until now, I was only a reader of the topics here, but now I have an issue that I can’t address myself. Hopefully, I haven’t overlooked a solution somewhere.
Maybe someone could help me out with my problem or better say request that I have with my H2D. I’m located in Germany and here the power costs have increased significantly over the past last years. For that reason I’m trying to do my best to save energy wherever I can.
I am printing ABS parts with a low height and with a bed temp of 110 degrees (Celsius). I don’t need a heated chamber as the chamber will heat up anyway very quickly to a temperature that is more than sufficient for my kind of prints.
So I set the chamber heating to 0 in Bambu Studio and started to print. When I came back to my printer two hours later the room temp had risen by nearly 5 degrees.
The printer had opened the top vent lid (although the filament was set to ABS) and the exhaust fan blew all the hot air that I wanted to keep inside of the printer into my room. Even with this, I didn’t have any issue with warping.
And the heatbed was heating and heating and heating … not that what I wanted. And not power saving at all.
After this, I tried to edit the start gcode (that is pretty well tagged with informational text) but this brought up several repeating chamber temp warnings and a red flashing status indicator light and in the end (an ‘offset calibration error’). As I’m not familiar with changing gcode I went back to the factory one.
I’m investigating this now for three days and have not been able to find useful information anywhere that could tell me how to:
Print ABS
Heatbed at 110 degrees
Chamber heating off (and it doesn’t matter what temp is in there!)
Top vent lid shut
Exhaust fan off (no cooling, no heating and maybe air filtering, but no ‘must’)
I think 0C chamber temp settings might be turning off the air filtration. Chamber heater kicks on when setting is above 40C. Try setting the chamber temperature to 30-35C in the filament profile.
I always make a copy of the high temp filament profiles to make one which either has chamber set at 40°C (off) and one at 50°C (low chamber heat) to print small parts without requiring the full chamber heating.
With a low chamber temperature — anything below 65 °C — you’ll typically need to print at significantly reduced speeds to avoid brittle or warped parts, especially when using materials like ABS. I’ve printed a lot of ASA on my X1 Carbon, but always very slowly, since the chamber temperature on that machine never exceeded 45 °C. Lower chamber temps increase internal stress during cooling, which often results in poor layer adhesion and cracking.
Incorrect. 40-45 degrees is already enough for moderate good ABS results in full speed. P1P With homemade enclosure with glasses from Photo Frames reaches 45-50 in short prints, 55-60 in 2hours plus. All of my prints are automotive and I have never had layer adhession issues or durability issues. If you are talking about higher stressed parts, yes you might need a couple higher degrees, but with the amount of abuse my parts get from my clients, this is absolutely incorrect (BUT Im using e-sun and polymaker abs! Bambu has NEVER given me the results I want, and 2 out of 5 times i bought BBL ABS had bubbles crystalized inside (big ones , almost as big as the diameter, which resulted in the filament just breaking))
How did you get it to do that? I wouldn’t even think that was possible. Chamber heater on, chamber fan on, and venting open while printing in ABS.
This is a situation where you are likely best off, letting it run it’s routine. Sure, chamber heat may not be necessary, but there isn’t a high value in trying to force it to do what you want, and you are increasing the chance of a bad result.
All said, I believe the points deeps29 mentioned are correct (or possibly close to correct), but the real question is, is it worth it. IMO… you are only saving a few minutes to forego the chamber heat-up wait and a few 100 watt hours.
Sorry to be the Debbie Downer, but I don’t see the value.
I notice significantly weaker prints when the chamber temperature drops below 50 °C — they often snap easily between my fingers. When I print with the chamber set to 65 °C, the results are rock solid.
That said, I haven’t printed with ABS yet — only ASA within that material category.
When setting the temperature to, let’s say 45 degrees the H2d starts to cool down the chamber and I saw a message that the chamber temp is to high and I should open the front door or the glass cover.
My prints of Abs are fine and flawless. They have fine details and additionally needs to be waterproof. The current design of the part is sufficient to ensure this.
When chamber heating is on, the h2d cube acts like a radiator. It tries to balance out all the heat losses that occur when the heat dissipates. And that is the thing I want to avoid. Not even due to the power drain only, also for printing in hot summers. During that time of the year it’s already warm enough without a running printer in the room.
What Asa did you use. Honestly 7/10 Asa that I have tried turned to NOT behave like Asa and when i questioned the manufacturer of the filament about it, in the end they all semi-admitted it’s not “pure” Asa but “comforms to the properties of Asa “ meaning it’s a damn recycled blend of anything they got
If I were you I would do an ABS print with normal/recommended settings and measure the kWh, then I would do the same print with the settings you’re trying to use to save power and measure the kWh.
