Staggered Start

A cold printer pulls its biggest current spike while the bed and hotend come up to temperature. Send a whole rack to temperature at the same moment and you can trip a breaker or brown out the circuit. Staggered Start caps how many printers in a group warm up at once, spreads the surge out, and starts the rest automatically as capacity frees. You can pack more printers onto the same electrical infrastructure without watching the breaker panel.

Staggered Start works at the queue-matching layer, not on the hardware. A job only matches a printer when that printer's group has a free warmup slot, and jobs over the limit stay pending in the queue until one opens. A print that is already running is never paused or touched.

Group your printers and set a limit

Open Settings, choose Staggered Start, and add a group of the printers that share a circuit, a rack, or a PDU. Membership is explicit, so bulk tag edits never change your power behavior, and a printer belongs to at most one group. Set how many printers may warm up at once: a limit of one starts them strictly one after another, higher limits allow that many simultaneous warmups.

Release on temperature or a timeout

Each of the bed and nozzle rules can release on a fixed temperature you enter, or on the first-layer temperature read straight from the sliced job's own G-code, so the rule follows each job's material instead of a hard-coded number. When both are enabled, both must be met. A fallback timeout is always available as a guaranteed backstop, so a misbehaving heater can never hold the group forever.

Real-time release

Slots now free the instant a printer reaches temperature. For printers connected through Printago Fuse, the release fires on the temperature crossing itself, usually within a fraction of a second, so the next machine starts right away instead of waiting on a periodic check. That check still runs underneath as a permanent backstop for every printer.

Multi-nozzle aware

On machines with more than one hotend, such as the Bambu Lab H2D or a Snapmaker toolchanger, the nozzle rule tracks the currently active nozzle and the bed rule tracks the single build plate, which is exactly what dominates the startup surge.

Watch it happen

The Active holds view lists every warmup slot in use in real time, with each printer's live progress toward its release rules and an estimate of when the fallback timeout would fire. Release any hold manually when you need the slot back.

Staggered Start is part of the core platform and runs the same way on the hosted Cloud Platform and the self-hosted edition. Read the feature overview or the setup guide for the full details.