Why I'm retooling my print farm around the Snapmaker U1
Background
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.
Early impressions:
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.
