Experiences regarding the fabrication of the raw construction in brick element construction method

Hello everyone,

this is my first post and therefore I apologize in advance in case important information necessary to answer my question is missing. Should this be the case, I will of course provide the relevant information upon request.

My girlfriend and I want to build a single-family house in the Augsburg district (the plot of land is already available). In recent weeks, we have dealt with potential construction companies and came across a type of solid construction method that was unknown to us until now.

We are talking about the production of the shell structure using brick element construction. Here, brick walls are prefabricated in the hall by a robot, dried, and then transported to the construction site and assembled there. The individual wall elements are "connected" on site by construction workers. Unfortunately, there are hardly any experiences on this available on the internet.

According to the construction company, this method offers many advantages, such as the short assembly time, preventing human errors on site due to skilled labor shortage (following the motto a robot does not make mistakes), etc.

Of course, we are primarily interested in the disadvantages, as there are probably some, but we are not yet aware of them. Through the construction company, we were only able to find out that shrinkage cracks in the corners by the exterior wall are common, which result from high stress.

We would be pleased to receive feedback and firsthand experiences or general opinions about this type of shell construction.

We remain with kind regards and wish you a nice Sunday!

if he is going to be your general contractor, he only has his standard construction method as described. He can do that and has specialized his work on it. If you still have questions, have finished houses shown to you and talk to the builders about their experiences. Familiarize yourself with the construction performance description, as differences between providers become more apparent there. We have experience with prefabricated expanded clay walls and with masonry Poroton bricks, both worked well because the general contractor was able to handle them very well

Thank you for the quick response!

The contractor still builds in an old-fashioned way, but only in a few exceptional cases (mostly justified by the local conditions - meaning the delivery of the "prefabricated walls" is not possible due to lack of space).

He obtains the wall elements prefabricated from a brickworks in the nearby area.
The exterior walls are constructed solidly with 36.5 cm thick Termopor SL Plan Plus 0.08 W/mk porous bricks using the thin-bed method.
The interior and partition walls are made of hollow bricks according to structural requirements.

And we will definitely try to talk to the builders in the next few days, but we thought that additional opinions definitely could not hurt.

It will be a good house, in my opinion. If you can talk to other builders who already live there, ask them lots of questions and get their mobile number.

Through the builder, we were only able to learn that shrinkage cracks in the corners of the outer wall are the norm, which occur due to the high tension.

Due to the system, the outer walls are butted together bluntly at the corners here, instead of being dovetailed like stone on stone. Expansion joints are common in this process, but I would still have shrinkage cracks explained to me in more detail. If we are talking about Rötzer Brick Element House, you would find them mentioned multiple times here in the forum. On their website, I found similar mentions regarding the "robot" (of course programmed by a fallible human, haha), and unfortunately also proudly displayed large in the header is a wall panel whose bricks are assembled without overlap - which no trained mason would do and is, in my opinion, the exact opposite of the real deal.

that is, the delivery of the "precast walls" is not possible due to lack of space).

I also see that as a disadvantage. Another one would be that with prefabricated construction, spontaneous changes can no longer be made.
You don’t see your house grow, day by day...

According to the builder, this method offers many advantages, such as the short assembly time, preventing human errors on site due to skilled labor shortages (the motto being a robot makes no mistakes), etc.

Regarding conventional construction: a bungalow is built with Poroton in 2 days.
With a Polish crew, mind you, the Germans need about a week.
Mistakes can hardly happen – either you got a sloppy company or a good one that works cleanly. You can recognize the work by the company’s philosophy.
Moisture also hardly penetrates because the bricks are no longer laid with mortar in a laborious way but glued.
Moisture rather comes from above, that is from the rain over time, depending on how long the walls are exposed.