Compared to the bed heater and the extruder I’m willing to bet the chamber heater really doesn’t use that much. Sure - it will use a larger amount of power to get up to temp - but so does the bed, and so does the extruder - once everything is steady-state they don’t use much.
When printing ABS with recommended settings - my printer uses ~1900 watts initially while warming everything up and then very quickly drops to 70~80 watts to maintain everything. I am in the US so I only have 120V [not sure if your german printer is 220v].
The bed itself getting up to 110 is going to use the absolute most power but once it’s there, it doesn’t take much to maintain. You also have to keep in mind that if you’re relying on the bed to heat the chamber it’s going likely take more power for that to happen than the chamber heater designed to heat the air to accomplish the same goal.
I do realize the chamber heater itself is pretty high wattage but, just like the print bed - once it’s up to temperature it doesn’t use much to maintain.
I mean you said that your room temperature raised by 5C - unless you’re printing in a closet - that’s a large volume of air to heat via your heat bed and you surely used more power to do that than it would have taken to just heat the volume of the H2D chamber with the chamber heater.
Test to see if your assumptions are true [not using the chamber heater saves you money] as I suspect it may not be the case.
Alternatively - don’t print materials that need a heated chamber - PLA or PETG for example. If you must print in ASA/ABS - well - I would consider the chamber heater a cost of the material. Factor the cost of power in.
Before I had the bambu printers I had a Creality CR5 Pro HT and an Artillery Genius 2. I could run both in parallel with my small photovoltaic system that I have installed. Here in Germany power should be 230 Volt, I currently have 238V here at my location.
When I first tried to run the A1 mini with the photovoltaic system, my inverter (1200 Watts) was overloaded due to the power peaks of the heat bed. It didn’t stop converting, but the voltage repeatedly dropped down to 150 V. And this remained unchanged during the whole printing process. With a second printer A1 on the line, it got even worse.
The heatbed of the Artillery was also driven by AC Power (230V) and didn’t have these peaks. I don’t know how bambu has designed there (normally) solid state relay driver and what causes these high peaks that I didn’t experience with any other printer I had.
Thanks for all comments on this, but my question was how to do ABS prints as described, without chanber heater and lids are all closed.
Which brands and filament names (if more than one under that brand) did you find were the good ones? And if you don’t mind naming names, which were the bad ones? Whatever you can easily remember would be good enough.
I do know that a lot of black filament, regardless of type, is often at higher risk of being recycled. This because it’s easy to turn any color into black.
Esun, BBL, Gembird are the ones that didnt give me trouble in any way
Creality ABS is horrible in my opinion even though I had several people recomment it. Thing shrinks like you put it into vacuum, anything under 5 walls looks like it came from … nevermind i wont say where, Ill get canceled lol… Also the finish is horrible, you expect abs, you get shiny petg.
The ones I WOULD NEVER TOUCH AGAIN
are
GST3D,
even their “hello” is a covered lie/half truth
And
for the love of god , honestly its the first and last spool I got from them,
Real Filament…
Its not just brittle like a gf-abs… I reckon they still use one of the ancient recipes. The thing breaks like a ruperts tear that you smashed the tail… It cant be fed directly to extruder, it cant be fed through ptfe, I dont have a bowden setup to try but I guess it would have the same results. It just goes … “I dont feel good Mr Stark” and just… disintegrates. In the tube, in the gears, in the heatbreak… even if you try to snap the tip off it just shatters into dust instead of cutting it. I respooled it, dried it, dried it again and again, but this is just unusable.
OH and SMELLS WORSE THAN A CORPSE ! stay away…
(That was gold abs if that matters to someone… )
I still don’t get it: why would you not want to use a chamber heater? What’s the downside to using one? Why would you prefer to turn it off? I agree it doesn’t seem to be needed for printing PLA or PETG, but for ABS, ASA, PPS, nylon, etc., it seems like a real gift.
I’ve already tried life without a chamber heater on my X1C, and I don’t see how it’s better.
But if you don’t want it turned on, you don’t need g-code. Just set it to zero in your filament profile.
I know it’s trendy to trust the 1/4" of carbon filter in that housing, but it’s important to remember that exhaust fans are primarily wanting to get rid of toxic styrene gas that is being emitted from your molten ABS. Send that gas outside if you are able, let it use the included chamber heater to replenish the heat level, and enjoy functional lungs. The kwh added to your power bill can be billed to your PPE budget, don’t ignore safety IMO
How did you get it to do that? I wouldn’t even think that was possible. Chamber heater on, chamber fan on, and venting open while printing in ABS.