Ender 5 Plus Power Supply: What You Need to Know!

well it finally happened the power supply in my ender five-plus has died and I am left with a dead printer well unfortunately I'm not the first one that have had this problem we've had multiple stories in the Facebook group of people that have had dead printers and have had to arm a their power supplies or replace it with a meanwhile power supply we've also had terrific videos from like tripods garage who showed us why his power supply died and the internals of it versus a mean well and then we had another video from th 3d who walked us through the differences between the two some power supplies as well as the different current draws in this machine well in this video I'm going to tell you my story about how my machine died I'm going to show you the internals of my power supplies and in the end I have a slightly different root cause than just a substandard Chinese power supply and I'm gonna tell you why I think that is as well as give you a solution to the problem that is slightly different than what others have offered that's what I'm doing right here today this is Kiersey fabrications let's go so after using this printer for six months why did my power supply finally die well let me tell you what was going on I had taken this printer indoors to do some mods on it because this time of year the garage is pretty cold and so I was changing out the hot end I had everything done and it was time to print a Vinci so I was printing my bench E and all of a sudden the printer just stopped it just shut down no smoke no theatrics or anything like that no fire but the printer just shut down so I had that sinking suspicion that that was pretty much the end of it went over to it switches were on everything was still good just would not power on the printer was dead so what was different about this situation that I think caused my printer to finally die well the only real difference between hive in printing and what I was doing then was the environment so out here in the garage we're talking days of 30 degrees Fahrenheit 40 degrees Fahrenheit it's been pretty cold out here and indoors 70 degrees Fahrenheit which you know about what we keep the heat on so I believe that what happened finally was that I had heated up this supply in the environment it was running in enough to finally burn it up that's just my theory I think it makes the most sense with the information I have that the temperatures just exceeded what this supply was finally able to handle so let's look at the supply let's look at how it burnt up and then we're going to do some more testing to show you what I found so here we are with the power supply that comes with the printer this is the Cheng Liang P 500 watt 24 volt power supply let's take a look at what I found when I pulled this apart well first of all there were some shaky components that had come loose and parts of components really and what I have here these two components right here are completely burnt to a crisp probably see them right there and they are toasty they are just completely burnt up which means that most likely they are beyond spec now I believe these are 2 thermistors they were designed to change the amount there it goes it's breaking some more yeah alright they were designed to regulate the current as this thing comes through here but as you can see they have been completely overused beyond spec so this was my first clue as to what was going on here now I will make the assumption because I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy that this power supply is built to spec to handle what the label said this thing does have certifications it is cen FCC certified this thing has not just been taken off of a floor and shoved out into this printer this thing actually has certifications which means it has been through testing but unfortunately these have burnt up so after I was done taking a look at this supply I wanted to get my printer back up and running again so I went and grabbed one of these Zil tech 24 volt 500 watt power supplies to just get my printer back up and running now when I did that I had the familiar smell that I had with this guy now opening this one up this is still a good supply I haven't done anything to it but you will find that in some ways it is similar to this guy they're not identical but you know they're built in similar ways and I will tell you I've been using these lil tech supplies without any problems I trust Zil tech as a supplier and why these are cheap supplies I mean you can get this guy for like 30 bucks off a Zil Tex website they aren't unreliable right if you run it at spec you shouldn't have any problems and I was smelling that immediate burning smell that I had smelled before on the Chang laying before it died so I immediately shut off the printer so these are two inexpensive supplies but again certifications and everything intact these should work cheap doesn't necessarily mean non-functional or crap it just means cheap and it may not have some of the features that something like a high-dollar Meanwell Supply has but they should perform up to spec so this is what I was thinking so let's take a look at this meanwhile supply while I have it here on the counter to compare it to so the Meanwell supply is chock-full of components you can definitely tell as others have shown this is a 600 watt meanwhile supply this is the 500 watt Chang Lang and you can tell sure these aren't in the same category these are not the same class of power supply but I'll tell you one thing that the meanwhile supply offers that this one doesn't this offers a certain amount of overload protection this has voltage protection over amperage protection it has overheat protection all of that built into the supply and in fact meanwhile even guarantees their supplies will work to a certain amount of over the rating now that's something these don't offer but meanwhile does and that's where some of this extra component tree comes from is you'll actually find logic chips in here where you don't see anything like that in these this actually has intelligence this actually is doing some checks to make sure the power supply is still healthy and as you can see this is a beefy power supply designed to put out much more power than what it's rated as because they have a warranty and they want to honor that warranty so for the final step in this process of finding out I did these less expensive