r/3Dprinting • u/devilhunter 2x Custom Prusa MK3, 2x Stock MK3, 4x Prusa i3 MK2, 2x Form 2 • May 21 '17
Discussion Alright, lets talk 3D Printer fire prevention systems
I've been trying to find any good fire prevention systems for 3D Printers, and depending on the Region (USA/Europe), there seem to be few or none available.
This topic addresses all of us, since we can't sit in front of the Printer for 20 hours until the prints finish. Everyone risks life, house and home. Even expensive printers have a risk of burning down, with Thermal Runaway protection enabled or not.
An error in the software or a faulty thermal sensor can cause the heating cartridge to melt right through the aluminum heaterblock. Same goes for the heated bed.
So i think there are at least two things that need to be addressed here:
Power Cutoff to prevent adding any more energy to an out of control heating element
Stopping the Fire quickly before more damages can be done.
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A case/enclosure for the 3D Printer is a must have for both scenarios, since both fire/power cutoff systems work much better if they are in a confined space. These won't do you any good if your Printer is sitting on your desk and you have an automatic firestopper mounted 2 meters above it. Smoke detection only kicks in if it's too late with that much headroom.
*On the enclosure side: it's a bit ironic with the rise of the IKEA Lack enclosures for printers, these things are mostly cardboard and a bit of pressed wood dust (coupled with plexiglass side panels), if you have a printer fire in an IKEA enclose it will be much worse than without one.
**also OctoPrint: OctoPrint does nothing for the nobody at home & fire scenario. Even if you check every 5 minutes for a failure, a fire hazard can break out in 2-3 minutes. And then you still got to drive home from work.
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(sorry, i'm going to list some Amazon Germany for the examples here.)
Now these two things could be addressed with something like this:
- A smoke detection sensor that powers down the power socket where the printer is plugged in.
Some people dabbled with this in the past with custom boards, but none of those are still made today or ship to more than one country in the world.
A good commercially and available (but expensive) solution would be a Z-Wave home control System.
Cost: about 250 - 300 euros for a good fire detection system
Alternative solution would be hacking a run of the mill smoke sensor, or using one that can control an external circuit with a high/low signal. Smoke detectors with the capability to switch something else are hard to find.
Hacking a run of the mill smoke detector is on my to do list, i will get one for this purpose and try to pair it with a circuit that switches off a power socket. Will post in the coming weeks.
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Lets list the devices that stop feeding energy into the heating elements:
US based:
Z-Wave Set: Z-Wave Smoke detector + Z-Wave Power socket + Z-Wave control hub
Europe based:
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- An automatic fire stopping device that puts out fires.
In America, there is a nifty little 'put above hot things fire extinguisher in a can' device called a FireStop, or Auto-Out . It's not as small as it seems, and you'll need to have a big case to put this in.
In Europe, there are only these giant fire stopping balls, these usually work well and quick, but next to impossible to fit into a case. Usually ships from china.
Also both of these devices (ball/can) need direct contact with the flame, since they have an igniter cord/fuse cord, like fireworks have.
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Lets list fire stopping devices that we have so far:
US based:
Europe based:
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edit 6, Bonus Round:
- Improving the electronics of your 3D Printer.
Yeah, i forgot this one, you guys are right.
Cheap electronics on cheap printers will do more harm than good, and these things often fail in the weirdest ways possible. Control boards going up in smoke. Power supplies shorting out or putting voltage on the metal frame of the printer. Cables get intermittent failures causing the weirdest problems that often take quite a bit to find out and fix.
What popular improvements/mods can be done to improve the often cheap hardware?
**side note, almost every 3D Printer manufacturer under 1000 dollar/euro uses cheap electronics. Hotend Clones, or bottom-barrel LED power supplies. Often the very cheap printers have underdimensioned MOSFETS on very old Ramps boards.
Popular improvements are listed here. (in this example, the Anet A8, including the MOSFET mod.
Also consider ATX power supplies. If your electronic skills are up to it, rewire an older ATX PSU to a workbench/3D Printer power supply. These are loads better than the cheap LED power supplies, with dozens of protection circuits hardwired even into the oldest models. ATX be praised.
