My nephew is staying with me for a few days and I'd like to send him home with a few prints for him and his young siblings that they'd love playing with but would drive any adults nearby to the brink of madness.

So far I have a few little whistles but I'm not sure how long they could keep that up.

Ages 5 - 7. Any suggestions?

I've been monitoring my power consumption as I am the cause of the largest part of our electricity bill with my computers, servers and since some time now with my 3D printers. The main reason that I'm making this post is because I'm curious how other people think about at this, and to share my findings about power usage of my devices.

I own a Ender 3 V3 SE, a Creality Space Pi dryer and since this week a Bambu Lab P1S (Combo). You'll find my measurements below.

I know that electricity is not as costly in every country. And a lot of people probably don't care about it at all while printing. Reasons for that might be "that hobby's are expensive" or that "it's expected to use a lot of power". But I am sure that there are more people in this subreddit that actually do care about their power bill and try to optimize it. I'd like to know how you think about this.

I'm also curious if people who offer their printer as a service (or sell printed objects), also calculate the energy costs with their service/items. For longer prints, this can of course be a couple of €/$.

I've measured the power consumption my devices. As expected, the Creality Space Pi dryer uses quite some power. Between 250 and 300 watt. Once it reaches the set temperature, it drops back to about 7 watt. Then it will continue to start/stop heating as required. It then sits anywhere between 90 and 300 watt to keep the set temp.

The Bambu P1S was using about 70 / 80 watt while printing. This is not bad at all to be honest. At first when I started prints, it starts to heat up the bed and nozzle, and peaks to about 800 wats for a short moment, till it reached the desired temperatures. But while printing, 70 to 80 was not bad.

The Creality Ender 3 V3 SE takes longer to heat up. While it's heating the bed it sits around 300 watt, when it's heating the nozzle it's about 70. While printing though, it seems to be between 120 and 180 watt. This surprised me. As I was expecting the P1S to use more power than this machine. I don't know if this is normal or not. I could understand that the P1S needs to use less power to heat the nozzle or bed as it has an enclosure and doesn't nearly lose as much heat as the Ender does. But using more than 2 times as much power was quite a surprise for me.

Well, like I said, I just wanted to share my measurements and am curious to how other people handle printing while keeping the power usage in mind. Maybe you don't think about it at all, or maybe you care a lot about it and only print while the sun is shining (with solar panels). Let me know your ideas about this.