Printer profiles
Profiles saved here are selectable in the quote calculator. Ownership cost per hour is purchase price spread over lifetime plus maintenance; electricity is added per quote at your kWh rate. Everything is stored locally in this browser.
Printers
| Name | Watts | Purchase | Lifetime h | Maint. /h | Own. cost /h |
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How printer profiles feed your quotes
A profile captures what one hour of machine time costs you. The ownership part is purchase price ÷ expected lifetime hours + maintenance per hour — a €300 printer you expect to run 2000 h contributes €0.15/h in wear before it draws a single watt. Maintenance per hour covers nozzles, PEI sheets, grease and the occasional fan; €0.05–0.15/h is a sane range for a hobby machine. The table shows the combined ownership cost so you can sanity-check it before saving.
Electricity is deliberately not baked in. When you select a profile in the quote calculator, the power draw in watts is multiplied by the print hours and your kWh rate at quote time — that way one profile stays correct when tariffs change. Use the printer's average draw, not the power-supply rating: a 150 W bedslinger only peaks during heat-up, then settles well below that while printing. The electricity cost guide shows how to measure it.
On first visit a seeded “150 W bedslinger” preset appears as a starting point — edit it to match your machine or delete it. Profiles live in this browser's local storage, scoped to your active workspace, and are included in the JSON backup on the Quotes page.
Machine cost per hour in practice
Run the numbers on the seeded profile: €0.15/h ownership plus a 150 W average draw. A 10 h print accrues €1.50 of wear and consumes 1.5 kWh — €0.45 at a €0.30/kWh tariff — so the machine side of that print costs €1.95 before a gram of filament. Material is costed separately from spool price and weight, which the filament cost calculator works out; the quote calculator then combines both with labour, a failure-rate allowance and margin.
The same maths covers resin machines with two adjustments. Average draw is lower — typically 40–100 W for an MSLA printer, since only the UV array and electronics consume power — but wear shifts into the maintenance term: FEP films and LCD screens age per hour of exposure, so budget a few cents per hour above bare depreciation. The resin itself is priced from bottle price and volume with the resin cost calculator.
Keep one profile per machine and select the right one at quote time; identical farm machines can share a profile. Give lifetime hours an honest estimate — 2000 h is roughly three hours of printing a day for two years, so raise it for a lightly used machine and lower it for a workhorse that runs daily. For a per-hour figure without saving anything, the print time cost calculator runs the same calculation standalone.