supplies died I'm going to hook up my meanwhile supply back to my printer and we're gonna take a look at exactly how much power this printer is pulling when you do different kinds of operations on it so first things first let me show you the setup that we'll be using to test this this is a human power meter that I have set up that will measure various components of the electrical input it will measure things like voltage amperage and ultimately what I have it set on wattage which we can then use to compare to the power supply that we're running it against so what I have is the power supply is connected directly through this this is a 600 watt meanwhile power supply that is then hooked up to my end or five-plus printer I'm going to power on the printer as I power it on we will be able to watch how various components of the printer use energy so we'll be able to see when we power up the hot end how much wattage it uses how we power up the print bed how much it uses and in the end how much total power might we use on this printer and what size power supply do we need to actually power that so at this point we are obviously reading 0 the printer is not turned on so let me turn it on and find out what the base power consumption is of the printer so as you see when we first turn on the printer we're using about 20 watts of power obviously not much we're pretty much powering some fans and the electronics so next up let's heat up the hot end and see how much the power the hot end uses so at this point the hot end cuts on and we are almost at 70 watts so it is a 50 watt hot end that's how much power the hot end uses in order to heat up the filament up to the 200 or so degrees that we're looking for now finally let's turn on the bed while the hot end is heating up to see how much power that uses so we really really jump up at this point so we are looking at a heat bed that consumes about 500 watts of power all by itself we jumped up from about 70 watts to about 570 watts just turning on the heat bed which means that technically this is an almost 600 watt printer now keep in mind one thing I want to mention is that we are consuming 600 watts now this is to the wall the actual components may be using a little bit less because there's some inefficiencies in the power supply but that's going to be pretty close to actual printer consumption it's definitely how much we're pulling from the wall now I compared this to the numbers that th 3d pulled off of his when he was actually testing each of the individual components through the DC lines he was getting about 427 watts off of just the bed and he was getting 700 watts total give or take a little bit off of the whole printer so my numbers and his numbers really line up to support the fact that this is somewhere in the neighborhood of a 600 watt printer maybe all the way up to 700 depending on which supply you use because again depending on the power supplies there may be different levels of efficiency I did similar tests to this with my Zil tech power supply and I did find the Zil tech power supply actually did use somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 Watts again lower end power supply not quite as efficient as the 600 watt power supply that I'm using now so now that we know how much power that this is going to use under full load let's take a look at a few options that are available for replacement power supplies now all three of the options I'm about to present are meanwhile power supplies and there's actually a couple of good reasons for that number one I find that they're readily available you can find them on Amazon you can find them from many other retailers and they should be available around the world number two these power supplies offer a lot of protections and a lot of features versus a lot of the cheaper generic power supplies for example all the ones I'm going to be talking about today have short circuit overload over voltage and over temperature protection standard as part of these supplies which means that you're going to be a lot safer with these supplies because if something goes wrong internally hopefully the supply will catch it and shut down ahead of time before we burn anything up and potentially cause a fire so let's look at the three options that I found these are options that have either been recommended by others or that I have found myself as I go through these power supplies I'm gonna put the spec sheets up over here so that you can follow along with what I'm talking about the first supply we're looking at is the Meanwell SD 450 series and this is a 450 watt power supply spec now looking at the data sheet we see that this power supply has an overload of 105 to 150 percent of rated output that means theoretically according to their specs you should be able to run this power supply at least for some amount of time up to 150 percent of the spec which is going to be 675 watts if you do the math now the problem I have with using this supply is that you're going to be running at that 600 watts which is 150 watts more than spec most of the time or at least a relatively large percentage of the time while this printer is running I mean think about it the bed itself uses 500 watts or so which means you are immediately over spec anytime that beds heating up so I really don't like the idea of running a 450 watt power supply on something that is going to be constantly over running 450 Watts now according to the spec sheet I think you're going to be fine running it I don't know since you're overloading it how it's going to decrease the life of that power supply or even how that affects your warranty that's not specified here but that's my opinion the next one is the meanwhile our SP 500 series this is the supply that is being recommended bike reali it's the replacement being sold on their website as well as being recommended in multiple forums that I follow now again at 500 watt spec we're already at peak just running the bed now obviously once our hot end kicks in we're we're way over at that point we're good 70 watt so perspec at that point according to the spec sheet we can run out of overload power of 105 to 130 percent of rated power which puts us at about 650 watts now again we should be able to run at 650 watts or up to it but we're still pushing the limits of what that power supply is meant to handle at 650 watts we would be a hundred fifty watts over its rating and we would be at peak