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Have others found that environmental factors have altered the quality of prints? I'm printing inside my office which is built into my shop in North Texas. I have AC in the shop, but rely on a small space heater for warmth if needed. Yesterday was sunny and 70° and I generated two prints that looked great and I was able to run at 100%. Today, it is cloudy and 50° and nothing will stick to the bed, my Z height looks off to me, print layers don't seem to be sticking to each other all that well, I had to slow back down to 60% and it still doesn't seem to be helping a lot. All of my settings are the same, only the part being printed is different. I started out printing on the same bed as yesterday, but since it didn't seem to be working, I cleaned it and re-sprayed it several times with hairspray. Still no good. If I didn't change any settings, how can things be so radically different if not environmental?

They do. I live in NH and my landlord controls the heat, so my apartment can get pretty cold. This has been a big issue for me.


I started by pre-warming my heater bed to 120 then printing. Unfortunately with the onyx the temp ends up dropping to 90. So while I can get the layer to stick it starts warping pretty bad.

Right now, I have a huge blanket over the whole thing (A nice printer fort.) The idler mounts do a great job at keeping it off the belts and I just make sure it's not going to snag on the cheapskates when it's moving. This is keeping the draft out and helps the heated bed stay warm.

Both ambient temperature and humidity can affect prints.

This seems to be especially true if the adhesion of the first layer is borderline i.e. you are printing ABS on Kapton or PLA directly on Kapton or glass.
Adding an adhesive into the mix like ABS Juice (for ABS) or Dilute PVA (for PLA) or Hairspray makes printing (at least getting the first layer to stick) a lot less sensitive to environmental conditions.

I've printed in my garage with temperatures <5C, I know this because it tripped the firmware failsafe and I had to warm the hotend with my fingers enough to clear that so I could heat it.

I have prints where I can see a line where a windows elsewhere in my house was opened when printing.

That makes me think a setup like the Berry Bot where you have an easily adjustable height range for the hot end would really be almost mandatory if you are planning to do much printing at all. Not sure if everyone has seen his latest video, but he goes through his setup in detail and it is impressive the amount of thought he has put into his build. I may re-design my carriage not only to accomodate the spherical magnets, but also to incorporate this height setting. He just loosens one set screw, pulls the hot end up a smidge, moves the carriage to xyz=0, slides his paper "feeler" into place, drops the hot end and tightens the set screw. That's much simpler than fooling with the settings in the firmware for every atmospheric change that comes along, at least in Texas where we may wake up to 30°F temps one morning, hit 100°F in the afternoon and be back to freezing by nightfall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRAjhsLWpY

I'm not sure the problem is the Z height. When you're hotend and Heated bed (assuming you have glass over it) is at temp it should have the same amount of expansion despite the ambient temperature. I think the thing that is changing is how quickly the plastic cools after leaving the nozzle. That's my assumption. I might be completely wrong on that.

However, that's still a really cool idea.

It just happened to me again. Yesterday I was printing fine. There was a storm rolling in and it was about 80°F outside. Today I came home and it is windy, about 50° and the storms have all passed through. The Z=0 was so far off that the filament was barely even touching the glass. It wouldn't stick, kept balling up around the nozzle. I adjusted the z=0 and all is good again. I can't believe the weather would change it that much. Two days ago, I think I may have had a similar issue, though. I had a large print that was estimated by slicer at about 37 hours. At somewhere around the 80% complete mark, the glass bed was moved enough that the binder clips popped off completely. I don't know because this happened in the middle of the night, but when I came out in the morning, the part was still stuck to the glass, but both of them were shifted about about a quarter of an inch. I'm guessing the hot end ran into the part and pushed it, popping the binder clips. Very weird.