A little crossover from the Reddit 3DP community. Please, if you have some of these lower cost printers (or just any printer) take some time to make sure everything is properly rated to handle the current going through it. Seen too many burned up Anet A8’s recently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/8ah96r/anet_a8_burns_down_half_the_house/?st=JFPFGS4V&sh=e4afc9b9
Dang. That sucks…
Everytime i hear of someone buying a $200 printer I think of this. It’s not worth it.
Not that a $2,500 printer is significantly safer (I’ve had the wiring on a lulzbot Taz6 and a Makergear m2 burn up), but they do use better rated boards, fuses, connectors, and wiring.
Or you could be thinking, “eventually this printer is going to catch fire. what can I do to limit that fire so that it only destroys the printer and can’t spread to the rest of the house”. Might make an interesting article for somebody to explore mitigation techniques.
Thanks for sharing
@Eric_Davies that’s an interesting idea. Just assume that it’s going to catch on fire and set it up so that it’s contained.
nonsense, you just need to change wires for higher gauge silicon ones, and make sure thermal element is well insulated and not loose, plus desolder the connector on the board and instead solder the wires in. what happens to ignorant people that have no idea what they doing - does not matter it would happen anyway, they would stick a fork into toaster or something. You basically ned to know what are you doing. Otherwise, well wait for apple printer if you know what I mean.
The problem is it’s sold this way, a fire hazard, off the shelf just waiting to burst into flames. You shouldn’t need to heavily modify a brand new device just to make it safe. Thousands of people are buying these thinking that they’re safe. If it needs to be modified to keep it from burning down your house then it shouldn’t be sold. Remember the cheap hoverboards? Those were mostly banned because of fires. And that galaxy note that would explode, this is no different.
These companies are selling faulty and dangerous products. You cannot place the blame on the consumers for using it as intended.
The problem what happened here was that the Thermal Runaway detection was Disabled
The main reason why 3d printers, cellphones, hoverboards, etc, catch fire sometimes is because they are classified as "low voltage " devices …under 24 volts… by CSA and UL, and do not require rigorous safety testing like normal appliances do which run on 120 volts.
@Gary_Tolley_Grogyan Its actually an option to turn off “thermal runaway detection” I wonder how the guy’s insurance company is going to respond to that?
I’ve had my motor controllers catch fire on my ramps board before. Thankfully I was home watching the printer run.
@Eric_Davies Unless you put the printer in a fireproof box with fireproof negative pressure ventilation to outside, even just the printer itself burning up is going to cause $10,000s of smoke damage. Burning electronics and plastic smoke will straight-up WRECK a house. Not to mention $10,000s more of water damage and deliberate fire-watch destruction if the fire department comes.
@Gary_Tolley_Grogyan How do you know that, and how do you know that was the cause of the fire? There are lots of faults that Thermal Runaway Detection can’t do anything about, like a failed-on MOSFET.
@Eric_Davies @Gary_Tolley_Grogyan Now I see from the Reddit thread, Anet is disabling thermal runaway protection in their stock firmware build. (Or they’re using a version that predates it being standard in Marlin, maybe.)
@Piotr_Sitko Do you get the irony of saying people need to do a whole bunch of home electrical modifications to make their printers safer? Since when do we want people opening up high-current electronics and screwing around inside them? Would you recommend people open up their toasters to rearrange the nichrome wire so the toast doesn’t burn? No, that would be a terrible idea, and so is asking everyone who buys a 3d printer to do extensive modification work before they turn it on.
Everybody knows not to stick a fork in a toaster. It’s common knowledge. No first-time printer buyer knows they’re supposed to replace all the wiring and connectors in their printer.
This is an unsafe product, period. It shouldn’t be sold.
@Ryan_Carlyle you have a good point, sir… I couldn’t argue that if I wanted to.
Gotta use a super light version of Marlin to run on their processors I guess… someone needs to just make a drop in upgrade board for it.
Do not run the printer unsupervised
I did not mention it to anyone before, but at MRRF my old Rostock Max v1 that I was trying to resurrect had the hotend cooling fan’s wire yank, short and start getting hot. It was just 5v or 12v and that simple little thing had the wire smoking. The fan was hooked directly to ATX power supply.
The wall behind the printer in the picture was most likely wood paneling. Drywall and sheetrock are not something that will burn.
Do not keep your Acetone too close to your printer. I have no idea if that person had acetone to not, just saying that if you are afraid of fire you should remove explosively fameable chemicals from the proximity of heat sources.