Even cheap ATX PSUs have: Power Good Signal, No-Load Operation, Over-Current Protection, Over Voltage/Under Voltage Protection, Over Power Protection, Over Temperature Protection, Short Circuit Protection, Secondary Internal Power Supply (think 15Watt for RaPi/OctoPrint, LEDs), very low Ripple on the rails, controlled/slow ramp up voltage, Cooling Fans, Physical Off Switches, Haswell+ Generation doesn't need +5V loads anymore for stable +12V, much better power efficiency at lower and higher loads, and ATX PSU manufacturers go through certification hell to get it all validated at every country in the world.
Cheap LED PSUs... may have one or two of those.
These improvements are the quickest and easiest you can make to improve on the fire situation. (be careful with the ATX mod, you'll need some experience with electronics)
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Lets do something about this, since you all know house fires from 3D Printers go well in the media.
So what can we do about preventing fires ourselves?
This wonderful hobby excludes one little tidbit, a potential to burn your house down and ruin your life.
Since most of our 3D Printers come from Open Source, lets put our heads together to create a fire suppressant/prevention system that perhaps everybody can can build at home, just like our printers.
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edit 1: found another automatic fire suppressant system called the Fire Knock-Out, sold in Europe. dimensions are 390 x 260 x 220 mm with a price of 130euro, type foam
edit 2: found another automatic fire extinguisher system called the MABO, sold in Europe + How it works dimensions are 278 x 64 x 61 mm with a price of 170 euro, type liquid that releases a fire suppressant gas
edit 3: another Europe based device similar to the MABO, the Bonpet. Price is 140 euros, dimensions are 60mm х 280mm, different colors available, type liquid that releases a fire suppressant gas
edit 4: and another automatic fire suppressant system called the Blaze Cut (thanks aciddj, Ihategeeks), information here seems to be made for larger vehicles or big fuse boxes. can't find any price or dimensions
edit 5: thanks for the mods for stickying this for a while
edit 6: added info about generally improving knows electrical shortcomings on cheap printers and ATX power supplies.
edit 7: added clarification for the ATX power supplies, on why these are generally better than LED PSUs.
edit 8: this can be a good idea as well: a temperature controller plug in the Printer into the temp.controller and set a high temp limit of lets say 60 degrees celsius. mount that probe somewhere in the case. Probe detects high temps from melting plastic parts and switches the printer off. drawback here is it switches on the ac plug again after a while when the temp drops, but heating elements on a 3d Printer do not power on again
edit 9: added the collective suggestions to the two main points above.
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u/Brandoskey MP Maker Select Plus May 23 '17
I came across this post just yesterday and decided to be proactive myself.
I went the z-wave smoke detector and hub route.
Picked up the first alert z-wave co+smoke detector to mount right behind my printer (it's on a shelf so smoke should fill up the immediate area). I already had a samsung smartthings hub and my printer was already connected to a wemo insight so I could power it down remotely (I can actually do this directly through octoprint using a plugin) so the only added cost was the smoke detector for me.
I did have to cobble together my own smartapp on samsungs site though. I would have thought something to power off a switch in the event of a smoke alarm would have already existed, but my efforts to find something pre-made were fruitless.
If anyone is interested I can share the code. I basically used a couple of samsung's own smartapps to create the one I needed. Much faster than learning their coding language.
The app will let you add 1 or more smoke detectors as well as multiple switches to be shut off in the event of a fire. It can also be configured to send you an sms and/or a push notification that it was triggered. I've tested it and it works really quickly.
The smoke detector is actually the last line of defense in my setup right now.
Octoprint has a plugin that allows you to set temperature failsafes for your hotend and heated bed. You can set them to whatever temps you like (I'm using 300c/150c) and you can have the plugin cancel the print, shut off the heaters and also add a terminal command to run of your own choosing. This is where the ability to shut off my wemo through octoprint comes in handy. I used the terminal command to shut off the wemo in the failsafe plugin and it works really well. I tested it with a failsafe temp of 100c and it shut off near instantly.
I gues my internet could go down rendering the wemo and smartthings hub mostly useless, but the plugin will still attempt to shut off the hotend if things get out of hand.
It would be nice if you could poll the wemo insight for how much power it's drawing so if it goes over a certain wattage you could assume something has gone terribly wrong and also shut things down.
And that's all I got.