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Have you ever wondered just how much power one of these little suckers use? And how much they’re costing you to run per month well? I certainly was, so I grabbed one of these. What meters to find out exactly how much power they were using and the results were pretty surprising. Let’s get started. [MUSIC] How’s it going guys? Angus here from makers Muse and welcome back to another video. So I picked up. One of these which is called a watt meter, and it measures voltage watts amps and kilowatt hours of an electronic device that plugs into the mains so kilowatt hours is the unit of measurement that you get charged on every quarter when you get your electricity bill and I’ve always wondered like how much power do these machines use? Considering that they they heat up to high temperatures and they have motors, they’re quite powerful and they’re running for hours and hours and hours at a time, so I decided to make an experiment and test exactly how much power they used for a given Its ready print and the print. I chose, was this. So this is a wheel for a new version of the off-road robot platform. I made quite a while ago. They’re sort of paddle wheels designed for sand and that sort of thing and the machine. I chose to do my tests. Is the cocoon? Create the latest one that was sold through. Aldi here in Australia. So they saw my video My vlog, visiting Aldi and I reached out to me and asked by one of the version of their latest machine, and I said, yes, please, because I’ve only tested their older version and it’s a really great machine. Actually, they’ve done heaps of improvements to the i3 plus that I tested last last year or the year before even a lot of iterative improvements, which is really cool to see from when hell. And also they’ve done some firmware tweaks to the touchscreen, so it’s easier to use really nice to see and this machine can be run on any gqo, so I used simplified 3d to create a profile to slice in PLA and a slice for ABS, so PLA plastic prints at a lower temperature than ABS and needs a low temperature heat bed, so I decide to do three tests. There was the PLA and the ABS default and then to print PLA with no heat on the bed, so not hitting the bed up at all, and also I added two other printers in as a bit of wild card to find out how much power they use, but we’ll start with the results from the cocoon create. So the first test was the PLA on default settings with a 60 degree heat bed and the print turned out lovely like 23 hours to print this at 40% in fills quite slow. It was very conservative than printing propellers using, but the result is fantastic. It’s a really nice machine, actually. I’m quite happy with this. And the print came out Great. Released from the print surface fine and the total power usage after printing in the PLA was 19 kilowatt hours. Which is, which is, you know, not too bad, It’s not very expensive, but I want to see how much more energy printing and ABS would use because that pushes the heat bed from sixty to a hundred degrees. C, which is a fairly large increase and also the extruder temperature bumps up a bit as well to 230 degrees C to print the ABS plastic. This was the result of the ABS print. It’s a bit of a disaster. It’s stuck down great, but a deal laminated to all hell. I was actually doing a livestream as part of makers. Muse live and I could hear it cracking as the print finished and was cooling down, so it doesn’t matter how hot your heat bed is. You could have it over, vaulted and overpowered as you get further away from it. The ambient temperature of the room comes into effect. So that’s why you get something called delamination where even he might get a print a stick. The actual additional layers start pulling away, so that’s. What happened here? So the print, unfortunately delaminated, but I want to know how much power it used to actually create this print, even though it’s not a very good result, and the power usage was actually really surprising 2.7 kilowatt hours quite a substantial increase to our PLA print, despite the heat bed. You know, 60 to 100 degrees. C, it’s a jump, but it’s not a massive jump. I think to maintain that extra heat at a hundred C at 23 hours uses an awful lot more energy than just maintaining sixty degrees C. And, Lastly, other cocoon create. I want to see how much energy you would use for the heat bed completely disabled, Because here’s a thing. You don’t need a hot heat bed to print. Pla, the machines come with, like a build tech like surface, and I actually applied a bit of glue to try to give my baby a sprint the best chance of success, but this print stuck beautifully down to this surface with the proper layer height with no issues with a disabled heat bed. The heat bed was sitting at the room temperature. The whole time and the print is fantastic. But what about the difference in electricity use compared to the default? PLA settings. Well, that’s where it gets very interesting