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Is it ok to leave your printer on?

Say you had a 2 day print and were going on on vacation. Would the little fella be ok on its own for a couple of weeks?

Or you setup repetier server and had the printer on the whole time so you could remotely connect and start a printjob.

I do. Of course, by "on", that just means the RAMBO and LCD are on. Steppers automatically disable after a pre-set time in the firmware, and the hot end and heated bed are off.

When I run a job, the hot end and bed get turned off automatically as well. I've run jobs while I was at work.

My common sense answer is no, not really - but if you're forced or forget, the chance something might happen is reduced if you have your HE/bed turned off at the end of a print.

This has been covered before in this forum - when you have this in your home, take every precaution you might as if it were your stove; with the added precautions that you've got something that is moving that is designed to melt plastic or other materials.

I leave my printer plugged in and powered up 24 x 7 and have since I owned it. That's 18 months or so. I DON'T run it unattended though. But, when I'm done printing, I make sure all the heaters are off and either disconnect from Repetier host or let it stay connected. I use the printer every day though so it never goes unattended for days. If I go on vacation I do shut it down.

Oly mentioned something the other day that seems relevant to this conversation...

If you use the stock heating resistors, they'll pop if they run free and get too hot. If you're using a ceramic heater cart, they get very very very hot and could cause a fire if a glitch keeps them stuck on.


I leave my printer running overnight, or for a few hours if I'm going to dinner or something, but I wouldn't leave for vacation with it on. Chances are that you'd be fine, and you would be, but there's always that 1 in a million chance.


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P.S. I still hate the youtube embed feature

Hahaa. I remember watching that



Enclosure with fire detecting and suppressing features anyone?

teoman wrote:Enclosure with fire detecting and suppressing features anyone?

A metal box outside, perhaps?

Hnmmmmm.....


Two things come to mind.

1 here are some special fabrics/coatings that emit so much co2 when burned that they extinguish the fire around them.

2 if one were to pull a vaccum on the enclosure you would not have the printed part cooling off. It would slow the cooling process all around quite a bit...

teoman wrote:Hnmmmmm.....


Two things come to mind.

1 here are some special fabrics/coatings that emit so much co2 when burned that they extinguish the fire around them.

2 if one were to pull a vaccum on the enclosure you would not have the printed part cooling off. It would slow the cooling process all around quite a bit...

High water content nylon would be awesome looking in a vacuum as well!

Vacuum would almost certainly be a no go. Radiative heat transfer is not terribly effective and its unlikely the previous layers would have cooled sufficiently. I'd look for some sort of chemical/fume hood with a suppression system.

And don't forget that a vacuum lowers the points that things melt and vaporize at. Not sure what the effect is on a material's flashpoint, but I assume it follows suite.