I recently upgraded my first-generation Centauri Carbon 3D printer with the Elegoo CANVAS multi-material upgrade kit.It's an excellent deal, and totally worth doing, but it has one major downside.Thanks to the new tall filament feed setup, it's no longer possible to put the top cover on.
Elegoo doesn't make an official hood for the Centauri like it does for the Centauri 2, though there are some user-made printable ones out there I'm considering.This means the noise level is now much higher when this printer is running, and that made me look for ways to quiet it down a little.Lo and behold, there is a "silent" mode in the speed settings I had never spotted before, and boy am I glad I found it.
“Silent mode” doesn’t make your 3D printer silent Nor deadly, just to be clear Close Interestingly, it's not just my two Centauri printers that have this mode, but also my original Creality K1 Max.I'm pretty sure it wasn't there out of the box, but added in a later firmware update.Either way, now that I knew about these modes, I had to try them.
What I can say is that for all three of my printers, especially the one that can't wear its lid at the moment run far quieter in silent mode.What should be obvious to anyone that's used a "silent" mode on any device before, it doesn't actually make the thing silent.That's true for these printers as well, but the drop in noise level is dramatic.
In particular, the fans work at a much lower RPM, and the printers avoid fast bursty movement, instead moving the print head slowly, smoothly, and deliberately.We slept in the room next to where the printers work, and I could not hear them through the wall when in silent mode.You can activate it right on the printer, or through its remote web interface, and flipping that switch does immediately show you the difference in volume.
Beyond the peace and quiet, print quality improved Slow and steady wins the race All of my printers are of the new "CoreXY" type, which means they can reach pretty incredible speeds.However, even with that high level of speed, large and complex prints can still take a long time.Since the printers are quite loud, it means we might have to endure 24 hours or more of blasting fans and motor noises.
So, by switching the printer to silent mode, I have found that long prints are easier to tolerate.The sound of the printers fades into the background and doesn't annoy anyone.It feels a little paradoxical, because running the printer in silent mode means that the print takes much longer.
However, if you aren't in a hurry, then a print that causes a smaller disturbance is preferable.Another benefit I'm seeing is that my prints are coming out a little better in some cases.Now, it's not news to anyone that you can improve print quality and reliability by slowing things down, and it's not that I wasn't happy with the print quality before, it's just worth mentioning that less noise isn't the only positive tradeoff you might get.
I suspect since this is as slow as the machine will practically go while still being useful, certain types of print failure might become less frequent as well.There’s a price to pay for all that peace and quiet The elephant in the room is the time it takes to print things.So far, my general experience is that print times almost, but don't quite double.
So a 6-hour print might become 10 hours, and, of course, with truly long and epic prints, this could mean an additional day or two of printing.For me, although I do also sell prints at the local market, I'm never under any sort of massive time pressure.Rather, I reinvest some proportion of the money into a certain poundage of filament, and there's always more time than filament in my case.
I also have three printers, and one of them is usually available for my personal projects.Which means having the printers take longer isn't a big deal.The print could also potentially end up using more power.
Although the mechanical motion of the machine should be less energy intensive without that explosive movement and high-RPM fan noise, the heated bed and hot end now have to stay on temperature for longer.These are the most power-hungry components, so I expect that total power consumption will go up.If you have multiple machines running in parallel like I do, then the benefits of silent mode are amplified, or rather the opposite I guess.
It might make a moderate difference on one machine in isolation, but now I can actually run all my machines with less noise than a single one would have produced before.At least, assuming I can make a new canopy for my Centauri Carbon...
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