A6 Heated Bed Insulation Retaining Clip

thingiverse

Clips to hold foam-board insulation securely in place at the bottom of the Anet A6 heated bed. IMPORTANT: If you proceed with this project, you will be placing potentially flammable and electrically conductive material close to or directly on the electrically-powered heated print bed of your printer. VERY BAD THINGS could happen (such as electrical shorts and fire). I've been running this modification for a few months, printing PLA, PETG, and TPU at bed temperatures up to 70C without any problems. That said, please use common sense for your application. If you do not understand the risks and accept the sole responsibility for this modification, please DO NOT PROCEED. Thank you. I wanted to insulate my Anet A6 heated bed so it was easier to achieve and maintain the set temperature, consequently reducing the workload of the power supply. I liked the idea of a simple foam-board sheet as an insulator (with aluminum foil on it as a radiant heat reflector) because it's lightweight, inexpensive, and easy to make. I needed a way to hold it in place without using glue or something permanent. I also wanted a way to install and remove all of it without disassembling my printer. With this design, you only need to remove one spring-tensioned screw to put the insulation into position. The retaining clips go into place without any disassembly (assuming you have a reasonable gap between the bed and the carriage assembly). DOES IT WORK? The foam-core insulation (with foil) works well. With no insulation and a room temperature of 26 C, the heated bed was "on" 45.8% of the time to maintain a 70 C bed temperature. Repeating the test with the insulation in place, the heated bed was only "on" 31.5% of the time. Note: That data was collected by printing the same object twice. The heater "on" time was monitored/measured for a 12-minute period, starting at about 25% print completion. The heater-on time was divided by the elapsed time to get the percentage.