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How much power does an industrial 3D print farm use?
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- čas přidán 29. 12. 2022
- We get this question a lot and the short answer is... a lot. However, it's also important to distinguish what type of power we use.
Our print farm uses common single phase 110 volt power but consumes a lot due to the shear volume.
On the other hand, our industrial 3D printers and processing equipment requires three phase power at 208 volts or 480 volts. Three phase power generally means the power supplied by the utility company can be more consistent with less peaks and valleys - this is normally only required for large commercial or industrial buildings. Additionally, the higher voltage allows for more electrical current to flow. Overall - this means a lot more power can be supplied for these more demanding machines.
Here is a great video to help further explain three phase power:
• Three-Phase Power Expl...
Drop a question in the comments to help us on our next video.
Visit us at www.i-solids.com/ to learn more about what we do.
Love the walkthrough, big fan of what your company is doing! Feel free to make longer videos, its really interesting!
Thanks for the kind words and support!
You didn't answer the question in the title of the video.
Hey Chris, there was a bit more background information than we anticipated but here is a link to the point in the video where we hopefully answer the question with some since of scale that many people can be familiar with: czcams.com/video/k4maBqSR-Zw/video.html. Overall we use around 40 to 50 times what an average household consumes in a month. This was a pretty brief moment within the entire video so we'll do better in future videos.
To provide a bit more detail, we use on average around 40,000 to 60,000 kWh per month. Accordingly to the US Energy Information Administration the average household consumes around 880 kWh per month: www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97 However, we are in south Texas where AC usage is typically high so our local average is likely similar to Louisiana which takes the crown for the highest national average at around 1190 kWh per month.
@@i-solids There we go, that's what I was look'n for, a real number :) Thanks for that! My wife has like a bazillion Echos and Tivos so our usage is about 1.3-1.8kwH/mo
@@i-solids Could we get that in kWh please? Since I dont know what the average electricity usage is, like Chris says 1,3-1,8 kWh/mo but over here in norway we use 3,8-4,4 kWh in the winter (warming up with the electricity.)
Hi, can you share how you decided on what FDM printers to buy for your farm? What were roughly the criteria you were looking for? (besides the bed size)
isnt the 350watts only when heating, usually printing is way lower.
I would think so
That's definitely true and a really good point that I should have mentioned. Operationally we typically start "clusters" of printers at a time and so its not unusual for 20 to 30+ printers to all be heating to max temp simultaneously. This means we do have to balance the load on each individual circuit to avoid flipping breakers and possibly losing existing prints but once the machines are operating at steady state the power usage drops to around half of the machines max capacity.
The power within the facility was designed like a machine shop where we consider both potential power spikes to start or heat machines up as well as average usage across the entire building. This is pretty common for most residential or commercial buildings but in theory if we were to attempt to simultaneously start every machine we would likely overamp the main breaker. This situation would never occur in normal operation of course.
@@i-solids I was curious if you where able to start them all at once without any issues, Thank you for elaborating on it, I know I have only 12 printers and if I want to utilize them all on my circuit I have to heat 2 at a time and wait for the others. Can be a pain.
What are theose massive HP machines?
Those are HP multi-jet fusion industrial 3D printers and processing stations. Its a technology that uses polymer powder to generate 3D printed parts that have near isotropic strength and have essentially no visible layer lines. It's great for generating extremely high quality parts that look and perform like traditional injection molded parts but the speed and production capacity are where it really shines - we can produces hundreds or even thousands of parts with just one machines within a few hours. Here is a bit more information if you are interested: www.i-solids.com/multijetfusion
Does the heat from the nearby machines make the individual printers more efficient by not having to do as much heating?
That's an interesting questions and I can't say for certain since we haven't tested this specifically but in theory it would likely make a small improvement. Our print farm is a bit unique in comparison to some others in that we do print mostly with enclosed printers and primarily use materials like ABS and ASA. The enclosures do help keep most of the heat within the print area but there is no doubt still radiant heat that can help the machines nearby.
Being in south Texas, we typically struggle with the ambient environment being too hot and there can be noticeable difference in the print results if the room temperatures fluctuate too much. This means we do have a lot of AC units to offset most of the radiant heat from the machines. Overall, we try to control both the humidity and temperature of the shop to accommodate the needs all of our materials and printing technologies.
@@i-solids It sounds like there is a lot of room to innovate in your space.
For example, you could test to see at what ambient temp each of your printers are most efficient, and then create a closed loop system that guarantees it stays at that temp.
Maybe your desks could incorporate radiant heating like they do for floors, but you use heat sinks above the units to capture the excess heat and pump it back into the radiant system, using something like the ground source heat pump techniques.
I have no idea if it would be worth it financially, but the test to see if it would would be interesting and could allow you to get better results, maybe save time and energy thanks to that, and maybe lengthen the lifespan of the machines?