Here's some good news to start the week with: according to researchers from Michigan Technological University, 3D printing could save the average household $2,000 (approx £1,300) a year.
To figure that out, they calculated the cost of buying 20 everyday objects and compared it with the cost of printing all of those things yourself at home. Among the items included in the study were shower rings, a garlic press, an iPhone case, a safety razor, and a toy train - so possibly not vital, life-changing objects, but the kind of thing the average household might reasonably buy in a year. Printing all of those things would take about $18 worth of filament and 25 hours of production time - plus, of course, the price of buying a 3D printer in the first place, which could cost anyting from $350 to, well, how long's a piece of string?
By comparison, buying all those things over the internet would cost somewhere between $300 and $2,000. So depending on how many things you print and how expensive the printer you want is, it's possible that a 3D printer would pay for itself within about a year. And if you manage to set up some kind of 3D printing crafting business with it in that time, it might even make money.
So that's pretty encouraging, isn't it?
