MakerGear Forum

Anyone know the typical/average wattage of the M2 heated bed, hotend, stepper motors and the fans each individually?

creativedex wrote:typical/average wattage of the M2

There are so many variations of the hardware loose in the field that the only way to know for sure is to plug your M2 into a Kill-a-Watt meter and measure it.

In round numbers, the heated bed accounts for most of the power dissipation; figure 300 W total and you won't be too far off.

ednisley wrote:There are so many variations of the hardware loose in the field

Yes, but I think the main ones were the early version at 12V and 1.5 ohms, or the later version at 24V and 3 ohms. Both of those work out to 8 amps current, but the power is 96W on the early version and 192W on the later version. Of course, that's a peak number.

Stepper motors are set from firmware, usually to 1A to 1.5A peak. I think that runs at the full 24V, so that's up to 36W (each). It's tempting to add all of them together, but they don't all run at peak.

Fans often have ratings written on the back. My 24V fan says it's 2.3W. My 12V fan says it's 0.1A at 12V, so 1.2W.

So that's the individual breakdown, from which you can get a theoretical maximum peak power, but Ed Nisley's "300W" number is a perfectly good aggregate ball-park number.

Thanks, trying to set up the "Printer Stats" plugin on octoprint to help gauge power usage. Not sure how useful it will be unless it can somehow detect the usage itself

Any thoughts on what the hotend might be running at? believe i heard 40 watts some where before?

I can run 5x M2s on a 1200W UPS. I cannot preheat 5x M2s on a 1200W UPS. I can preheat 4x M2s though.

The wattages are peak, and used mostly when heating. The motors are constant-power devices and will always draw the same roughly 20 watts once energized. The hotend will stabilize at about 5-10 watts of draw once it's up to temperature. The fans are mostly negligible.

How useful did the printer stats plugin turn out to be? What settings did you end up with for your M2?