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UPS for 3D Printer?

I don't have a 3D printer (yet) but this seems like a very standard UPS calculation... what is the power required and how long is the longest print run you want to protect. Am I missing something?
 
Charlie Plesums said:
I don't have a 3D printer (yet) but this seems like a very standard UPS calculation... what is the power required and how long is the longest print run you want to protect. Am I missing something?
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I have no idea if you're missing something.

I was requesting input from those who might have practical experience and, if so, how it works for them.
 
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Would be interesting to measure the power consumption of the printer. I'm wondering what the load is like for bed heating petg?

I think if you had a decent sized one, it should be able to manage short outages, but I bet those heaters would go through things pretty quick.

for my home workstation, I do have a standard deep cycle marine/rv battery hooked up to a charger/inverter meant more for campers, but it works great and the capacity of the 12v deepcycle is much greater than most off the shelf ups units.
 
Seems like draw might be a bit high. I've got some sensors at home to check the draw. I guess worst case you can detect a power outage and pause your print and turn off the extruder/bed and keep the octopi running until you can attend to it.
 
Darren Wright said:
Seems like draw might be a bit high. I've got some sensors at home to check the draw. I guess worst case you can detect a power outage and pause your print and turn off the extruder/bed and keep the octopi running until you can attend to it.
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The only problem is if the heated bed cools down, the part might come loose, but certainly doable with octoprint and the enclosure plugin.
 
The reason for my inquiry is an incident from last evening. We had a very low chance of thunderstorms and the print I started had an estimated duration of 7.5 hours. I started it at 11am, thinking it would finish by 6:30-7pm. Due to its complexity, at the 7 hour point it was barely over half finished. Then, storms formed west of us and moved our direction. Normally, our electrical power system is very reliable and it was holding up fine until there was a lightning strike not too far from us and the lights went out. Power came back on after about 3 seconds, but the printer had reset, of course.

Also, I have plenty of experience with UPS systems, having used them on home PCs for over 20 years now. With the PCs, the UPS software can be set to begin a controlled shutdown at some point of your choosing, so no harm there.

I haven't measured the actual current draw on my printer. The power supplies translate to about 350W total, so something in that neighborhood at maximum draw. A 600VA UPS would keep it running long enough to record the Z axis point at which the printer is stopped in a controlled pause situation.

In my current situation with a print that was a little over half done, I measured the height of the parts carefully. Then, I imported the STLs into Simplify3D, set their Z origin below the table by the distance I had measured, and generated a new gcode file. The new print will give me the remainder of each of two pieces that I can glue to the others, so it should work out.

Brent, I had not thought about a backup system as you described, but that would certainly keep a printer going for quite a while. I'll look into that.
 
I've got a 'few' pcs hooked up at my workstation and the stand ups boxes you could buy just were never reliable. They'd act like they were working until the power went out and they'd last 20 seconds and die.

This setup has been going for several years and is working great. I just make sure to do periodic maintenance on the battery.
 
Brent Dowell said:
I've got a 'few' pcs hooked up at my workstation and the stand ups boxes you could buy just were never reliable. They'd act like they were working until the power went out and they'd last 20 seconds and die.

This setup has been going for several years and is working great. I just make sure to do periodic maintenance on the battery.
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I'll definitely put together a system like yours. Something like that might even keep my CNC going, although it's easier to restart in the event of a power disruption.

I use a small trickle charger on my gasoline backup generator full time and on my mower during winter months. Is that all that's necessary for the battery you use?
 
It's going to vary quite a bit based on bed size and the rest of the printers features and environment from what (watt hehe) I'm seeing. Somewhere between 50w/hr and 300w/hr range. It seems like a lot of them are closer to the 50w/hr once running as it takes a lot less to keep the thing warm than it does to heat it up. Of course if you're trying to print outdoors in alaska in the winter.. that's another problem :)

You'll also need to consider the power for the machine driving it. We "recently" (4 or 5 years ago) swapped out our media machine from a big tower unit with a stack of hard drives to a low power laptop with a decent SSD. That dropped the power consumption there from somewhere north of 300w/hr to a bit under 50w/hr in IDLE mode (active mode they both went up more or less proportionally) so that's probably your biggest draw unless you have a controller where you can completely disconnect the computer from the printer when printing.

I'd probably get one of the killawat or other smart strips and measure usage for a reasonable duration print and plug that into my UPS sizing plan. Also going 3-4x (or more) oversized on the battery sizing for the UPS configuration will definitely help your battery lifespan, like don't get one that "just fits" because in a few months it probably won't.

Brents redneck stack of batteries plus an inverter and charger setup is remarkably effective. I know quite a few people who've done that. Do check for the possibility of the batteries offgassing (some types do, some types don't - not is of course better) and put some consideration into cooling them (low power fans, adequare airflow) as heat kills batteries.
 
This is what I used. It's a little pricey, but I haven't had to replace the battery in a long time, unlike the smaller ups systems typically used for pc's.

In fact, it had been a few years since I had done any battery maintenance, so I pulled it out, topped it off with distilled water, checked the charge level and ran a load test on the battery and it was just fine.


71aoS6cEsUL._SL1200_.jpg

https://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-APS750-Inverter-Charger/dp/B0007PGAG6/ref=asc_df_B0007PGAG6/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198065480126&hvpos=1o3&hvnetw=g&hvrand=16435932914039561184&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9030896&hvtargid=pla-348911600140&psc=1
 
Shoot, I typed 2016 and I meant to type 2013, dang.

So 6 years roughly, still going strong. Now you have me thinking about getting one for my printer, lol.
 
I keep hoping for some affordable Lithium Ion battery replacements for my ups units. They are out there, but still way too expensive to justify, then there is the safety aspect. I think most of my units are 12v, so probably wouldn't be hard to swap them over to a deep cell 12v battery externally.
 
Darren Wright said:
I keep hoping for some affordable Lithium Ion battery replacements for my ups units. They are out there, but still way too expensive to justify, then there is the safety aspect. I think most of my units are 12v, so probably wouldn't be hard to swap them over to a deep cell 12v battery externally.
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I did do that for a while with one of my ups units, but wasn't comfortable with the charging circuit for the deep cycle battery. It does work though.
 
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