2 minute read
Double-digit current market shares for both offsite and panelized construction spray foam insulation equate to enormous business and operational opportunity for an industry known to be ripe for disruption, but hesitant about embracing it.
Almost all homebuilders tend to acknowledge – and lose sleep over – a premonition that a pivot to 21st Century technology that profoundly augments human efforts in home and community development and construction is likely in the next decade. But unless the cost barriers to foray into this future state of housing construction come down, they’re loathe to participate as guinea pigs in what stands to be a bumpy and iffy transition period.
The Spray-R process, which as co-founder Lisa Render notes in a conversation with The Builder’s Daily, can occur in many existing offsite and panelization facilities with room at the “end of their production line.” Directionally, integrating an essential step in the construction process via an automated, financially efficient, precise, fast, and human-free mode checks all the boxes of potential disruption to Rube Goldberg-style complexity in current start-to-completion vertical construction workstreams.
Spray-R is about enabling safe indoor spraying. It is the robot that sprays, while the operator supervises the process from outside the cell.”
“The process is automated, safe, precise, and fast. A picture of every single panel is taken before and after spraying, fully documenting the insulation process. This is all included as part of spray foam-as-a-service.
The Spray-R team – which incubated its plan under Chemovator – has expertise in construction including building codes, chemical processing, architecture, robotics, as well as cloud and machine learning. The founding team consists of Tomasz Cwik, leading the company; Lisa Render, responsible for customer success; and Erik Metz, who oversees the technology development and operations.
This is about helping offsite and modular prefabricators provide more value to their customer,” Render says.
But, shhhh! Let’s not go so far as to use the I-word, because that might scare people off. Instead, talk about Spray-R as a practical, money-mitigating, labor-scarcity solving, performance-enhancing, and process-simplifying solution. Then, builders might be all ears.
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