InfillGuide
3D Printer Electricity Cost per Hour
Two inputs decide it: what your printer actually draws, and what your kilowatt hour costs. The answer is usually smaller than people fear and smaller than machine wear.
The formula
Cost per hour is average watts divided by 1000, times your price per kilowatt hour. A 130 watt printer at 0.30 per kWh costs 0.039 an hour, so a 3 hour 20 minute print costs 0.13 in power.
The word doing the work is average. A printer's nameplate figure is the peak draw with a cold bed and a cold chamber, and it is roughly double what the machine settles at once it is running. Pricing on the nameplate number overstates your electricity by about half, which sounds harmless until you notice it also makes every other line look smaller than it is.
What twelve printers draw
These are the average wattages Infill ships in its printer profiles, with the running cost worked out at a 0.30 tariff. Change the tariff in settings and every quote moves with it.
| Printer | Average watts | Per hour | Per 8 h print | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bambu Lab A1 | 110 W | 0.033 | 0.26 | 5 percent |
| Bambu Lab A1 mini | 85 W | 0.026 | 0.20 | 5 percent |
| Bambu Lab P1S | 130 W | 0.039 | 0.31 | 4 percent |
| Bambu Lab X1 Carbon | 145 W | 0.044 | 0.35 | 3 percent |
| Prusa MK4S | 80 W | 0.024 | 0.19 | 4 percent |
| Prusa MINI+ | 80 W | 0.024 | 0.19 | 5 percent |
| Prusa CORE One | 150 W | 0.045 | 0.36 | 3 percent |
| Creality Ender 3 V3 | 120 W | 0.036 | 0.29 | 10 percent |
| Creality K1 | 140 W | 0.042 | 0.34 | 7 percent |
| Elegoo Neptune 4 | 115 W | 0.035 | 0.28 | 9 percent |
| Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra | 35 W | 0.011 | 0.08 | 8 percent |
| Anycubic Photon Mono M7 | 65 W | 0.020 | 0.16 | 8 percent |
Resin machines draw the least by a wide margin: a masked LCD and a small vat heater are not a 60 degree bed. They also carry the highest maintenance figure, because the screen and the FEP are consumables with a known life.
Machine wear is the bigger number
Electricity is the line everyone asks about and the one that matters least. The machine itself costs more per hour, because a printer is a fixed cost being spread over a finite number of printing hours, and it needs parts along the way. Infill works that out as purchase price divided by expected lifetime hours, plus a maintenance figure per hour.
| Printer | Electricity per h | Depreciation and upkeep per h | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bambu Lab A1 | 0.033 | 0.090 | 2.7x |
| Bambu Lab P1S | 0.039 | 0.147 | 3.8x |
| Bambu Lab X1 Carbon | 0.044 | 0.240 | 5.5x |
| Prusa MK4S | 0.024 | 0.167 | 7.0x |
| Prusa CORE One | 0.045 | 0.196 | 4.4x |
| Creality Ender 3 V3 | 0.036 | 0.096 | 2.7x |
| Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra | 0.011 | 0.200 | 19.0x |
On the worked example on the home page, electricity is 0.13 of a 5.10 print and machine wear is 0.49. Both are dwarfed by ten minutes of your own time. If you are hunting for the line that decides your price, it is the labor line, every time.
Put your own tariff in once
Infill carries the wattage per printer and your price per kilowatt hour, then applies both to every quote.
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See where the money in a print really goes
Free on the App Store. No account, no advertising, no tracking.
Free on the App Store. iOS 17.0 or later, iPhone and iPad. No account, no advertising, no tracking.