I should have built this thing from the word go. I ran this printer for almost a year on my desk right next to my computer. But it was loud and smelly and the high traffic area played havoc on print quality and caused a lot of warping.
Now that it’s tucked away in a back room suspended in a corner by French cleats and sitting directly on top of dense foam and a big ass paver it is merely “audible” but certainly ignorable. There’s also no more headaches from the smell, and my print quality has never been better.
Do yourself and your printer a favor and get an enclosure sorted out asap.
A kind of related question, which bugged me for a while: what are the environmental temperature limits for a typical printer? Is it a viable option to keep it in the basement or garage? I’m wondering, because that would mitigate the noise, vibration and fumes issue.
I don’t live in the coldest place but it’ll hit -20s c at the coldest in the winter with -10 +/-5, summer is 30 +/-5. My garage isn’t climate controlled but not the largest, a space heater is enough to bring ambient up enough to be comfortable, certainly enough where the printer firmware doesn’t kick out on low temperatures.
I have enclosures so it helps some, mk3s doesn’t get super warm as it’s currently setup but I do regularly successfully print abs on it, petg and pla aren’t an issue at all, voron gets substantially warmer. Summer, enclosures need to be open to print pla depending how hot it is. Even with all that, I’d recommend it, I do it primarily for air quality reasons, I’ve printed abs indoors without an enclosure in the same room exactly once a long time ago, 0/10 don’t recommend.
I know a lot of people online talk about running them in garages and basements all the time. Hell one guy in Canada said he ran one out in a shed. So while I can’t share any hard numbers I think you would be fine.