I’m building a nice enclosure for my printer. The main aim was to be able to print ABS reliably.
I have 700W build plate and I have 450W enclosure heater.
The enclosure itself is 25mm Aluminium box sandwedged between 3mm aluminium sheet with 25mm celotex foam insulation.
Originally I had planned to have the enclosure pretty air tight. But I have read a couple of things recently that have me worried that it might end up too hot in there with the build plate alone.
Should I fit an exhaust fan and set it to come on at certain temperature?
Should I fit a fan that circulates air within the enclosure.
I notice that bambu and K1 Max seems to have extra fans inside of them.
What operation conditions you are trying to achieve ?
Temp of bed, Temp of enclosure ?
Why I’m asking: Your setup seems like huge overkill, in summary you have 1.1Kw of heaters which you need to manage and stabilize to achieve stable operation conditions and everything should play together to do that.
I would finish enclosure and do the initial test:
Install temperature measurement device in middle of enclosure height at 5-10cm distance from wall,
then run long print job (or just set required bed temp and extruder temp to operational values) and keep your printer there running for 1-3 hours during which you will monitor enclosure temp and printer state and take records (temp with runtime) about that.
This will give you some estimate numbers to work with and possibly will uncover some issues with printer working in that environment.
If your enclosure is well build then most probably you will se that just running your printer there eventually will start overheating your enclosure - this means you need to add controllable exhaust fan (and air intake if it’s air-tight) to extract some amount of heat from there.
If you would see that your running printer can’t introduce enough heat for enclosure - then you can try to add circulation fan and point it to heat bed from long distance - this will make it to cool more rapidly (and produce more heat as a result)- it have 700w so I don’t see any issue there, in usual environment 80wat is enough to keep 200x200 bed at 100c
After adding circulation fan - repeat 1-3 hour test and make records of temp and runtime.
Now you will have some numbers, look at them and analyze, most probably you already can reach desired conditions and you don’t need to introduce additional heater for your enclosure.
If you will see that you need huge amount of time to reach desired temps - you can try to introduce “pre-heat” sequence like making bed hotter by 10-15% to pre-heat everything quicker, after pre-heat - reduce hotbed temp and only then start printing.
If you still not happy with desired temps or time is too long - only then start introducing additional controllable heaters.
P.S. Definitely install additional ANALOG heat limit switch in top of enclosure which will kill power to the printer and heaters if something will go wrong and you will not be there.
I would agree that I have gone overkill. I bought all the materials when I had dreams of printing PEEK. But before I had researched the cost of PEEK. So the cabinet should be able withstand oven temps. But alas the printer itself would not.
Anyway, I will settle for a system that allows me to print large high infill ABS parts without fear of warpage.
So an enclosure temp of 65 degrees seems to be what I’m aiming for.
I will take your point on board about the exhaust fan. I will probably set it up like this
Enclosure heater on till it gets to 60 degrees. Then use a extractor fan to keep the chamber below 65.
