Looking for a Battery Solution to Run My A1 Mini

MakerWorld
1

Hi everyone,
I’d like to participate in a market, bringing my A1 Mini with me to keep running on the table and attract passersby and potential customers. Unfortunately, there won’t be access to electricity at the market. I’m therefore thinking about getting a battery to power the A1 Mini. Has anyone had experience with this?

I’m looking to keep it running for at least 6 hours. To reduce consumption, I could also lower the print speed or adjust other settings.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good battery?
Thanks!

2

I guess it depends how much you want to spend, poked GPT and best estimates will mean you’ll want something with around 700Wh if you want to run it for 6 hours, of the brands it suggested i recognised Jackery and Anker as brands i would probably trust without worrying but it did mention EcoFlow and BLUETTI as options aswell, so depends if you need any extra headroom for other things you plan to take with you

In regards to reducing power draw you could try making sure you have the printer shielding from wind so that you’re not trying to fight to keep it at the right temps

The Jackery Explorer 700 looks to be about $600 so i would imagine the other decent options will be in the same sort of price bracket

3

Reducing print speed will not reduce consumption as you will need to keep bed hot - lower speed more longer you need to provide power to bed. That potentially takes more power than keeping hotend at print temp.
What you could consider is checking low temp build plates or even skip heating bet completely - as long you are printing easy prints you should be able to getaway with cold/low temp bed when printing PLA. Heck in my early printing days I was printing PETG on cold bed + Blue Masking Tape.

A1 mini can potentialy spike to +1kW when starting heating so when choosing battery take that into consideration so internal protection doesn’t cut power off on start, once running consumption is reasonably low

4

Unless you are using a polyurea plate lowering the print speed would have the opposite effect.

5

  1. The heatbed is your primary consumer of energy. Use a coolplate and it solves a large part of your total energy problems.

  2. Modern “AC power output” battery boxes are pretty good about the instantaneous watt they can handle. I cannot speak to the A1 mini, but at 110/120V, the A1 is actually very tame for the watts it draws, usually maxing out at 300W and avg 100W. I’d go for triple the rating just because©. There’s a lot of off-the shelf options out there if you look for the range of 1000W output rate, and 1-2kWh storage. A key thing to remember about these power stations is that they have a parasitic load when the AC inverter is enabled and running, so whatever you think your power usage is, plan to add 15-25 watts

6

Based on the info you’ve given, I would suggest a Jackery Explorer 1000.

It’s got the capacity to keep you running for 6 hours while coping with the initial surge on job startup. It’s currently on reduction at £450 on Amazon UK, usual price £899.

It depends on if you think that is the price worth paying for offline power supply.

Just thinking out loud, but are your prints compatible with SuperTack cold plates? If you run your bed at the specified 45C for PLA then you should eke out a little more power on time.

7

Also as a note; a lot of these power station companies run shady AF marketing practices like constant deep sales off the “full price”. Don’t get too fooled by the “save x dollars!” FOMO, they’re always around the sale price.

//and if you believe CATLs new Nax battery claims, these things should be plummeting in price soon