Heating bed throughout the printing
Is it necessary to heat bed throughout whole print?
I think heating bed is useful at the beginning of the print, and then for height about 10mm.
(of course if the printer is not in some box). Then you can turn the heating off.
I would like have an option in PrusaSlicer when (in what height) the heating will be turned off.
We would save a lot of energy.. (for example if you print from ASA, there is heating at 110°C and this is almost at the limit of the bed. It is still heating - maybe unnecessarily for higher prints)
Thank you for reading
RE: Heating bed throughout the printing
The pei surface of the prusa bed is designed to stick parts when warm and release them when cool. As such if you turn the bed off part way through there is a great risk of your part coming loose and ruining your print, or worse forming a blob around your extruder and damaging it.
However if you really want to do that you can easily using the Prusa Slicer 2.2.0. Just use the colour change mechanism but instead of inserting an actual colour change , right click on the control and you get 3 options, colour change, pause and custom gcode. You can use the custom gcode option to set the bed temp to zero at the height you want.
Or you could add some custom gcode to your layer gcode (under Printer settings custom gcode) with a conditional that would always turn the bed to zero when a certain number of layers was printed.
RE: Heating bed throughout the printing
@neophyl has it. PEI adheres well when hot, but will release the part as it cools. There are surfaces intended for printing with a cold bed. They tend to be really grippy and require some effort for part removal. You could try BuildTak on a flex sheet for example. Some adhesive boosters are meant for unheated print surfaces. It can be done, but it's a bit of a step backwards.
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