SAFETY WARNING!!!! TAZ 5 burns

My TAZ 5 just caught on fire!! Luckily the house has smoke alarms and the fire was mostly the current print item and the X-carriage ABS burning. I’ll post some pics. I had just swapped hot ends so I’m sure the stock TAS 5 is not a risk, but please make sure a fire extinguisher is handy. I was also printing at 260 degrees, but the ABS would not flow below that so I suspect the termistor was off. No damage was done to anything but the printer itself, except a little soot on the ceiling. However, if I had had not extinguished the fire there is a good chance the ceiling could have burned eventually. Flames roses 3-4 feet above the print bed, which was on a table. Once again I think I did something wrong and do not think the TAZ is unsafe, just make sure you can put out burning plastic if necessary!!

This is the second time smoke alarms have saved my house from burning. Several years ago I had a Lipo explode while charging, catching the table it was sitting on on fire. If you dont have smoke alarms, please get them. Its very cheap safety for you and your family.

David

Good idea about the fire extinguisher. I have a fire & smoke detector behind my printer and will be mounted in the upcoming enclosure. The detector is hooked to my home automation, so it shuts off power to the printer and texts / emails me…

Now you’ve got me thinking about junking the plastic enclosure idea and going with a fire retarding foam board… Or lay up some carbon fiber on the interior of the enclosure. I do all my prints from the comfort of my couch through Octoprint. So the more protection the better.

I think the heater pulled out of the hotend. I had that happen once before and it quickly got cherry red and the firmware still thought the temp was ok. There is watchdog code in Marlin but I never used it. I;m going to take a look to see if it would catch this condition. In spite of trying to heat the temp would be dropping for more than a few seconds.
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I cemented my heater in with thermal conductive epoxy. It’s the stuff computer nerds use to glue heatsinks to components and comes as a 2-part epoxy. Perhaps this can help prevent these issues.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100013&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC--pla--Thermal+Compound+%2f+Grease-_-N82E16835100013&gclid=CjwKEAiApYGyBRC-g_jIstuduV8SJABCEzhZ3oy_ss5Pk7I9CzT0q8M42w8Lomrkoyvoaef70SfK1BoCfzTw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Well the remedy would be to check the grub screw… Loctite if necessary… And make sure the wires have a bit of slack.

Yes it would. You can take a look on latest Marlin (See this thread, it stops heating if the temperature doesn’t rise a couple of degrees after heating has started. A real reason to upgrade the FW, in my opinion…

There is a section on the RepRap forums ( http://forums.reprap.org/list.php?392 ) about such issues and others posting about fires. Lots of good ideas going around from smoke detectors to secondary thermister to a power cutoff system (in case of thermal runaway) and even self fire extinguishers that hang over your printer and release if they detect fire.