I'm excited that after spending months on three major designs for the Ender 5 Plus this last enclosure is finally ready to send out in the world. After spending a lot of time with every other Creality model, I think they finally got it right with this one. The bed leveling works great out of the box (I’m looking at you CR-10 Pro), the touchscreen is well designed, the bed is solid, and its been churning out lots of good parts for 3DUPfitters.
That isn’t to say the enclosure design was easy. We’re shipping the third major redesign; after using the first two for a while I just wasn’t happy using the printer inside the enclosure. This H-bot design is tricky: you don’t want to make an enclosure too tall and have to heat a lot of wasted space, but you also need to be able to access the top of the printer easily. And then there’s the spool holder IN THE BACK for some reason. If you have a space with access to the back of the printer there’s a nice door for changing filament but otherwise, I’ve been changing spools by reaching in through the front.
Sorry about the $349 price point, but the darn thing is just large and uses up a lot of acrylic. Because of the H-bot design it's 4” wider and 4” taller than the CR-10 enclosure. The main reason the first two designs failed is I was trying to keep the cost down, but in the end I figured people wouldn’t want to pay $50 less for something that was a pain to use.
One thing to keep in mind is the fan is an integral part of the enclosure. If you do not turn on the fan the hot end is likely to clog. This is because the internal temperatures get too high for the heat break to keep the filament cool before entering the hot end. This problem exists because the proprietary Creality hot end simply can't keep the filament cool when the internal temperatures are hotter than around 40C, which is pretty common for lower-end printers. We've selected a fan that both allows you to print with ABS, which requires a higher enclosed temperature to stick to the bed and not warp, AND keep the hot end from clogging at the same time.