3D printing with 60°C heated bed is unnecessary on Ender 3 v2

I’ve religiously sworn by 60°C because that’s what everyone online said I should use for best bed sticking. It’s also default setting for Ender 3 v2 which I’m using. But through months of use I maybe had bed sticking issue just once or twice and the rest of the time I was battling with my printer to release my damn prints from the printing bed. It was so bad I cut myself twice with the included spatula thingy that came with the printer because I was trying to jam it under the print so hard. It was insane how difficult it was for me to pry prints off the printing bed.

And then I finally realized, heating the print bed to 60°C is at least for my use case entirely unnecessary, time consuming and wasteful. Why?

• Heating up print bed takes time because it’s using a thick slab of glass-ceramic for print bed surface which makes pre-heating process unnecessarily long
• Since my printer is using glass-ceramic bed surface, it’s a big thermal mass and takes forever to cool down as well and release my prints (so I can even take them off the print bed)
• It’s energy wasteful, heating up printing bed to 60°C for several hours of entire print just to stick the bottom most layer (you can set it to just heat up to 60°C for first few layers and then cool down to different temperature but still)
• During summer, it significantly warms up the room which is not helpful

So, I’ve noticed my printing bed is basically at around 25°C anyway during summer, so I’ve decided to settle with 30°C. It needs just few seconds to reach 30°C before printing starts and after printing is done, I don’t need to wait half an hour to pull my prints off. I can do it right away which saves me tons of time when prototyping some design. And best of all, the prints still stick so well I was having super hard time pull it off even when I’ve printed it at just 30°C printing bed temperature.

I can’t say for other printers that use printing bed made of some different material, but in case of stock Ender 3 v2 printing bed (glass-ceramic plate), it works great and so far I’ve tried relatively big prints as well as ultra tiny that measure just few millimeters in size and they both stick extremely well with no worries of print detaching mid printing and ruin everything (I am using Z hop feature which makes chance of knocking off elements very small).

So, if you’re using Ender 3 v2 with its factory glass ceramic plate, give it a try and see how it works for you. It absolutely changed my work flow, not only I can churn out prints faster with less downtime between them, I also save on power because it barely has to heat up the printing bed and I also save power because my A/C in room doesn’t need to work harder.