MakerBot Industries

This is the best estimate that I have seen:
Sorry, but I cannot post links yet because I am too new. It was a blog post from 'makerblock' and it should be first link with the search term 'makerbot printing cost makerblock'

The best way to estimate the wear and tear on the bot would be to estimate the amount of plastic you expect to print in it's lifetime, like in the blog post. I am brand-new here and don't have a good guess for how long a TOM might last. 10kg of ABS? 50?

Re: eried

Care to share your setup and your numbers?

After posting, I though about the problem a bit. I think the best estimate is based on a formula like this:
Operating Costs (time based, electricity for printing, heating-cooling, etc) + Materials Costs (mass based, including rafts) + Wear and Tear (depreciation and cost of repair based on life expectancy in hours)

It sounds like print time correlates to material usage, so it probably possible to come up with a simplified formula that puts all costs on an hourly basis.

Re: Lars Osborne

The article you mentioned is titled "What’s the cost of printing with a MakerBot?" and it is very good. According to that breakdown, cost is a function of mass. Converting that to an hourly basis brings me back to my first question- how fast does a MK7 extrude material? There is a blog post titled "MakerBotting is Cheap!" that is also worth a read.

As far wear and tear (or depreciation) goes, you can either assume a print time or a print mass. I figured I would depreciate over 2,000 hours of printing. A laser cutter I was looking at had an estimated lifetime of 3,000 hours for one of the parts. 2,000 is the number of hours a full-time person works, so that sounded like a good number to me. The alternative is to assume that you are going to print X spools of material, and depreciate your bot over the mass of the spools. All of this totally neglects repairs, and they should be considered.

About plastic, I measured 30% filling, 1 shell, print-o-matic enabled, 0.3 layer height with 0.2416 grams per minute measured by Skeinforge. (This was measured printing several hours 2 finished pieces, one small 4.84 gr and one big 38 gr and 18.6 gr of garbage and errors).

About consumption, look in thingiverse for 'Power Use: Thing-O-Matic', there is more details there, also I posted a comment with more information about my consumption test.