Unless your nozzle temperature is always under this threshhold, ask Chatgpt if it wants to reconsider its recommendation:
That’s why folks were going with a high temperature thermal paste.
Also, whatever that gunk is, it travels backward and coats a lot more than the hotend heater:
It gets all over the wiring even. However, you won’t know this just from looking at the front:
so it can accumulate over time without your being aware, as it did in my case. The standard H2D maintenance doesn’t call for even inspecting this area of the printer. You can heat up your nozzle and/or hotend heater and scrub it off, but what about the wiring? How do we get it off from there? I imagine the wiring insulation won’t take kindly to scrubbing abrasion, and those wires look fairly delicate in the first place. Maybe we should print some kind of cover or shield to place over those components to avoid this? Well, ideally Bambulab would, but since that hasn’t happened, I guess it’s up to us to find a stopgap.
I’ll be installing the H2D Pro heatsink fan on my H2D printhead, and maybe it will favorably influence the particle flow somewhere away. I have no reason at the moment to think that it will, but I’m hoping for a beneficial side effect.
I print mostly PETG, and I think you’re right about PETG being worse than PLA with respect to this kind of nefarious buildup.
By the way, I did show the above photo to Bambulab tech support, and they suggested replacing the Hotend heating assemblies and the Eddy Current Sensors, so I’ve ordered them to have on hand should push come to shove. To put a dollar figure on that, if you were to replace all four parts, that would run about $80, which is why if there were some kind of protective shield we could print, it might be the ounce of prevention that’s worth a pound of cure. Even if you had to reprint it occasionally, after accumulating whatever level of gunk, it would be cheap insurence.
Short of an elegant crafted solution like that, in the meantime perhaps covering the wiring with some Kapton tape would work? Then, at least in theory, maybe it could be peeled off whenever it accumulated gunk. Or, if not that, perhaps some kind of high temperature sock could be fitted over the wiring, and then discarded as a consumable when it got gunked up.
Anyone have any thoughts or ideas? Or am I just talking to myself?