Temperature reading lower than actual?

Bambu Lab P Series Troubleshooting
1

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Hi, pretty new to 3d Printing. Got my first printer (P1s NO ams (yet)) setup and running in mid-March, so about 1 month ago. Been reading up, experimenting, etc as much as possible. However, I’m wondering if there is something wrong with my specific unit, related to temperature reporting/reading. Having run a few dozen prints (with a few failures), I’ve noticed that I’m constantly having to adjust the temperature settings way down in order to get expected results.

This is across PLA, PLA Matte, PLA silk, and PETG, filaments from multiple vendors (Bambu, Inland, Elegoo, Creality, Polymaker)… I am having to turn every single temperature down to minimum recommended settings… and sometimes even lower… to avoid significant quality drops on my prints. Stringing, blobbing, over-adhesion, are all things that I’m constantly fighting with.

Troubleshooting steps have included drying filament (I’m in CA, and save this week, humidity is rarely above 30%, but I got a filament dryer to atleast rule this out), multiple rounds of full auto-calibration, running auto-bed leveling on every single print, propping/removing top for PLA prints, extra purges when unloading/loading new filaments, frequent warm water/soap plate washes, etc. I’ve even gone so far as trying to edit the Z-offset on the purge line Gcode directly just to be able to not spend 15 minutes with an xacto knife removing the purge lines and skirts/brims from the included textured PEI plate.

Any ideas on additional troubleshooting steps? I want to figure this out before moving on to attempting ABS and/or TPU prints.

2

Can you quantify? What’s “Way down”?

When you set the setpoint to 210, does the nozzle come up to 210, or another far-off number? Is this measured from the LCD or are you using a probe?

3

I’m often needing to set the max nozzle temperature to the manufacturer’s recommended minimum temperatures, as any higher starts causing quality drops, and my bed temperatures often require being held steady at 5-10C below the recommended minimums.

Nozzle temp generally reads as +/- 1C within Bambu Studio or on the LCD. I don’t have a probe to confirm directly, unfortunately.

4

IMO this sounds normal but you havent given an example yet :slight_smile:

For example, on my P1S, I print Elegoo PLA+ at 208C at 10mm3/s. Spool says 200-230. During print, the nozzle LCD reading doesn’t deviate from that temp more than +/- 3degrees, mostly +/-1.

If you’re not trying to crush volumetric max flows, the lower range of the heat is usually the right one so long as it’s still bonding.

5

Ok, sounds good then. In my profession I’m used to things working better towards the middle of a given range, so felt odd that everything was going to the very low end of recommended parameters. Apologies for not providing a specific example, its just tough to select 1 when it feels like everything was trending a certain way.

I’ll keep tweaking and testing as I learn.