Hotend and Heated Bed Temps dropping while printing

Hello everyone. I am brand new to 3D printing and just finished my MakerFarm I3 a few days ago. I am running into a problem where the temperatures of both my print board and the hot end are dropping while printing. While sitting still, both temperatures stay at the set temp. I am using a 12v 18amp ATX power supply. Everything was working fine until a few print attempts ago.

Any ideas?

My first thought is that if you're using a single power supply, it may not be able to handle the load of both heaters and your motors, etc.

Yeah Im thinking of going to the 30A power suppply and see what that does. I disconnected the fan on the extruder, and that seems to help a lot with keeping the temp in the right spot.

I hadn't thought about the fan. I've played around with cooling a little bit and have found that the bed is fairly sensitive to fans. My nozzle isn't bothered as much.

I had this problem when I started out with the same setup. It turned out that my no-name 400W ATX power supply was SUPPOSED to be supplying 20A on two separate 12V rails but was not. I switched to a $50 500W Antec which seems to be performing as rated. Punchline: generic power supply manufacturers may lie about their current rating.

Also make sure you're using BOTH 12V rails. Usually there is a high-current 4-connector Molex for a separate high-current 12V connection on a graphics card, which is (often) a separate rail from the 12V supply to hard drives and DVD drives. Some power supplies tell you which connectors are on which rails but they should generally follow that convention.

If you connect both 12V rails in parallel you should get the maximum current supply. I prefer to keep my heated bed on a separate rail.

Quote
papergeek
I had this problem when I started out with the same setup. It turned out that my no-name 400W ATX power supply was SUPPOSED to be supplying 20A on two separate 12V rails but was not. I switched to a $50 500W Antec which seems to be performing as rated. Punchline: generic power supply manufacturers may lie about their current rating.

Also make sure you're using BOTH 12V rails. Usually there is a high-current 4-connector Molex for a separate high-current 12V connection on a graphics card, which is (often) a separate rail from the 12V supply to hard drives and DVD drives. Some power supplies tell you which connectors are on which rails but they should generally follow that convention.

If you connect both 12V rails in parallel you should get the maximum current supply. I prefer to keep my heated bed on a separate rail.

Well Im still awaiting a thermistor replacement for one that I broke, but my power supply only has one 12v rail. So maybe that is one problem. I can get a 30A power supply on Amazon for like 28 dollars so I may try that if things aren't fixed when I get my thermistor in tomorrow.

Try Increasing the Wires (increase Quantity not the length), it will give you More Amps to flow so there will be sufficient power during printing, in case of Heated bed you need to go with higher amps PSU or connect another same power supply parallel to each other

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