I have a spool of pink filament, but needed a "bit" of pink (about 1.5g) to run on all 4 of my printers simultaneously. So I pulled off an arms-length for 3 of my U1s, and just fed it that way. There's no way I would have ever gotten away with that on a machine that required complete retraction on every color swap.
I have a spool of pink filament, but needed a "bit" of pink (about 1.5g) to run on all 4 of my printers simultaneously. So I pulled off an arms-length for 3 of my U1s, and just fed it that way. There's no way I would have ever gotten away with that on a machine that required complete retraction on every color swap.
I got into 3d printing back in 2023. A friend of mine asked me to build her Ender 3 pro kit, got hooked, and bought a Bambu P1S when she took the Ender back a month or so later. Quickly got into 3d printing as a side gig to make filament pay for itself. Made enough money to continually expand the farm. I've since put about 20,000 print hours on a fleet of 4 p1s units.
The biggest downsides, in my mind, were purge waste and purge time. The quality and uptime of the machines was stellar, but I was throwing away tons of filament in the form of purge. And that was dollars directly going in the trash.
So, in 2025, I got a Prusa XL (see posts here and here). Theoretically, it should have solved my biggest problems. The larger bed was nice, but not critical. Instead, I got a finicky machine that couldn't be left unattended on high-swap jobs. The printer just didn't have the uptime I needed.
I had my eye on the U1. I saw the Kickstarter and was tempted, but waited until early units started hitting the public, and I saw how positive most reviews were, so I pre-ordered in Nov 2025, and got my first unit in March 2026. Within a week, I sold the XL.
So
After a month, I sold a P1S and bought another U1. 2 weeks later, I did it again. My 3rd U1 arrived today, and I'll be buying another tomorrow, and putting the last redundant p1s up for sale. (I'm keeping one specifically because I have it tuned for ABS/ASA printing). I've already put about 700 print hours on my little U1 fleet.
First thing I did for my operations: I quickly replaced the gold PEI sheets with Biqu CryoGrip Pro plates. I prefer the smooth bottoms on the prints, but I've always had issues with "cold plates". I theorized that if they were nice and sticky at 35-40C, they'd work like beasts at 60C. And they do. Zero adhesion issues. I only handle the plates while wearing nitrile gloves, so no washing needed yet.
The u1 is a rock-solid printer and requires very little observation once that critical first layer goes down. The prints are faster, with much less waste. These machines just run, and I don't have to worry about them. I've had zero overnight failures, zero mid-run failures. And with the Biqu plates, zero adhesion failures. If you want a litany of what I didn't deal with, go read that 2nd Prusa XL post. :D
On the Bambu, in order to reduce costs, I killed the prime tower to make room for more units on a plate. More units means less purge cost per unit. On the U1, it was worth adding it back in because pennies spent on the tower saves me post processing time, and I don't have to amortize purge waste.
Some numbers: I recently got an order for 750 wholesale units of small prints. 25-to-a-plate. Printing on the Bambu printers means an additional cost of $22.50 in purge waste, and 90 hours of additional print time on this order.
But, it's not all a bed of roses. I'll never get over how easy it is to load filament in the AMS for a Bambu machine. It's just so easy and convenient. The U1 is loads better than the XL, since it has automatic filament feeders. But loading filament is still a 2-step process: Feed 90% of the way with the auto-loaders, then go into the screen and select all your filament types and colors and then hit "load". But that's a minor annoyance when spending 5 minutes up front loading saves you hours of print time.
There are reports that Snapmaker Orca has issues. Reports that the cloud environment is unstable. Reports that the handheld app isn't great and that there's only like 30 models to choose from. All of those may be true. I wouldn't know. I run my fleet in LAN mode, using vanilla Orca and have a Home Assistant integration into a dashboard so I can observe my entire fleet at a glance. But, these things may be more important to you than they are to me, so be aware of them.
Some things I think are better, ecosystem-wise: I can slice and send a job *while the machine is printing*. As soon as the print is done, I can load up filaments and just hit print, without running back to the slicer to kick it off. And since you can select filament mapping at print time (unlike on the P1S), it means I only have to slice something once. Then I can just mix and match colors by remapping every time I reuse that g-code. That means less time slicing and sending jobs from the computer and faster turnaround time in the print room.
Something equally important though, is the U1's ability to unlock custom jobs. Most of my production is built around "print 8-25 units on a single plate." That's what made the most sense operationally with the P1S units. But if someone wanted a custom color, I had to charge them a premium because I couldn't amortize that purge waste across an entire plate. Now? I don't. So when someone comes to me and says "I want that thing you make, but in purple and red." I can just say yes.
So, for me, I'm all in on the U1 for now. I can't know long term longevity yet. Nobody can. But I hope to make a followup post when I have a few thousand hours on the machines to compare against.
Didn't get completely unpacked because I have to run into a meeting at work. But in half an hour....
The picture basically sums up my whole business model. Tiny prints, big gains. Sorry for the AI slop image, but I am so in love with this concept, I had to make something funny for myself, and decided the concept was worth sharing.
I have a small print farm, 5 machines. I started out selling bigger items: custom cosplay stuff, large Cinderwing dragons, etc.
I aggressively drove down my costs by buying filament in bulk, batching jobs, and moving to toolchangers to eliminate purge waste.
But it's the inverse cube law that really made a difference. In my market, $40 is a hard sell for a large item. $5.00 for a small item sells all day. But because of the inverse cube law, a large item that may cost me $9.00 to print and sell for $40, if shrunk enough, becomes a pittance in cost. Putting 25 tiny fidgets on a print bed might cost me $4-6 to print, and bring me $125 at my booth.
Cube law says that for a 3d item, doubling the size cubes the volume. Print something 2x as big, it uses ~8 times as much plastic. But the inverse is also true. halve the size, 1/8 the plastic. Costs go *way* down, and the sale price becomes low enough to be an impulse item.
Last 2 years in business, working about 8 events a year, I've brought in about $32,000, using about $3000 in filament. Not bad for a part time side gig
TLDR: Change retraction length for each toolhead in the machine settings. More info below
I've seen a lot of people having issues printing 95A TPU with the U1, but I've printed a ton of it, without messing with the extruder tension or any of that rigamarole. The change I had to make is software-only in the slicer, which makes it much nicer in my book, since you can reverse it easily.
When I first started printing TPU, every time I had a color swap or two, I'd get a jam. Same layer, every time. Because it was exactly the same layer, and only after color swaps, I started doing some troubleshooting. The symptom upon pulling the filament: It always had a little "mushroom head" at the end of my filament where it looked like the tpu blobbed up and expanded.
Digging into the machine settings, the u1 has a very aggressive 10mm retraction after every color change. This probably works well to keep oozing and such to a minimum for stiffer materials, but for TPU, it's murder. TPU will retract, stretch, spring back, blob, and then cool. And now the diameter is just a bit too wide to go back into the hotend.
The solution: Change the retraction length in the machine settings for each toolhead you're going to run TPU on. I settled on a 0.5mm retraction to minimize stringing as much as I could.
change this to something like 0.5mm
With that one change, I've made about 50 little multicolor TPU prints, all without issue. I saved these changes as their own TPU-specific printer profile in my slicer, so that I can easily swap back and forth between TPU and stiffer materials, without fiddling with extruder tension.
