Bed heating takes too long. Defect?

[hoegge 4]

According to the data sheet for the UM3Ex the heating time for the bed is < 4 minutes. 

Heating my bed to 100 deg Celsius takes 15 minutes. So I assume my printer / bed is defect? 

15 minutes is simply too long

[gr5 896]

4 minutes to 60C is about right.  15 mintues to 100C is about right also.  If you are printing ABS you really need to enclose the printer as well and 100C isn't really quite hot enough - 105C is much better (less likely to warp off the bed).  You can just use a box and place it on top of the printer without any cutting/taping of the box - if you can find the right size (the boxes you find near photo copiers that hold many reams of paper are perfect and need no modifications).  And cover the front of the printer with saran wrap or similar.

 

This should help it heat slightly faster and also the air inside should reach about 35C which will improve your ABS prints.

 

Also with ABS you want the fan no higher than 3%.  8% is almost the same as 100% on the um3 fan (I don't know why) so you really need to go down to about 3% or even 1% on the um3 fan with ABS.

 

If you don't do this your parts may look fine until you break one and realize how weak it is on layer lines (bad layer bonding).

[hoegge 4]

Well - when the data sheet says < 4 minutes to heat the bed and the maximum bed temperature is 120, it should not take 15 minutes - unless the datasheet lies. What does it take to 105 then - 30 minutes? It is especially annoying since it is impossible to keep the bed hot like on other printers, since the UM3 turns off the heat plate whenever you change filament or do other operations and it does not show the temperature all the time and you can't see it in the web interface either.

 

When the advertisement states it can print ABS; it should not require modifications and additional hardware to print ABS - by enclosing it or buying an enclosure. Then it should work out of the box.

 

For a 5000 USD printer, you'd expect you don't have to do all kinds of fiddling to make it do what it says it can do! This is so incredibly disappointing.