Printer environment  

RE: Printer environment

Posted by: @adamb

Hi,

I'm a newbie to 3d printing, looking at getting my first printer and decided to go with an i3.

However, I have limited space in my house though I have some outbuildings that have power so was thinking of putting the printer out there. What I wanted to ask is would this affect the operation of the printer at all? It gets pretty cold here in the winter and there's no heating out there, would that potentially damage the printer or do we reckon that'd be fine?

If I built an enclosure for the printer would that help any potential problems?

Thanks!
-Adam

An enclosure will solve 99% of the problems of being in an outbuilidng.  You might want to warm the enclosure will a small ceramic heater before use on cold days.  

RE: Printer environment

Posted by: @adamb

Hi,

I'm a newbie to 3d printing, looking at getting my first printer and decided to go with an i3.

However, I have limited space in my house though I have some outbuildings that have power so was thinking of putting the printer out there. What I wanted to ask is would this affect the operation of the printer at all? It gets pretty cold here in the winter and there's no heating out there, would that potentially damage the printer or do we reckon that'd be fine?

If I built an enclosure for the printer would that help any potential problems?

Thanks!
-Adam

In any case, I would also strongly advise using a closed case and warming up the case with a simple gcode (heating up the printing plate and the nozzle) before starting. Otherwise, problems are very likely pre-programmed.

10 minutes warmup gcode example:

G90 ; use absolute coordinates
M83 ; extruder relative mode
M117 warmup start
M104 S260 ; set extruder temp
M140 S100 ; set bed temp
M109 S260 ; wait extruder
M190 S100 ; wait bed
G04 S600 ; 10 minutes warmup
M104 S35 ; set extruder temp
M140 S35 ; set bed temp
M117 warmup end
M84 ; disable motors
M300 S1000 P500 ;First beep
M300 S0 P500 ;Wait
M300 S1000 P1000 ;Second beep
M300 S0 P500 ;Wait
M300 S1000 P1500 ;Third beep

RE: Printer environment

I would second the recommendation for an enclosure, not only for cool areas, but in general to provide a consistent temperature and draft-free environment.

I bought the kit from 3d Upfitters and it's specifically built for the I3 series.

I passed on their temperature monitor but made my own with an option to turn the fan on the enclosure off and on to control the temperature.  I don't use that feature as much as I intended, as in different control points with different filaments.  Lately I've set the control points in the low-mid 30s and used that for all filaments.

If you have a cool outbuilding, you may have difficulty getting the enclosure warm enough with the heat of the machine alone.  For PLA I suggest that you have the enclosure warm to the low 30s at least.  I've done some temp tests with the fan off to see how hot I can get the temperature and with the machine heating at PLA temperatures the best I can seem to get is the mid-high 30s with no fan.  This is in a home office which is usually heated to 72-ishF or 22-ish C.

One thing I would suggest is that you preheat the machine and let the temperature of the machine and the enclosure stabilize before launching a print.  I started doing this for ABS and it did help with consistency, but I'm now in the habit of doing it for all filaments.

RE: Printer environment

OK great, thanks for the info everyone - I feel a lot more confident going ahead now!

Thanks,
-Adam

RE: Printer environment

@adamb

Great!  Good luck!