What is a reliable way to calculate cost of filament usage per part?

Hi all,

I was wondering what would be a good way to calculate the cost of filament usage for a certain printed part. Can you just weigh the part on a scale and derive the cost from the weight and cost of the full reel (given the weight mentioned on the suppliers website is accurate)? Or does some weight of the filament get lost during printing (fumes etc)?

Thanks in advance,

Niles

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2013 06:08PM by Nilez.

Skeinforge has a module called statistic that lets you input material and machine cost and then calculates cost per part. It doesn't factor in fumes, but I feel like a significant proportion of the fumes are just water vapor. Weighing it sounds pretty accurate too, although you wouldn't know until after you've printed it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2013 09:02PM by BrianC.

My "go to" slicing routing is Repetier Host with Slic3r. When I plate something up ready for printing and hit the slice button, it tells me how much filament I'm about to use. I don't know how accurate it is but I have used this figure in the past to get a ballpark figure on how much the part will cost. In most cases the cost is so low that the error isn't worth factoring in unless I'm about to print high volumes.

Ok thank you guys! I'll try the different methods and compare them.

I use the Skeinforge module ('statistic') and looking at how it calculates the cost, its how I would do it. Basically it comes down to something like:

( (cost / mass) x material density x extuded volume [calculated] ) + (cost of electricity / hour) x print time [calculated]

My only gripe is with the hardcoded '$' symbol. I prefer to see my costs in '£' rather than dollars but providing you enter your costs as your local currency it will give you a fairly accurate cost for your build

By the way, you can change the cost of your material or running cost in the preview window when Skeinforge has finished slicing.

Thanks Setherith. Those programmer(s) of Skeinforge certainly knew how to throw in a lot of cool features in one program

It was written by one person: Enrique Perez from Canada.

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Awesome people in this community, respect!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2013 06:20PM by Nilez.

I have a problem that still has something to do with Statistics, and there are two file attachments from the Text Document Statistics, the first is the file 'box 2', the figures showed the number of materials cost $ 0, while the 'minimug', shows the figure $ 0.01 . Though the file 'box 2' model size larger than 'minimug'. Why is this so? How do I fix it so that shows the actual numbers? Thank you.

Load the gcode file into pronterface and it will summarise the print job...including length of filament used.

(Cost of reel / length of reel) x job filament length.
$30/100m = 30c per metre.
"Cube" will use 6.75m...therefore job cost $2.02 of filament...+ tax, shipping, markup, power, and layers fees in case makerbot have a patent pending on the cube. Should come in at about $43.95

:-)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2014 04:16AM by ShaneH.