First printer arrived today and I've already burned through half a spool

Congrats on the new machine, that unboxing-to-first-print speed never stops being nice. I started on an Ender 3 a couple years back and hand-leveling the bed was half my hobby time, so when I borrowed a friend's auto-leveling printer last month I kept poking the screen looking for steps that weren't there either. On the stringing, two things helped me more than slowing down. First, dry your filament. I left a spool of PLA in the garage over a humid summer and the stringing was awful untill I baked the moisture out. Second, check the nozzle temp in your slicer. I dropped mine by about five degrees on small detailed prints and the wispy bits mostly went away without sacrificing speed on the big flat parts.

One thing I wish someone had told me early: keep the first ten or so prints small and cheap. I burned through half a spool chasing big projects that failed at hour three because I skipped the boring calibration cube stage. A little benchy here and there tells you more about how your machine behaves than any big print will.

Also grab a cheap filament storage box with some desiccant packs before that 5kg arrives. Opened spools sitting out for weeks was my biggest early mistake and the prints showed it.

I went the other direction with mine and just stopped chasing the speed numbers altogether. Mine lives in the basement and I mostly queue prints before bed, so a part taking three hours instead of ninety minutes costs me nothing. Everything I print at the default speed comes off the bed looking cleaner than my early attempts at fast ones ever did, and I stopped wasting filament on second tries. One thing that caught me out early on was a window about four feet from the printer. Any PLA part with tall thin walls woud pull away from the plate on one side and I couldn't figure out why until I noticed the draft on cold mornings. Moved it to the workbench against an inside wall and that problem vanished completley.

For the phone-stand type downloads, check the comments on the model page before you print. Half the time someone has allready posted the settings they used, and copying those has saved me more failed prints than anything else I've learned. The little dog that comes on the card is tuned by the factory, so it's not a fair test of how a random file will behave. That 5kg haul will outlast your expectations. I'm still working through my first big order from last year, mostly because small hobby parts use shockingly little plastic once you get rolling.

That 5kg is going to go quicker than you expect, so pace yourself. I've put around 400 hours on my 5M since spring and the best habit I picked up was washing the plate with plain dish soap every few weeks. Finger oils build up where you can't see them and you get corner lifting on long flat parts, which sounds like what bit you on that phone stand. Thirty seconds of scrubbing and it sticks like the day it arrived.

Also, kitchen table is fine for now but keep it away from doors or vents. A cold draft mid print does ugly things to small details even on a well tuned machine.

Lurking here while mine is still in the shipping queue, so reading this makes me less nervous about setup day. Mine is going in a spare room that doubles as my office, and I keep wondering how loud these things actualy are over a normal workday. The videos all seem to be shot with the mic far away. Did anyone else notice the noise being an issue indoors, or do you just get used to it after a week? Also nice to hear the preloaded models are actually decent, I assumed they'd be throwaway junk.

Update: took the dish soap advice and gave the plate a scrub before tonight's print. Whatever was on there from my fingers, it was enough to make the corners of a flat print lift a little, and now they're sitting flat. Also stopped trying to win any speed records on small parts, slowed everything down and the stringing is basially gone.