maximum output power which is really going to be taxing that supply again with all the safety features maybe it would shut itself down before we'd have any damage to the supplier before we'd have any electrical problems but still not something that I really want to do to a power supply I believe that the spec value is there for a reason and you really shouldn't exceed it if you have a choice now the last supply that I've got here is a Meanwell SE 600 series supply now this one is rated again with an overload value of a hundred and five to a hundred twenty five percent of rated value which puts us at a peak maximum of 750 watts way over what I what we need for this printer and the 600 Watts puts us right at what we need which means that stop we won't be over pushing that power supply aney we saw from the testing that the pulled power for this printer is 570 watts using that supply you'll notice that this power supply is not a stock form factor and that's something to definitely take into account when you're buying a replacement supply so the 500 watt the 450 watt will fit into this chassis they're pretty much drop-in replacements you might want to drill some extra holes if they don't line up but if you do buy the 500 watt from crowding it does line up with the side of the chassis and you're done now as I said it's up to you if you want to overload or overcurrent those power supplies again according to the spec sheets you're still within a safe range I don't know what you're going to do to the overall life of that power supply though so just keep all that in mind it's the easier solution but in my opinion it is not the best solution so that's why I bought the 600 watt power supply for myself so as I mentioned this is not going to fit in the chassis I will turn this over real quick we'll take a look at how it fits you'll see that it's not gonna fit inside and then while we've got it turned over I'll show you how I chose to wire this power supply up now I found that the easiest way to get to the components in this box is not flipping the printer over now you can sure do that but you could mess with your alignment you could damage something about your carriages and I really don't like to worry about that so following along with like what I saw on tripods garage I think that this is by far the easiest way to get to these components if you'll simply pull those four screws out to on the front and two on the back then you can get to this box without too many problems and flip it over so once you get it flipped over its pretty easy then you can get the bottom off under your fan plug now you have access to all of the electrodes and again I've already done the mods on mine because I had to figure it out obviously before I did this video but the original power supply went right back here you might be able to see the original mounting holes here and the switch port goes right here so this went here all of the wires came back towards this area and attached here now as I said if you get the 450 watt or the 500 watt replacement it is a simple swap go watch th 3ds video they have a very good instruction about how to swap out these power supplies and not mess up your wiring but if you're going to go with the 600 watt supply you're going to have a problem this is not going to fit in this chassis and even if you decided I'm going to extend all of my wires I'm going to make everything sit flush I'm gonna find a way because theoretically it it fits then you still may run into a heating problem because what you're going to be doing is you're going to be taking all of the he that this power supply generates and dumping it possibly onto this board or if you find a way to do it this way you're gonna be dumping it one way or the other as this power supply heats up it's gonna be in your chassis with your electronics it's probably not a good idea so I decided against that for my installation now if you're not going to install it inside the box you still have to get the wires to it so that's where I came up with the idea of simply running the wires to the back of the chassis now hopefully you can see this here and here I've gone in here and I've drilled two 3/4 inch holes that go right here and then out of each side I've pulled the necessary wires so on this side are my DC wires these are the ones going to components and on this side are my AC wires these are the ones coming from my switch and from my wall plug here so you can see if I mount it this way see I'm sorry if you mount it this way these DC plugs all go on this side AC plugs will go to this side and everything Mouse nicely now I am pulling these wires pretty much to the max limits I have verified that I'm not over pulling them or putting too much stress on any of these connectors but mine barely reach now if you go for this mod there's a possibility that you are going to have to replace some of these wires if they don't quite reach but anyway this I've done it I'm probably popping up here on the screen showing me drilling these holes and then after you drill these holes you'll need some grommets to put around in these holes in order to keep the wires from being cut by the sharp metal now these are simple assorted grommets that you can buy as you can see they come in different sizes the ones I used are the 7/16 by 3/4 it fits a 3/4 inch opening goes to at 7/16 hole at that point I could pull all my wires through here a tip when you're installing a grommet boil these or at least place them in some real hot water first they will soften up really nicely because they're just rubber and then they'll fit in the way that supposed to then you can pull the wires through I hope that helps now let's get this all buttoned back up flip back over mounted and I'll show you what I have planned for the rear of this chassis so everything's buttoned up on the inside now let's take a look at how I plan on mounting this power supply to the chassis so I have spent the past couple of days iterating on these designs and I wanted something that would add safety to this supply as well as be easy to install now please ignore any print quality issues with these these were printed fast because like I said I've been making a lot of prototypes these have been designed to make it easy to take in and out any of the wires as well as we able to slide on these wonderful little protectors that this employee comes with you just slide these in the side I'll show you that in a