Yes, very common use case. I print things remotely from home on the printers at the office all the time, as do many of my colleagues. Probably not a common use case for people with at-home printers, but if you use them professionally people do it all the time. That said, you probably don't want bambu's cloud if you're working on protected IP...

Closer to 200C. But the gantry constraints movement, the 200C nozzle can only really touch its holder, the print bed, the filament and some metal or silicon cleaning surfaces. None of those are flamable at those temps.

Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model

All of the fires I've heard about 3d printing involved sketchy power supplies in some of the printers or DIY builds out there. Thermal runaway protection is really easy code to write and very common in firmware and the thermal design of the heated parts makes it hard to get there.

Not saying fires don't happen that way but let's say it's a failure mode that is a challenge to achieve intentionally much less accidentally.

Thermal runaway protection does not help in certain failure modes.

Failed FET for instance. They tend to fail "on". Unless you have a highside FET shutting off the power (and that may fail too).

On my printer I have software watchdogs but I also have an entire "dumb" (no MCU) circuit that will shut off a large relay that goes to my heaters if any of it's failsafes are triggered. I have a smoke detector, secondary thermistors, etc.

There are a bit more things in the way of thermal fuses and heaters that are less likely to runaway on the newer commercial printers but I still think people need to take the risk more serious.

I have been building printers and printing since 2011 and I still prefer to not have my printer in my house where the family sleeps, even with the failsafes. It lives out in the shop with plenty of room around/above it in case of a fire.

It could be enough if the nozzle just stops moving while touching the model being printed - based on the type of material, it might start burning.

And if you want to be outright malicious, you can disable maximum temperature control and do the same with much hotter nozzle rammed into the model - and even print an extra burnable model when you are at it!

Or count on the power supply or the wiring catching fire instead due to overload.

That isn’t a significantly different risk from how you are required to use a FDM printer, regardless of circumstance.

Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.

And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.

The main board of my 3D printer short-circuited and caught fire once. I don't know what would have happened if I wasn't around, but I'm not leaving my printer running on its own without supervision.

We built an enclosure fort our printers from a metal storage rack & added active ventilation that suck out any fumes outside the building. Still, you need to physically get there, check the bed is clean & start the print manually.

There are are also regular software checks for overheating or thermistor wiring failing & we know they are there and are enabled as we built the Marlin firmware ourself from source (which is quite easy once you properly configure it). Not to mention we are sure we are the ones in control over the firmware.

We also have a bunch of web cameras watching the printers print that we can monitor remotely.

3D printers aren't the fire hazards of yore. They're quite reliable, fused, with multiple interlocks for various conditions (mainly around heating not matching expected rate) that will kill power.

The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.

Straight propaganda. Printers have burned down apartments in the last five years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anycubic/comments/1j4kfsr/guys_just...

Anycubic is a poor quality brand that doesn't really go through the engineering effort to design good quality stuff. These types of printers definitely still exist, no doubt.

But, it's not really straight propaganda that the well designed machines (Bambu, Prusa, and many other vendors) don't have these issues.

You can find equally alarming statements about all sorts of other poor quality goods.

When I was at the fruit company I became aware of multiple phones starting house fires. Their lawyers would immediately gag the victims and offer $$$$. IIRC it was close to 1 every fortnight I was there.

I have never had an issue with fire with one of my machines, but I have had 3 or 4 of them fail because they detected inconsistencies with their thermistor, immediately removing voltage from heating elements until they can be convinced that the problem has been resolved.

IIRC Some enders shipped with a faulty marlin firmware that had faulty thermal shut off code, and you used to receive a pamphlet with the printer to update the firmware immediately. I suspect that a lot of people simply did not.

Dont know what this bloke did, but between anycubic and the kind of person who carries a flaming 3d printer in his arms, something went very wrong.

Pretty common for us to leave the printer unattended. The prints are 8 h or more at times and I’m definitely not watching the device. During that time I might be asleep or out of the house. I’ve never actually started a print from outside but that’s not from a safety standpoint just I’ve never needed to.

At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.

My P1S has a camera built into it. If the print begins to fail, I can stop the printer and turn off the heat immediately before anything spirals. Very easy and convenient to remote control from my phone.

Does your house have an HVAC system? Water heater?

I would never compare an inexpensive 3d printer to a household device which is designed to last decades.

It is closer to a toaster or an oven than a water heater or HVAC.

Also...my last lease specifically said that I was not allowed to use the washer/dryer or oven when I was not home. So it is not a stretch to believe that the property owners will use those types of agreements to go against you when the insurance company denies your claim (this does and has happened with 3d printer fires).

All that being said...I have run 135hr prints unattended on my printers (not bambu). The risk may be low but it is not zero and it certainly higher than a water heater or HVAC.

I do this occasionally, but am fine with using Bambu's integrated Slicer and Remote Control software. It works well enough.

These people exist.

That's what homeowner's insurance is for. I often run my printer when I'm not home.

Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire, and takes years to pay out in many cases. I really hope your disaster recovery plan is "insurance'll fix it".

> Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire,

Why wouldn't it? Unless you don't have enough coverage, it should cover all losses fully. Literally the point of insurance. You may not properly claim everything lost, but that's on you. Insurance claims 101: giving a very clear itemized list of everything lost in an insurance claim.

> and takes years to pay out in many cases.

Years? Why would it take years? Maybe 6-12 months, but you can get claims rolling relatively quickly. Most of the time is probably going to be your time spent itemizing all the stuff lost.

When the risk of a printer catching on fire and burning down your house is very, very low, why wouldn't you rely on insurance? You have the draw the line somewhere.

> That's what homeowner's insurance is for

This mentality is baffling to me. No, insurance isn't there so you can knowingly do risky things, it's there in case something accidentally happens.

Would you say the same about juggling chainsaws? "That's what health insurance is for"?

Absolutely crazy to me

Driving down the street is risky. Owning a home is risky. It's all a matter of degrees, and insurance doesn't deny coverage for 3D printers, QED that's what it's for.

I don't run prints when I'm not home. I have a fire suppression system in my H2S, and I had one with my A1. You only need it to fuck up once, and your house is toast.

I think this sort of person definitely exists

There are people who are simply careless

There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment

There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do

There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them

Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...

I don't know, do people exist who will run 220 V wiring through their house, even though a few mm of plastic separate the two wires from conflagration? Who use devices running on thousands of volts, with mere inches separating their hands from death?

Perhaps one or two.

I would have never done this 10 years ago with the garbage printers that were pieced together like science projects rather than finished products.

But a modern enclosed bambu printer is a much better engineered device. Bambu is mature enough as a company that they've issued formal recalls for device issues before. This would never happen with the aliexpress specials that used to dominate the market.

Bambu printers (and other reputable modern printers) are being run unattended at scale all the time without issue.