Upgrade your 3D Printer with TriangleLab’s new CHC Hot-End. We were sent the CHC upgrade kit which is installed on your V6 style hot-end to upgrade it. The CHC Hot-End is a ceramic style heater, in a cylindrical shape. It’s compatible with many of the V6 style hot-ends:
- V5/V6 Hot-end
- CR10 Hot-end
- Hemera Hot-end
- Matrix Extruder
- Titan AERO
- DDB-V6Hotend KIT
It comes with a pre-installed 104NT-4-R026H42G thermistor, which allows for drop-in upgrades for most V6 style hot-ends. No firmware changes required for many which are already using this thermistor.
5:100K thermistor – ATC Semitec 104GT-2/104NT-4-R025H42G(Used in ParCan & J-Head) (4.7k pullup)
Marlin
#define TEMP_SENSOR_0 5
Repetier
ATC Semitec 10GT-2
Klipper
sensor_type: ATC Semitec 104NT-4-R025H42G
Installation
It’s super easy to install this kit, unless you are on a 12V control board/PSU. For anyone already using a 24V system, you will simply remove your old heat block and nozzle, and install this heat block and replace your nozzle into it. In theory with the thermistor installed directly in the ceramic heater, our readings should be fairly accurate.
For the 12V PSU printers, we need to install a boost module to increase voltage up to 24V. I do not like this method, and it definitely implements another point of failure. I would say they really dropped the ball on this kit for the 12V users. I would avoid using this boost module and use this opportunity to upgrade to 24V or look for alternative kits.
Review
We installed this CHC Kit to our Ender 5’s V6 hot-end for testing, it is running Klipper and a 24V PSU. We tried heating up the hot-ends from 100*C to 215*C to be fair and start at the same temperature. No PID tuning or other changes were made between the tests.
In our testing, we found the CHC to be about 10% faster and the wattage of the heater to be about 15W greater than our stock V6 heater.
V6 Heater Cartridge: 39.8W @ 24v
V6 CHC Heater Cartridge: 54.4W @ 24v
So, is the CHC kit worth spending the money on? We aren’t sure yet. The max temperature is rated at only 300*C when our stock V6 was rated at 285*C. We think TriangleLab should have opted for a better thermistor to take advantage of the higher output of this heater. I will be performing some flow testing, and other tests to see if the cylindrical shape of the heater helps throughput.
It definitely heats up quicker than our stock V6 hot end, but we end up waiting on the bed heater anyway.