minute when I get it installed now do the way I designed these you can either put your wires on first and then slide on the covers and attach them or you can put these on first and then attach the wires I'm gonna just show you the way I find it most convenient to attach this and then we'll go from there [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so there it is all installed the custom design mounting bracket for the SC 600 power supply designed it obviously for this printer so that you can get the wires in the right side and everything but obviously you could use this for anything that had aluminum extrusions and you wanted to mount this power supply and had a couple of design goals in mind obviously I wanted to make sure it was safe first and foremost with these electrical components exposed on the front and back it could be a hazard you want to keep these covered comes with these nice plastic strips in here that I showed installing please reinstall those on yours because it keeps you from sticking your finger in here particularly on this backside which is the AC side these wires are going to be live AC you need to make sure they're covered by using this it should limit the chance of you sticking your fingers or anything else in here since the only place you could really get in would be this direction and that's facing the printer obviously no warranty implied or Express whatever they say no warranty on this but this should make this a lot safer obviously the other thing I was looking for is making sure I was maintaining good airflow so we've got these grilles on the front and back they should keep you from blocking it should keep anything from getting stuck in here and hindering the airflow of this power supply and keeping it cool I will of course be releasing this on Thingiverse and you can download it from there directly and I will also release my step files for this in case you want to make any modifications or if you get this power supply in something's off a little bit that you can fix it yourself now that it's all installed let's go ahead and sum up this video and see where this leaves us so now that we've repaired the printer now that it has a good power supply on it where does that leave the Ender five plus in my book let's start there well the Ender five plus is still a terrific printer I'm still getting good prints out of it the bench II that was on it while it died turned out really good as far as it made it so the under five plus is still a good framework now obviously I've determined that there is a fatal flaw with the electrical design of this printer and I don't see any way anyone's gonna get around replacing the power supply on this printer anymore I once thought that this was a quality control issue one that would hopefully get worked out or at least one that Crowley would be taking care of via warranties but I have to wonder if this going to be an ongoing problem without a replacement of this power supply now Crowley of course could decide to go with a Meanwell 500 which will give them that leeway to stop the power supplies from dying I still believe that this needs a 600 watt power supply maybe they can find a cheaper alternative to the meanwhile that's rated for 600 that's always an option I'm going to send this video link to creati directly see what they say see if they're gonna make any changes after they see what I've done and after they see what I found I don't know what to expect I'm going to include a link to this video as an addendum to the review and preview of this printer that I've already put here on YouTube I'm also going to put up a card if I can on those videos to link people over here I still believe all of the information I put in those videos unfortunately there's a big addendum here with what we know now of this power supply so I'm going to include those in the description and as a card because I don't want people to be caught off guard if at all possible now if you've had to make these changes to your printer if you've put a power supply on it please let us know in the description how that's worked out for you put if you put one of th three DS 450s if you put a 500 on here from Meanwell let us know how those are doing if you're still running a stock power supply let us know how long you've been running it it's good for the community to know what other experiences people are having not just mine and not just in the the Facebook groups but you know hopefully a wider audience now if you want to make these changes yourself if you like my 600 mod I'm going to include a link to all of the parts in the description of this video I will of course have some screws I will have the power supply itself and I will have the grommets and hole saw you need to modify the printer itself if this is something you do I will also include a link to that 500 watts of power supply that I've talked about and if you are interested in watching th 3ds or tripods garage videos I will include a link to those as well because again those guys had some terrific content about the state of this power supply in the end this is a video that I really didn't want to have to make but unfortunately did need to make I know a lot of you visit this channel for information on this printer and now that I have seen the problem myself I was able to debug it myself and these are my findings again this video represents my opinion on this I am NOT an electrical engineer if you have any further questions or need more of an authoritative answer on any of this please check out the advice from an electrician or an electrical engineer they can help you out further again thanks for joining me here on this channel thanks for following along with me as I work with my under five plus I still have lots more content coming with the under-five plus as well as some other printers and projects thanks again this has been Chris for Kiersey fabrications see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 33,192

Keywords: ender 5 plus power supply, ender 5 plus, ender-5 plus, ender 5 plus review, creality ender 5 plus, meanwell power supply ender 5 plus, power supply, power supply failure, power supply mounting, power supply mounting bracket, power supply mounting kit, 3d printer power supply, 3d printer power supply upgrade, meanwell power supply, 3d printer power consumption

Id: 2NIcugy7p5k

Length: 29min 29sec (1769 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020