Heated enclosure plus cooled motors

I have been looking at enclosures for my Taz 6, both actively heated (reptile heater) and passively heated (build tray only). I like what I am reading in terms of the reduction in part warping. However, one item that I would like to address is the hot environment since that’s not great for the stepper motors. Therefore I’m looking at peltier coolers (digikey, adafruit, etc.) that I would stick on the steppers. In addition I would pick up several temperature sensors and attach them to the steppers, plus one in the build environment. I work in a lab so I would control everything using a National Instruments chassis and a switching power supply I have lying around, plus a simple labview program to display and control everything. Before I start ordering parts to do all of this I have a few questions:

Has anybody experimented with peltier coolers before? Thoughts/recommendations?

How hot is hot enough to minimize part warping? I gather from reading a bunch of posts that maybe 40 C is sufficient. The stepper motor data sheet says 50 C is the maximum acceptable ambient environment so I consider that to be a hard upper limit.

Does the enclosure need to be vented? (I mainly print ABS but will probably move to other materials eventually). Does the venting cause drafts that increase warping? Passive or active venting?

Any other parts that I need to be concerned with overheating if the build environment is closed and heated?

I have a fairly cool and drafty basement and I built a make shift three piece cardboard enclosure a while back after I was having problems printing ABS. Before each print I blast a heat gun into the chamber while the printer does it’s auto leveling thing and that’s it. The heated bed and hot end do a decent job of keeping the chamber warm enough to prevent failures. I have a Lulzbot Mini

I was looking at getting a Taz 6 and thinking about what it would take to build an enclosure. I really appreciate the easily removable enclosure on my mini so I was thinking of doing something similar (more professional though) for the Taz. For the Z and Y axis motors, you can just vent them to external air if you 3d print shrouds. The X axis and extruder motors may need some extra cooling. Peltier coolers sound like a good idea, but you’d probably be better off just slapping a heat sink on either motor instead. I’d imagine you’d need one anyway to make the peltier cooler work in the first place.

As far as venting, there shouldn’t be a need to vent unless the enclosure it too hot. My leaky enclosure seems to do the trick.

That’s awesome that all it takes it cardboard! I’m a big fan of cheap and effective solutions so I think I will try to copy your experiment and see what happens. After reading your comment I started looking into how peltier coolers work on a bunch of different websites and it seems like every practical application does require one, so thanks for saving me from myself. It looks like a peltier cooler without a heatsink ends up getting really hot and barely removing any heat from the hot side, since they’re super inefficient.

So now it looks like a heatsink is a better solution, maybe something like these:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2247241
https://www.ebay.com/i/252820021388?chn=ps&dispItem=1

Perhaps you could rig up some kind of cool air delivery for the X axis motor using bellows like the ones in the link below. Hopefully i’ve attached a picture of the enclosure I was envisioning. Both the blue parts at the front and back would be stand alone pieces just sitting next to the machine. The less contact they have the more they’ll dampen the sound. The green section is a little 3d printed fan duct that’s fixed to the machine which supplies cool air to the left side z axis motor and the bellows (orange) which supplies air to the x axis motor. The y axis motor and right z axis motor are already adjacent to ambient air sources.


Or you know… you could water cool everything using RGB kit like they do on Linus Tech Tips :open_mouth:

Just remember Active heat + Active cooling = Condensation.