The reason I ask is that my X1C is in the garage, and I was recently running it there when the garage was a chilly 37 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius). It certainly sounded as though it was running rougher, and I got the following error message:
“HMS_0300_1000_0002_0002 The 1st order mechanical reonance mode of X axis differ much from last calibration, please re-run the machine calibration later”
The fidelity of the printed parts was also bad.
The bambulabs troubleshooting guide says this means I should re-tighten the belt and clean the carbon rods.
Is it coincidence, or am I running it in too cold an ambient air temperature? My other power tools work fine at that temperature, but then again they don’t have belts and are pretty much different from an X1C.
I tried looking for what the spec on what the X1C’s ambient air temperature operating range is, but haven’t found anything.
3D printers hate cold. At the very least, you’re going to make it run harder to keep at the warmer temps it wants which will ultimately cause premature failure of parts. Get that baby out of your garage!
FWIW, we’ve had a recent cold snap in my part of the world. The printers live in the back room which I heat to about 20. Except, unbenownst to me, the baseboards stopped working overnight. In the morning, it was super chilly in there. Maybe around 8 or 9c?
At any rate, when I woke the X1C up to start printing for the day, it wouldn’t connect to the AMS. Gave me an error saying connection was lost. I tried the usual of rebooting, power cycling, etc. and it just wouldn’t connect. The wiki said I had to go through all these testing steps and record readings with a multi-meter. I figured it was too coincidental with the heat going out and knowing electronics don’t work as well in cold temperatures, I put a portable heater in the room. Once it warmed up, the X1C and the AMS could find another again and things have been working fine ever since.
TL;dr: printers, like many electronics, do not like the cold. Not to mention that at 2.8 C, you’re bound to run into extrusion problems.
I haven’t yet done the recommended maintenance (cleaning the carbon rods and tightening the belt) that I referred to in my OP, but I did recalibrate and tried printing again, this time at 57F (14 celsius) ambient air temperature .This time the print came out fine. So, from this I infer that 37F is outside the operating range, but 57F is still in it.
How low a temperature is it still safe to print? I still don’t know where the edge is on that. Anyone know, or do I have to find it myself by trial and error?
Most electronics do better at colder temperatures. I’d wager this is a mechanical issue, not an electronic one.
Try getting the chamber temperature up to ~26-30°C by preheating the bed at ~70°C for about a half hour. Allow enough time for the heat to soak into belts, bearings, and other moving parts.
I usually keep my shop at about 10-15°C (50-60°F) in winter, depending on the amount of time I’m in there. Using the heat bed to warm the chamber seems to be a necessity at the cold end of that range.
Don’t worry about having a bed that is too warm when you send a print - it will not start until the bed cools down.
Just to confirm, I tried another print, this time at 42F. The loss of print fidelity was again evident.
So, based on the data so far, I’m willing to buy the proposition that 50F is the practical minimum.
The problem doesn’t seem to be an inability to heat up the filament fast enough at the colder temperatures… Rather, the kinetics seem tight. My current guess: I suspect the factory belt has a coefficient of thermal expansion that’s quite a bit different from the frame and other metal parts., and so at colder temperatures the tensioning gets too far out of spec.
Anyway, the solution for me will be to put the X1C into an heated enclosure that’s large enough to accommodate a filament dryer. I have yet to determine whether the heat source to warm the interior comes from the filament dryer, the X1C itself, or some kind of small space heater. From what I’ve read on the Bambu Lab forum, about the only complicating factor will be that the interior of the X1C must not exceed 60C during prints without risking that the X1C stepper motors might thermal throttle (possibly resulting in missed steps) or the X1C electronics goes wonky or dies prematurely. Since the filament dryer may run at >60C, this may mean that either 1. the overall enclosure should should not be too well insulated, or 2. the filament dryer needs to be in a separate compartment, largely isolated from the X1C. For year round usability, I suppose that means #2 is the preferred option.
What about the max ambient air temperature? Can the printer operate at an ambient environment air temp of 90-120 F (32-48 C)? For example, within a garage in Arizona where it is extremely dry and hot. Would this cause premature failure of components?
For best results, the printer should be in an environment with constant temperature, like room temperature.
As the temperature changes from low to high, the nozzle, filament, and related parts expand and contract. This in turn can affect the calibration and as has been pointed out the print quality.
@kuwna It would be a legitimate question for you to ask Bambu.
I’m not an expert on this, but here’s my take on it:
Electronic components are commonly graded to operate at different temperatures. For consumer electronics, what many are saying is the high end of that range is 60C, maybe 65C. Some people say the same applies to stepper motors, belts, etc. I’m sure those have ratings as well, but I don’t know what Bambu chose in that regard.
On top of that is the more difficult to judge question of adequate fan cooling, namely: how good is it? That’s harder to judge. As ambient temperature approaches 65C, you obviously need a lot more cfm’s to remove whatever self generated heat there might be and still stay at or under 65C.
For the Qidi X-Max3, which has active chamber heating capability, IIRC the original marketing may have said it supported a chamber temperature of 80C. One of the recent firmware updates reduced that to a max of 65C. And, if I’m not mistaken, X1E has a similar limit.
I’m sorry that none of this truly answers your question. At best it’s just a framework for thinking about the problem, plus a few datapoints. I’m sure the engineers at Bambu who did the design know all the specifics and probably ran real tests to verify them, including accelerated aging and whatever else that I’m sure none of us has the time or resources to duplicate, even if we wanted to.
If someone else reading this has a better answer, by all means please do post. I’m by no means the alpha and omega on this topic. I’m just giving a readout of how I might think about it if I had nothing else to draw upon.
@RLGL Yes, as a conservative ideal, I don’t think anyone will disagree with you on that, but as a practical matter it’s still useful to know how far one can stray from that ideal before it makes a noticeable difference in print quality or perhaps puts your hardware in some kind of peril. If you’re doing a long print in a non-conditioned space, like a garage, then odds are there’s going to be temperature fluctuations of some kind over the course of the hours or days that it takes to complete the print. It may not be ideal, but it’s real life. It would be nice to know at the outset what the likely result of that will be so you can make a go/no-go decision and/or maybe build countermeasures.
In Arizona, being a dry desert, there’s quite a swing between daytime and nighttime temperatures. It’s by no means an academic question.
The printers at home are at 20°C in summer and winter - that wasn’t the case at the beginning, there was simply space in the air raid shelter. Since then, things have become much easier. The dry air also helps a lot, since then I haven’t even dried any spools that had been lying around for a month.
The X1C stood in the winter garden for a week in midsummer, the glass house was at 40 °C and the display was exposed to full sunlight. Then I had to take it inside because the printer was definitely under too much strain.
For homeowners and actually massively more interesting than 3D printers, at least for me: I also really like AP system a company run from the silicone Vally that produces in China. This is about solar systems that can be expanded indefinitely from time to time (at least up to 300 kW) starting by 2kw with microinverters. The advantage of a split air conditioning system is that with 500 watts you get up to 2.5 kW of cooling or 3 kW of heating output, the air is also dried… so it’s not just a huge gain in comfort for printers, but also for me. Hoymiles, a purely Chinese manufacturer of microinverters has some disadvantages that may you don’t notice at the beginning…
A 3D printer regardless of brand is a tool you run indoors at “normal livable ambient temp”, that’s about it. Nobody really specifies min/maxes, but you’re free to experiment and give feedback.
For most there are already enough parameters to try and keep in check for ambient temp to be one more of them.