Beautiful cabinet @conny_g ! Looks like the printers were designed to be put in there. And interesting read about getting the temperature down, some good suggestions.
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Beautiful cabinet @conny_g ! Looks like the printers were designed to be put in there. And interesting read about getting the temperature down, some good suggestions.
2 hours ago, conny_g said:
It seems your ventilation is a whole dimension stronger. But likely also much louder?
...
Yes, somewhat comparable with a desktop fan in summer. Although with less electric motor buzz, and more neutral air noise. Not exactly silent, but a laboratory can have that.
Now we're getting there!!
In the diagram you see the test with the fan "off" as dashed lines and the newest one with the carton door with ventilation slit as solid lines.
Now the "exhaust" cabinet where the heat is pulled to goes 2 degrees above the printer cabinet, the printer cabinet stabilizes at 28 C and the 2nd extruder (which reflects the top of the inside of the cabinet) is at a max of 32 C - which is almost 6 C lower than before.
The exhaust line is now above the cabinet line which means there is more heat pulled outside than stays inside - that's perfect.
So clearly the air inlet is the most important bottleneck for now and is way too small, I need to drill additional holes into the bottom and then it works as it does here and absolutely hits the goal that I was planning for - to stay around 30 C.
The area of the carton slit is some 20x530mm = 10.600mm^2.
If I use 500mm of the width to drill a grid of 10mm holes with 10mm space in between I get 16 holes in each row.
And I need 4 rows to meet a total of 11.300 mm^2 - that's what I am going to do tomorrow.
Started another 10 hours print right after this one to see if the temperature stays stable in the long term.
And it does, even after 7 more hours the temp stays at these values.
Interesting that you can see that I lowered the extruder temperature to 190 C instead of 200 C - the temperature in the cabinet decreases by 0,5 C.
Summary for all who want to build something like this:
I thought a moment about retrying the 2 50mm fans. But if you compare their technical data to the 120mm, they are too weak to achieve the same result and temperature will be higher:
120mm: https://www.bequiet.com/de/casefans/270
50mm: https://www.blacknoise.com/datas/downloads/datasheets/TData_BSF50_122012_de_en.pdf
Both are silent fans, the 120mm produces 29dB and the 50mm only 16dB of noise. I think I will try another one of Bequiet with 16 dB next that has half the RPM and some 30% less static pressue and airflow, but still much more than the 50mm.
https://www.bequiet.com/de/casefans/718
Edited by conny_g
Laser cut a drilling template and did some drilling for a few hours - 57 holes through 19mm MDF is quite time consuming.
Also added a 3rd hole on the top side (not on the photo, did that later).
As a first version of the bottom holes I did shape the area of a 120mm fan, which results in 57 holes and 4.500 mm^2 of opening, which is half of what a 120mm fan has.
The idea is: if the airflow is enough with that, without a fan, I am happy and it's done.
If the airflow is not enough I can choose to either drill more holes (2-3 times as many) or add a fan on the bottom side of the cabinet to push air in. While the 2nd fan on top pulls the air out. Resulting in twice the pressure and probably enough airflow.
Another print test to check "level 1" of the above is running just now.
Test successful, the temperatures behave exactly as before. See diagram.
In terms of openings I have now:
- bottom / inlet: 57 holes of 10mm which results in a opening area of 4.500 mm^2
- top / outlet: 3 holes of 45mm = ~4.800mm^2
- as a reference: a 120mm fan has an area of 11.300mm^2, so inlet/outlet are about half of that area
Next test: use quieter fan, the BeQuiet Silent Wings 3 one with 30% less pressure/airflow but only 16 dB of noise.
Have you installed a fan for the inlet as well? Or are you just sucking the air out of the cabinet with a fan?
4 hours ago, Julian2801 said:Have you installed a fan for the inlet as well? Or are you just sucking the air out of the cabinet with a fan?
Currently the inlet is without fan. But I designed the inlet holes so that I could put a fan there. The last results showed: no need to do so.
But who knows - maybe next summer if the office has 28 C I want to put a fan there to push the temperature even lower.
I had to decide between a large slit of 10-11.000mm^2, like i had it in the carton door.
But I voted for the holes and for just the amount that are needed for a 120mm fan because the larger any kind of opening there, the more noise can escape the cabinet.
So I thought about rather having a few holes and put a push-in fan there than to create a large opening - in the end the key purpose of the cabinets is to keep the noise inside.
Fantastic!! The cabinet solved my issues with ABS.
Here's a picture of yesterday's test with ABS, it's a mount for a 50W LED with heatsink (for that ABS to survive some heat) with 11cm in diameter that about a year ago I tried print in ABS like 5 times with different settings and never go it to work without severe delamination issues.
Never had that quality of print with ABS!!
Back then I had the printer in a repurposed bar cabinet in the living room (also for the noise) and the only variant that worked slightly better with ABS was to add a heater blower to the cabinet that generated some 40 C of temperature.
Then the delamination was much better, but not gone, the object still unusable, mechanically not solid.
I think the reason being that this cabinet was not air tight and the heater blower created some air movement causing some unwanted cooling on the print.
For these reasons I never used my ~10 spools of ABS, any larger object failed.
Now it worked on the first try.
I switched off the ventilation fan and put some cardboard on top of the fan box to also suppress any thermic escape of heat.
The temperature moved up to ~40 degrees in the cabinet (36 bottom, 44 on top) and stayed there.
On 9/2/2018 at 5:47 PM, conny_g said:Here’s my new printer cabinets to keep noise in my office down and to store them in a neat & tidy way.
Made by my favorite furniture maker.
PSU, cables, Raspberry Pi with OctoPrint are stowed in the drawers underneath the printers.
The printers can slide out for filament change or other maintenance.
The doors have gaskets so the noise can’t escape.
themselves...professionals installed it for me wholesale kitchen cabinets. Their cabinets are absolutely beautiful, no words are needed, you can see everything in the photo.
Looks pretty cool as an idea!
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conny_g 251
It seems your ventilation is a whole dimension stronger. But likely also much louder?
Good idea to place a carton at the front and test with variations of ventilation holes.
Before I buy the expensive duct vents I should do that.
And regarding active cooling... that's all too much hassle and I think it's not that much heat to be removed, a reasonable airflow should really do it. In the end I think it's not too much more heat a good desktop processor would produce. And the case fans can handle that as well, just that there is better ventilation holes in the case.
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