because we saw an overall energy usage of 0.9 kilowatt hours of my watt meter, quite a lot of saving too compared to running the actual heat bed For basically identical results. There is no no issues at all with these prints and one had a hot, hotter heat bed and one was just running with a cold, cold bed. No, no heat added, that’s a good takeaway. You don’t really need to run a heat bed When printing in PLA, which leads us to our wildcard entries so to other printers, I chose to test their power consumption with these wheels, starting with the smallest the Cetus. Now I love the status. It’s a small portable powerhouse of a printer. Your run’s off! Wi-fi it usually just sits in a cupboard over there but doesn’t have a heated bed just has an element in plate there, and it actually is interesting because it differs to the cocoon create in that. The cocoon current has a large internal power supply unit. You plug. Niac mains cable in the Cetus, has an external power supply brick and this plugs into the printer with a barrel. Jack now! I’m not sure this is. If this is the original brick that the Cedars came with, I have had printers. I’m using this 19 volt brick before it might have been for a larger printer with a heat bed in the past. It definitely doesn’t. Need this much amperage to run. That’s for sure, but the print off the Cetus, apart from being one of the nicest prints in the lineup. It did only take 10 hours because the seat of software is kind of its own thing and running on fine settings like 10 was the slowest. I could get it to go, but what’s really interesting is a Cetus print only took point five kilowatt hours of it electricity, and that’s nuts That’s so much lower than the 2.7 that it took to print the ABS print now granted 10 hours verse 23 There is a time difference there on how long how long you’re on the printer, But I think really your your energy consumption is going to come down to how hot things are for how long a period of time versus the motors. I’m not sure the motors actually contribute a large amount to their power usage. I think it’s pretty much the heat bed. That is the real killer. So what about the other end of the spectrum? What’s the largest printer? I have that could print something quite impressive. Well, that would be this. This is the array’s n2 plus, it is a massive machine from. Rays and I wanted to test it out with printing ABS. And this is the result, so this wheel was printed again in about ten hours using idea maker software, but what’s putting on ABS temperatures with a hundred degree temperature heat bed and it used five point two kilowatt hours to print this wheel on ABS settings now? How does this all translate into cost? Well, where I am here in Australia? Our energy usage is about 30 cents. Australian per kilowatt hour. We pay quite a large amount for electricity, so you can see here in the graph lining up the cost per print on the machines that we’ve got. The cheapest, obviously was the Cetus, costing us a mere 15 cents of electricity to print this this wheel. In ten hours, whereas the highest was, of course, the raise N 2 plus, which cost us one dollar and 56 cents of electricity to print this one wheel, which we think about it will start adding up. It does add a whole new perspective to to running these printers because it’s a hidden cost. You don’t really see it till you get the bill at the end of the quarter now. I do want a shout out to CNC kitchen. Here’s a fantastic video of, you know, really look into the details of the cost of running these machines beyond, you know, includes electricity, but beyond that to actually how much these machines cost to run so check his video out. I certainly wasn’t the first person to use a power meter on these machines, and if you’d like to pick up, one of these is what metres they’re very inexpensive. I’ll have a feel it links down below to Amazon. And while I’ve got you here. I’d like to let you know that I will be in Melbourne on the 24th of March for the Melbourne makers meet up as part of 3d printing systems at the 3d printer superstore there, Melbourne. They’ve got a fantastic setup. It’s gonna be an awesome day of testing out 3d printers. There’ll be 3d scanners on display. They’ll be laser cutting and other cool toys to play with meet me. I’ll be there and I’ll be giving a talk and also I have some making coins to hand out. Bring things you’ve been printing to show off. It’s gonna be an awesome time and there’s the full details in the video description. So you can go there to to. RSVP it’s up on meetupcom so you do need to RSVP, although it’s completely free. I hope I see you there. So thanks for watching guys. Hope you found this video. Useful here on makers means ice. It certainly added a whole new perspective to running these printers for me, and if you did. I love to have you subscribe. My aim is to empower your creativity through 3d printing processes, And I look forward to seeing again very shortly. Catch you later, guy’s bye.