Enclosing a printer changes what it can make. It changes what it costs to run far less than people assume, and the P1S is a good machine to prove that on, because its power figures come from plug meters rather than from arithmetic.
A real ABS job, costed
ABS is the reason to own this machine rather than its open-frame sibling, so here is an ABS job rather than a PLA one. A 240 g functional part, 14 hours on the plate, on a spool at $26/kg:
$15.01 in total. Filament is $6.24. Machine time at 50 cents an hour is $7.00. A 10% failure allowance — realistic for ABS, and pessimistic for PLA — adds $1.50. Electricity is 27 cents, from 1.54 kWh at 110 W and the US average rate.
Twenty-seven cents. On a 14-hour print. That is the number people are surprised by, and it is why guessing at the electricity term is a waste of worry while guessing at the failure rate is not. Adjust any of it in the cost calculator — the failure percentage is the input most worth being honest about.
The 850 W spike, and why it is not the story
Meter this printer from cold and you will see a figure in the region of 850 W for the first half a minute or so, as the bed drives hard toward temperature. Read that number off the display and you would conclude a 14-hour print costs several dollars in electricity.
It does not, because that draw lasts under a minute and then collapses. Steady-state printing settles far lower, and the average over the whole print is what the meter integrates and what your supplier bills. A transient is a fact about the wiring you need — do not share a weak extension lead with a kettle — and almost nothing about the cost.
What a passive chamber can and cannot do
There is no chamber heater in this machine. The enclosure is warmed by the bed and by the printer's own waste heat, which in practice means the air around the part sits somewhere well above room temperature but nowhere near a controlled figure.
That is enough for:
- ABS and ASA at sensible sizes, with the part-cooling fan turned down.
- PETG and filled PETG, which do not need it but do not mind it.
- Nylon blends that are filled with carbon or glass, where the fibre restrains contraction.
It is not enough for polycarbonate at any size that matters, or for unfilled nylon on a wide footprint. Those want a chamber held at a temperature rather than merely raised, which is a different class of machine — the Qidi X-Plus 3 and the Prusa CORE One both heat the chamber deliberately.
A warm chamber also sends heat upward into the toolhead, and that produces the commonest long-run complaint on this machine. When the filament goes soft before it reaches the part of the hotend that is supposed to melt it, the extruder has nothing rigid to push against and the print stalls — heat creep in full. The diagnostic is seasonal: if the same file ran fine in a cold room and jams at hour six now, that is the mechanism. Leaving the door ajar for the last stretch of a tall print is the field remedy.
The brass nozzle question
Like the panel-less version of this frame, the P1S ships with a soft nozzle. That is fine for ABS, PLA and PETG and wrong for anything with fibre in it. Since carbon-filled ABS is one of the more compelling reasons to own an enclosed machine, budget for a hardened nozzle in the purchase rather than after the first spool of ABS-CF has already reamed the stock one.
Where it sits against its own family
Against the flagship in the same line, the P1S gives up the lidar-based first-layer inspection, the higher bed ceiling and some quality-of-life. Against the open-frame machines below it, it gains the entire warping-prone half of the materials list. For most people who want to print ABS occasionally and everything else routinely, this is the machine in the range where the money stops buying capability and starts buying convenience.
Buy something else if you print exclusively PLA — the enclosure earns nothing, and an open machine with the same bed costs less to buy and slightly less to run. Buy up the range if first-layer verification on unattended overnight jobs is worth real money to you, which for a small business it often is.