I am running modified TAZ5 with stock bed heater and Rambo board. I am wondering if there is a way to upgrade bed heater to something that can heat up bit faster. I am printing ABS which requires 100+C. It takes around 10+ minutes to heat up to 100deg. I ran the PID tweak tool, but still it remains the same. So obviously heater is not strong enough. its 24V 360W silicone heater.
Could I upgrade the heater to some 500W or so ? or is the new Etched modular print bed any better (also compatible with Rambo )?
10 minutes to heat to 100°C is normal.
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No. Taz 5 power supply is a 500w power supply. So, if you were only heating the bed, and not running anything else, it would still be at maximum output to try and heat a 500w heater. 360w into the bed, 40w into the nozzle, and that leaves a few watts and overhead to operate the control board and motors.
Past that, it doesn’t matter how you put 360w into the bed, thermodynamics is pretty strict at that point. You can decrease the mass of the bed (reducing thermal stability) or increase the starting heat in the bed by preheating sooner, or putting it in a warmer room.
What I would do is purchase an AC powered heater element like this one. There may be other comparable products that might be cheaper.
My first thought would be to add a manual switch and place this heater on top of the existing bed. It should speed up the initial warm up and when the bed temp gets close to the correct temp, turn it off and remove it. The existing heater can then maintain the desired temperature.
You could, of course, replace the existing heater with this one. If the supplied thermistor is compatible, you would only need an AC relay which I think you could control with the existing DC heater wiring.
The PID control for heating the bed will pulse at a very fast frequency and modify the duty cycle of the square wave, so a mechanical relay would probably not work well.
The 120V heating element is the way to go, but you’ll want something like this to control the AC with the 24V DC signal: Amazon.com: CG Solid State Relay SSR-25DA DC to AC Input 3-32VDC To Output 24-480VAC 25A Single Phase Plastic Cover… : Industrial & Scientific
