Price: $130
Manufacturer: Sunlu
Link: store.sunlu.com/products/sunlu-ams-lite-heater-upgraded-your-bambu-lab-ams-lite
Drying filament for 3D printing wasn’t on my radar till recently, so as a happy user of my Bambu Lab A1 and AMS Lite I was excited to get my hands on Sunlu’s AMS Lite Heater. It’s simple to assemble, easy to use, and keeps your filament dry while you print, but it only works with Bambu’s AMS Lite.
Unlike standalone heating cabinets, Sunlu’s AMS Lite Heater integrates with Bambu’s hardware so you have a fully enclosed AMS Lite that can dry filament before and during printing. Assembly looked easy at first and became a little daunting as I realized that I basically had to split the AMS apart and squish a Sunlu unit in the middle. In reality, it only took changing out a few screws and plugging in two wires. The AMS is still powered by the printer so you can print without heating and use the heater with the printer powered off. Apart from a couple of screw holes not quite lining up (and a fussy plastic cover to replace), it’s an elegant integration.
The unit has six preset temperature and humidity settings for PLA, PETG, TPU, ABS, PA (Nylon), and PC (Polycarbonate), plus the ability to manually set the temperature between 35°C–70°C and set the humidity between 25%–50%. A timer can be set and defaults to 6 hours of heating, but after that will switch on at 50% humidity to bring it back to your target value. The unit was warm to the touch during operation, but not enough to burn. And importantly it didn’t leak heat into my office. It was also fairly quiet.
Quality-wise, I didn’t see a huge improvement to my prints, but I also haven’t typically had a big problem with humidity where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, in more humid areas you may see more of a benefit, especially since the heater continues to dry the filament as you print.
You will want to leave some space to the side of the machine to load and remove filament. The heater doors need space to fold down and with the relatively short Bambu PTFE tubes I found myself turning the whole unit to access the side facing the printer.
Because the filament spools are enclosed and heated together, it may not be ideal if you keep different types of filament loaded in the AMS, like I typically do. Different materials need different temperatures, so heating a spool of PETG to its recommended temperature could cause a spool of PLA to melt and fuse if you have both loaded at the same time.
Overall, it’s a clever unit that’s easy to use, works well, and generally keeps the same footprint on my desktop that my A1 and AMS Lite combo did before.
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