The last thing I want to talk about right now is the price of electricity in the UK.
So let's talk about how much it costs to run a 3d printer! I've got myself two of these things,
and a couple of monitoring smart plugs, and I've been collecting data. A lot of data. Let's go!
The cost to run a 3d printer is quite a hard thing to really pin down, because
there's not only a lot of them, but there's also a lot of variables. I decided that I wanted to
really focus on how they perform out of the box rather than adding modifications so most of this
is stuff is really based on that, but without any further waffling let's get right into the data.
[1. Calibrated Benchy Energy Consumption Benchmark]
For this test I printed one benchy on each of the 6 printers I have in service
listed on screen now. A bit of foreshadowing here too as I have this FLSUN super racer
delta that I haven't officially got yet as I am going to be reviewing it probably next video.
Obviously how much energy it takes to make a benchy will be a function of how much time it
takes to make a benchy, so I decided it would be most fair if I just fired up the default
profile for each printer in cura and use the most default setting on that profile. By and
large the settings are quite similar across the board, with the only exception being
a couple of them had a default bed temperature of 50C while most were 60C or,
in the case of glass or smooth PEI, I had to change them to 60C to make them work.
What I found in terms of time is on this chart here, the FLSUN super racer
is probably being a bit of a show off with its default profiles, but rules are rules.
And here's the results. You can see that the super racer wins by nature of its speed,
you'll see in a moment that's literally why,
but right behind it, is the artillery X2 - which we'll also come back to in a minute.
The most expensive benchy was the ender 3,
both the direct drive modded ender 3 and Steve pretty much equal.
From this we can make this char t and see the FLSUN's secret. And if you look at the energy as
a proportion of time you start to realise that the neptune and sidewinder are more efficient somehow.
There's still more data to get from this though, you can slice it by my favourite new unit,
the Benchy per kWh. And of course, that led to this.
If you want to get the highest benchy per kwh output you need to be using a delta,
it seems. But look at the artillery, the reason I keep pointing it out is
because it's my largest printer. It should, you'd expect, be the most expensive to run.
[2. Individual Component Benchmarks]
I thought mainly this would be fun to see, and it's on screen now. I was able to isolate most
of the individual values for the cooling fan, the steppers, obviously just locked in place,
not moving, the hotend and bed. Results are on screen. I think it's quite interesting.
[3. Idle Parasitic Power]
I think it's probably not that surprising if we think about it,
a lot of printers do sit with all the fans on when they're idle,
but if you work this out it can amount to a very high cost for essentially nothing.
If you own a print farm, you might want to turn off your idle printers somehow.
Again I am impressed with the sidewinder for having almost no idle power consumption,
as I have noted in past videos, it shuts down all the fans when
idle and this is something that would be nice to see in other printers too.
[4. Bed tests]
If I show you a graph of all the printers' just heating the beds for an hour, all running at 60
degrees c, it looks like this. It's kind of very much similar to the results for the benchy thing
before, so no surprises. It seems like running the bed for an hour takes around 70 watt hours.
What I did want to see though was how it varies by temperature so here's one graph of that on the
Neptune 2S. Looks linear to me. The main reason I wanted to look at this was to see if you could
save some energy by, for example, printing the first layer at 70C on a PEI or glass bed,
which significantly improves adhesion, and then drop the temperature after that but
retain adhesion which in theory you should at 40C. I've done some tests with this in
the past and had reasonable success, but I wouldn't advise it on critical prints.
You do stand to save a fair bit of energy though, it looks like.
[5. A genuine comparison]
With all the results we have so far, we can actually get a bit closer to actually
comparing like for like with these printers. If I show you this chart, where I have taken
the benchy energy and divided it by the time, you get raw watts average over a benchy print.
I am aware that there will be an initial heat up penalty but in my results
I didn't find it to be notable enough to put these results into question.
On top of this I can also overlay the bed power usage. Interesting how it's around half for
most printers. The FLSUN is a bit of a weird one, but I think maybe it's just delta stuff.
I think they work significantly differently and that's what's using more power.
Let's talk about the artillery though. In every test it's absolutely aced the power
consumption stats. I think I might know why, too.
The artillery is the only ender style printer I have that has a mains powered bed.
I think that's what's going on. Every other printer is powering its bed through the on board
power supply, and of course stepping that voltage down and rectifying it to DC
is going to cause some losses. Apparently, from these charts, it's not that efficient.
[6. TL:DR;]
To tie all this up, I just want to make some assertions about the data. You might not agree
and I may have made some mistakes, but I hope broadly these will summarize what I found.
Firstly - printers don't use much energy. If I bring this graph back on screen,
a 10 hour print is going to be around 1 to 1.5 kWh of energy which even with these new insane prices
here that's going to be 30 to 40 pence. It's really only a percentage of the total print cost.
Secondly - Idle power is a thing, and even though it might not look like much,
if you can hear your printer, turn it off.
Thirdly - A good half of the power at 60C bed temperature is typically from the bed.
This goes up a lot with higher temperatures
so this is even more reason to not use these temperatures unless you have to.
And I guess Finally - mains powered beds, potentially, are a lot more efficient.
Which is another reason to use them, aside from the significantly faster heat time.
And that's that. As usual check links for description
and other info, and I will see you next time.