlog of 4.3 million homes missing from the national housing market. Unlike the Facit Homes business model, Facit Technologies has the production capacity to make a dent in that backlog.

Thomas reflects on the UK’s lackluster efforts in the preceding decades to close the housing gap. “Particularly over the last couple of years, labor costs have soared, and this means traditional construction is struggling,” he says. “It’s no longer un-risky. Many [contractors] are going bust during projects … developers are getting burnt.”

The UK has fewer homes per capita than most of its European peers. In 2020, the country recorded 576 homes per 1000 inhabitants aged 20 or older, according to a study by the Resolution Foundation.

The new Labour government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and deputy PM Angela Rayner, has set a target of building 1.5 million new homes over the next 5 years (or 300,000 per year.)

This is a threshold that hasn’t been hit in more than half a century. And of the hundreds of thousands of homes that have been built in the last few years, most of them don’t meet the minimum standard for what could be considered high-performance. According to Thomas, “We want to become home builders that can develop sustainable homes on a much larger scale.”

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