5 months ago, my husband purchased Bambu Labs orange PLA Basic filament along with several other basic and matte filaments. I’ve used them all off and on since then. They are kept in a waterproof container that is humidity-controlled. We never allow the humidity to go over 30%.
When I loaded the orange, it just snapped and crumbled. I’ve never seen filament that brittle after such a short time frame. Is this typical? The other filaments are fine and still usable.
In my experience brittleness is usually a result of a plastic memory phenomena where an unwound piece will become brittle. Did you keep the winding tension on that roll or do you just put it in the container loose? People have speculated it has to do with UV/light exposure, I haven’t seen any evidence of that, but it’s a much better theory than moisture.
I’ve got some fresh Basic green that has snapped 3 times after it has sat straightened out going into printer feed in about 2 weeks each time, so it happens fast.
Oh, interesting. We keep it wound and use a filament clip to secure it. One of the ones that use the two holes in the spool. I dislike the clip on style. They tend to fall off. We also keep the container out of direct sunlight. I work with paper sculpture and pop-up cards, I need to keep the paper out of direct sunlight, the filament benefits from that.
A five month old spool should be OK after a good drying cycle. 30% humidity is actually quite a lot when wanting to keep filament dry.
As for filament embrittlement, I had a bunch of 5+y old tester packs that just flew apart in tiny pieces when I touched them. I expect all traces of softeners used had dissipated after all this time.
Hope it’s not that with your orange as there’s nothing that can be done to save such a spool.
What range should I be aiming for? 20%? That seems difficult. At least in the high humidity state of MO. Not as bad as Fla, but not nice either. I imagine a quick dry cycle before each use then, but about how long an hour?
Interesting about the softeners. Not sure how I’d tell if that was the case. It just broke at slightest touch.
Well, your description of it breaking at the slightest touch would indeed indicate a seriously flawed spool. If it didn’t splinter completely as my testers did, some drying may help though. I have an ancient transparent PLA spool that needs weekly drying when in use in the AMS.
Unfortunately, we do not usually know how long spools have been lying around before being shipped…
As for storage, there are quite a few discussion threads in the forum. In my case, I have 8 spools in my AMS units with about 2-3 times that number bagged with dessiccant. I can not track that many bags so I usually dry these before putting them in the AMS. Although I admit to sometimes just putting PLA Basic in there without drying and crossing my fingers 
. Usually, works.
As for the AMS, I use a cheap round hygrometer. They show a minimum of 10%. Once one goes to 11%, I know my dessiccant pearls are no longer able to keep humidity down and get a ride or two in the microwave.
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Thank you very much for your response. I greatly appreciate it. There are a lot of little things to learn about 3D Printing along with the big and obvious ones. lol.
I’ll be adding a lot more dessicant to bring the humidity down. And make judicious use of my dryer.
I’ll also make sure our filament doesn’t unspool since that could have been a possibility, too.
Ah, yes, spooling…
I was not so fond of the various re-spoolers. But I do need around 1 Min per 10g by hand… Shame I need to split it into at least 4 parts 