Best Practices for keeping an Ultimaker 3 in the garage

[Adamize 0]

I'm only a couple weeks into ownership on my first 3d printer, the Ultimaker 3. Its only a hobby for me, and I need to setup a better home for the machine. For our family, the garage would be the preferred spot, but we live in Florida and that brings heat and humidity issues. Not to mention normal garage issues such as dust.

Does anyone have experience keeping the machine in the garage? Any best practices or techniques to keep it running well in this environment? Any accessories that could help? I'm willing to purchase a cover or cabinet or something else if necessary but would prefer not to spend more on the machine's home then on the machine itself.

Thanks!

[gr5 2,094]

I would absolutely never ever put PVA filament in florida humidity. That's the biggest issue right there. I think you should move something else to the garage. There's always something we can find to throw away or reorganize.

I have 5 printers and I don't use them every day so one solution for me is I'm always swapping them out with 2 printers in storage. It only takes me one minute to pull out one printer and put another one in "storage" (storage is in my basement on a shelf).

In addition to the PVA issue, it really never gets hot in Netherlands so they don't appear to test them often under high heat. When it hits 75F in Netherlands everyone complains how incredibly hot this "heat wave" is. Before the "plus" upgrade on the UM2 it had problems when the temp got over 80F but the UM3 and the UM2+ seem fine with the heat but still - I would worry about stepper drivers oveheating and shutting off for a second mid print causing annoying issues.

The dust is the least of the issues but if the dust is big enough and if it doesn't melt at 200C then it might cause a nozzle clog (it lands on the filament in back, gets moved slowly through the bowden and into the nozzle and then might cause a clog). This can be solved by a dust filter but truly it's probably not an issue.

[robinmdh 99]

@gr5 is very right here, and we don't have a good high humidity climate test chamber, we do try though.

I guess consider getting/making a drybox for the PVA in that high humidity.

And keep an eye on the stuff in the bowden tube, if it is no longer stiff, trow it away or you are just cleaning cores repeatedly.