All that I know about this, is that the printer and the light are, in a sense, fighting for power since there is not enough to go around, if you are running out of amps or volts (the total usage is greater that the provided amount) that means SOMETIMES either one will permanently shut off, or they will both fight for power, meaning sometimes the light gets it and the printer shuts off, or the printer gets it and the lights shut off, all this happens very quickly resulting in a flickering, or flashing.
I just picked up a stepdown converter. Only 300W, but hopefully that will suffice for a quick test.
That’s way underrated according to the step down converter website I linked above. You’ll be very near or exceeding the limits of that rating and on lower voltage the load will be more constant. Keep a close eye on it.
Yeah, I wasn’t planning on running it for more than a few minutes. I believe I can manually heat the bed with the on screen controls. If only that draws power and not the extruder and stepper motors, I hope that will bring it closer to 300W total
There is no 110/230V switch on the A1 that I am not seeing, right? Just want to make sure before I plug it in
If it’s advertised at 300W it’s really only 100W.
The problem is that you could saturate the transformer and it could behave in very strange, non-linear way.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would the stepdown only be 1/3 of the advertised specs? That sounds incredibly dangerous.
EDIT: I just double checked the specifications of the stepdown converter. Did not notice that it only has a power factor of 0.5.
I think you are right. This is too risky to try. Thank you for pointing this out @krellboy
Sorry, but then I don’t have access to a beefy enough stepdown to try running the A1 at 110V
For appliances that can switch in large, instantaneous loads (even resistive) the ones I’ve seen recommend 3x.
No experience with these things, but maybe a voltage stabilizer would be a better choice than a stepdown converter?
There are so many ways to build voltage stabilizers I couldn’t say. The important thing is that these are very very fast transitions and a voltage stabilizer is probably designed to deal with things like brownouts which are very slow.
The stepdown transformer is a perfectly legitimate method, I’d just pick something larger than 300W.
I bought a 600W step down transformer since my A1 was making the lights flicker when connected to a 1Kw inverter. Now it doesn’t! Been running my A1 for More than 24 hours now and haven’t had any lights flickering yet.
The transformer is also connected to my A1 mini but I haven’t ran both at the same time. Not sure if it’ll be able to handle the load. Tho with my A1 running I only see a maximum load of 130W with the smart plug connected to the transformer so I’m assuming it should be okay.
I was watching the numbers on my ups and on 120V I saw a maximum of 340W. That was with both bed & extruder heating. I don’t have an average number. It was bouncing back and forth between 50 and 308W while printing but that’s all I’ve got.
I have tried to put a step-down transformer from 230V to 125V and indeed the LED flickering problem has been solved.
I really don’t think it’s a good design by bambulab.