Done it already, but with a 400 quid printrbot simple metal. I don't have the optional heated bed yet (crap xmas post), so ABS bends like a banana but I've ran about 7 to 20kg of pla though it depending on if you ask my wife or not and I am waiting for my heated bed plate to arrive, along with a axis expansion kit to push the build volume up.
What do I use it for? well first my house, office, workshop etc are covered with plastic printed parts, everything is on hooks in here including my leather jacket, I have wall mounted 3 16" hanspree monitors on a home printed vesa mount, one wall is dedicated to a spool feeding system so I want a different colour its already sat there on bearings threaded to all but the last bit so changing colour is what 15 seconds work. I got a AR drone for chrimbo and already printed off the hanging hook for it from thingiverse, along with a gimble for underneath it to carry a small payload (though it flys like a whale with more than 300kg on it), my son's heli is on a special heli bracket, speaker brackets for my pc sounds system etc ec.
Domestically we've ran the usual 3d trinkets off for the kids, mlp's, olaf from frozen, some nintendo stars for the top of the xmas tree's etc, and I scored brownie points when I modeled the broken washing machine knob, which is part of an assembly costing 120 quid + vat and only available as a unit, and the replacement is working great 3 months later thanks mr washing machine manufacturer but no thanks. I also used it when putting up some of those plasterboard wall plugs to hang a picture, and something went wrong and it tore out, you know the result, big oversize hole in ruined plasterboard wall. Take plug to printer, model in cad, print off 110% size version, screw into oversize hole, day saved without having to get involved with jamming plaster into the hole or other major eyesores!
Also I do some rc modelling with my kids, and we have rebuilt some vintage tamiya rc cars, with home printed wheels, chassis repairs etc. Its fun to have a bash round then when the oops moment as you stove a 25 year old embrittled plastic car into a wall is followed by a measure up with some calipers and a sketch of the piece in cad, wazz it out as a stl and print it, and be back out in a hour with stuff that doesnt break as easily as the fragile original, and more importantly my kids are learning they can make stuff, not just be consumers.
Then we get to the real reason I wanted one, I metal work (build cars and bikes) in a serious way as my real hobby, I have a lathe, mill, cnc mill project, wire edm etc. All full sized industrial stuff. I print off plastic pieces for the machines, and also I run a part off on the printer to get a quick prototype, eg before wiring it out of hard material on the edm, because the real machines cost real money to run whereas a couple of pence on pla as a quick test is painless. I also do a spot of metal casting, and now I print off mould parts for greensand casting of parts. Then dotted round my workshop, all the tooling and other holders are all done in PLA, ran off the little printrbot.
Now friends are noticing the output, and theyre asking me to make limited runs of parts, I get them to give me the original, model it up and give them the first one off the 'bot free. But I have ordered for repeats by owners clubs having seen my free one, and meanwhile I'm building up a cad library of hard to find vintage car and bike parts should I ever knock IT on the head (and I'm getting ready to do a logans run, being over 40), but I'm waiting until I can sucessfully do ABS before getting too far ahead with that side of things.
Its not for everyone, and the printrbot is a tinkerers special, you have to keep tweaking it, replace the build surface when it gets spaffed up trying to lever the parts off afterwards (cold, hot its still a fight on some parts, I use masking tape and hairspray for adherance) and every so often it goes out of calibration as it wears. But, I'm used to dealing with machines already so its easy for me to tinker when it starts feeling or sounding "different". Consumer ready? god no, I'd hate to see grandma trying to deal with the z going out slightly and it refusing to adhere to the bedplate and having to reset the sensor heights to the bedplate. And the idea of something covered up hiding its innards away just sounds like a recipe for disaster when something does go wrong, which it will.
Software, I use the same toolchain as for all my machines, but stuff the stl file into Repetier Host running under linux (mono), and slice it with Cura. It just works but I have played round with various parameters and got a feel for how each material and colour etc likes to be set, and source plastic varies by supplier too. Theres a raspberry Pi "print server" that you can use instead of a pc being on, but the Pi's are so crap I'd not trust it to have not corrupted its sd card by the time a long print had happened. You can print from sd card too, or theres some lcd controller on the printer itself as a upgrade, but I just leave my office linux box on with it attached permanently.
Oh and I do a lot of big prints, but I just leave it running overnight and wake up and go in the office and its done waiting for me. Once the first layer has adhered, mostly things will be fine.
One last tip, you can print multi colour on a single colour printer, you can put a pause in at a layer, and swap the colour, and only draw the features you want in that colour in a certain layer range. Its not true colour, but its good enough for name plates, keyrings, birthday badges for the kids etc etc.
I'm also thinking of upgrading my printer to 4 nozzle configuration with a kraken hot end though I am mightily tempted by the latest new printrbot metal printer with its two column design which eliminates the sag on the print arm my model suffers from slightly...
If, your a general hacker/tinkerer type, the printrbot is a great little printer, not quite the full blown stand in the field thrashing yourself for months before using experience of a reprap or similar, but a good plug in and go then tinker away when you have time. I like linux, I like machines, I don't want a Up or a Robox to hide it all away from me.