QBL Maker Lab – Filament for Garden & Maker Projects
We are a ventilation company that prints. QBL filament exists because we kept needing parts nobody sells — duct reducers, sensor mounts, bracketry for a tent — and then kept watching cheap filament fail in the one place it had to hold: heat near a light, humidity in a grow room, full sun on a subfloor vent. Five materials, all 1.75 mm, each chosen for a specific set of conditions rather than a colour chart. And because printing ASA and ABS properly means moving the fumes out of the room, we sell the extraction gear for that too.
5 materials
PLA, Matte, Pro, PETG-HF, ASA
1.75 mm
Bambu Lab and AMS ready
Printed in-house
on our own gear, for our own builds
Sydney stock
ships with the rest of your order
Pick the material by where the part lives
Almost every failed print in a grow space is a material choice, not a printing problem. A PLA bracket 200 mm under an LED bar will sag. A PLA clip on a subfloor vent will chalk and crack in a season of Australian sun. Work backwards from the environment and the choice makes itself:
| Material | Print it when | Heat | UV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard PLA | Prototypes, fitment checks, seed markers, indoor pots — the part stays cool and out of the sun | Low (~53 °C) | Low |
| PLA Matte | Anything people look at — display planters, indoor accessories. Hides layer lines, kills the shine | Low (~55 °C) | Low |
| PLA Pro (PLA+) | Indoor parts that carry load — controller mounts, tool organisers, brackets that get knocked | Low (~53 °C) | Low |
| PETG-HF | Wet and warm — net cups, irrigation and hose clips, duct parts, anything living inside a grow room | Medium (~75 °C) | Moderate |
| ASA | Outside, permanently — subfloor vent fittings, greenhouse and roof brackets, gutter clips. Needs an enclosure and extraction | High (~100 °C) | Excellent |
Heat figures are approximate softening points for the material class, not a rating for a specific part — geometry, infill and load all move the real number.
One safety note on ASA. ASA is styrene-based, like ABS, and printing it releases styrene and other VOCs plus ultrafine particles at much higher levels than PLA does. It needs an enclosed printer with extraction vented outdoors — not a cracked window, and not a bedroom. If you cannot vent outside yet, print PETG-HF until you can. The full detail is on the ASA page, and the S4 Fume Extraction Kit is the setup we run on our own printers for it.
For growers: print the parts nobody sells
Every tent ends up with a problem that has no product attached to it. A sensor that needs to sit at canopy height rather than dangling. A controller with nowhere sensible to mount. A duct that steps from 150 mm to 100 mm and the adapter is three weeks away. A clip fan that will only point where you need it if something holds it there.
That is the actual case for a printer in a grow space, and it is why our filament is sorted by environment rather than by colour. The reducer below was printed in PETG-HF and has been in service on our own gear — the same material we would point a customer at for anything inside a warm, humid tent.
Duct reducer printed in PETG-HF.
For makers: we solve the half of printing nobody sells you
If you already print, you already have a filament supplier. What most maker setups are missing is air. An enclosed printer running ASA or ABS puts VOCs and ultrafine particles into whatever room it sits in, and the usual fix — crack a window, run a desk fan — moves almost nothing.
Extraction is our actual trade. The 100 mm S4 Fume Extraction Kit is the plug-and-play version: a 26 dBA inline fan at 226 CFM and 223 Pa, a 10-speed controller, 2.4 m of ducting and clamps — quiet enough to sit beside you through a 48-hour print. Building something more involved? The same catalogue that supplies Australian grow rooms covers it: inline fans, carbon filters for odour and VOCs, ducting and silencers, and USB component fans for chamber and electronics cooling.
Straight answer: we are not trying to be the cheapest filament in Australia, and if all you print is PLA display pieces there are cheaper rolls online. What you get here is material picked for a job we actually do ourselves, stock sitting in Sydney that ships in the same box as your fan or filter, and someone on the other end who can tell you whether the part you are about to print will survive where you intend to put it. If you are printing functional parts for a grow space, a workshop or outdoors, that is worth more than a few dollars a roll.
FAQ
Will it run in my Bambu Lab or AMS?
Yes. Every roll is standard 1.75 mm and spooled for automatic feeding, so it runs in Bambu Lab printers and the AMS as well as any other 1.75 mm machine. Start from your slicer's generic profile for the material and tune from there.
Which one should I use for parts inside a grow tent?
PETG-HF for most of it. A tent is warm and humid, and the two things that kill PLA are exactly those. Anything mounted close to a light, carrying water, or expected to stay put for a full run should be PETG. PLA and PLA Pro are fine for cooler corners of the tent and for test-fitting a design before you commit the good filament to it.
Can I print duct fittings and will they actually hold?
Yes — reducers, collars, vent adapters and enclosure ports print well and are one of the most useful things you can make. Use PETG-HF indoors and ASA if the fitting is outside or sees sun. Print with enough walls to take a clamp being tightened onto it, and remember the part only has to be airtight, not structural.
Is PLA good enough for something outdoors?
No, and we would rather say so before you spend a weekend on it. PLA goes brittle and chalky under UV and softens on a hot day — a car dashboard or a north-facing wall is enough. That is what ASA is for: it is the outdoor material, and the price difference is trivial next to reprinting the part every summer.
Do I really need fume extraction, or is that overkill?
It depends entirely on the material. PLA is the lowest-emitting common filament and most people run it in a normally ventilated room without a dedicated setup. ASA and ABS are a different question — they release styrene and other VOCs plus ultrafine particles at much higher levels, and an enclosed printer concentrates all of it before you open the door. For those, an enclosure vented outdoors is the recommended control rather than a nice-to-have, and running the fan for a few minutes before opening the enclosure matters as much as the hardware.
What is PETG-HF, and how is it different from ordinary PETG?
HF is high-flow — formulated to run faster than standard PETG without the stringing and inconsistent extrusion that makes people avoid the material. It keeps PETG's moisture resistance, chemical stability and impact strength, but behaves better on a modern high-speed printer.
Can filament ship with the rest of my order?
Yes. It is all held in the same Sydney warehouse as the fans, filters and lights, so filament and ventilation gear go out together in one shipment rather than as separate deliveries.
I am printing something for a grow space and cannot decide on the material — can you help?
Yes, and we would rather you asked than guessed. Tell us what the part does, where it sits and what it is near — a light, water, outside air, direct sun — and we will tell you which of the five we would use, including when the answer is the cheapest one.