Emergency Procedures For Power Outage?
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2018 3:20 pm
I live in New England, and we are in the midst of a Nor'easter, which is dumping lots of heavy sticky wet snow on everything. We had another similar one just over a week ago that took down tons of trees, power poles & lines. There are some people who are still without power from the last storm. We've been spared (so far), although the UPS my computer is on has kicked in & out a few times for a fraction of a second. Those don't appear long enough to affect my M2E printer.
I've read that there can be serious problems if you just shut off the power in mid-print, because the filament-drive fan shuts off while the extruder is still hot. The heat from the extruder works its way up into the drive, and can melt the filament enough to fuse it to the ABS drive assembly. It sounds like that could be a real pain to fix, and could possibly require replacing the drive assembly.
I have a small battery powered fan parked next to the printer, and a headlamp ready to grab to run down into the basement if the power kicks out.
Does anyone know how quickly I need to dash down & cool off the drive? Also, if I'm unsuccessful, how big of a chore is it to fix the drive? The good news is that I'm running PLA at 195C, so the extruder isn't nearly as hot as it might be if I was running PETG or ABS.
Thanks!
I've read that there can be serious problems if you just shut off the power in mid-print, because the filament-drive fan shuts off while the extruder is still hot. The heat from the extruder works its way up into the drive, and can melt the filament enough to fuse it to the ABS drive assembly. It sounds like that could be a real pain to fix, and could possibly require replacing the drive assembly.
I have a small battery powered fan parked next to the printer, and a headlamp ready to grab to run down into the basement if the power kicks out.
Does anyone know how quickly I need to dash down & cool off the drive? Also, if I'm unsuccessful, how big of a chore is it to fix the drive? The good news is that I'm running PLA at 195C, so the extruder isn't nearly as hot as it might be if I was running PETG or ABS.
Thanks!