Bambu Filament 10% failure

Bambu Filament and Accesories Filament
1

So, my daughter’s A1 was brand new, and as we usually do with new devices, we decided to order the first batch of accessories and consumables directly from the manufacturer. After all, you would expect their own products to work perfectly with their own printers.

So we ordered 10 rolls of filament: PLA Basic, PLA Matte and a little PETG. Everything has been working great — except for one roll of pink PLA (of course, my daughter’s favourite colour).

The stuff simply wouldn’t feed properly through the extruder and eventually managed to completely clog a 0.4 mm nozzle.

Okay, I thought, things like this can happen. So I opened a support ticket and asked how I could return the obviously defective spool (I had already dried it for 8 hours) and get a replacement.

I honestly wasn’t expecting the answer I got from support.

Okay, I live in Germany, and we have statutory warranty rights here which basically mean that if a product fails within the first year, it is presumed to have been defective when delivered and the seller has to deal with it accordingly.

Apparently, Bambu Support has a rather different approach. I was amazed at what they wanted from me just to process the ticket in the first place:

  • Printer logs (why?)

  • Clear photos of the clogged nozzle. Do I look like I have a microscope at home capable of taking detailed pictures of a 0.4 mm nozzle?

  • Photos of the spool to check for possible defects. Okay, I could have taken those. But you could have checked the spool yourselves if you had simply told me where to send the defective one.

For €11 worth of filament, this is simply too much effort for me.

Since then, I have bought another 16 rolls of filament from other manufacturers — Anycubic, eSUN and Sunlu — and every single one of them has worked flawlessly in the same printer.

So I’ll write this off as €11 worth of tuition and draw my conclusion: Bambu makes good printers, but I’ll buy my filament somewhere else from now on.

One defective spool out of ten is a 10% failure rate — and apparently even that one won’t be replaced.

Count me out.

2

Bambu doesn’t use western standards for support, to them everything is a potential scam. For instance if they had sent you a replacement spool after you had used 50 grams that is just a way people can get free filament forever (50 grams at a time).

3

how dare bambu ask for some proof! they are of course supposed to give you a free spool.of filament because you said so?

4

Oh yeah. 50 grams is worth 55 cents. It will be the deal of my life :smiley: I just need to do this 4 times an I can afford a ball of icecream from the money I “scammed” from Bambu… :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

5

No, not free. I send the faulty one to them, they check and send me a working one. Thats how it goes (at least here in germany).

6

I understand your frustration - it affects you as an honest customer, and that’s never pleasant. But the reality is that there are many bad actors constantly trying to take advantage of Bambu. You’d be surprised how many people contact support with completely fabricated stories just to get free filament. For you it may only be €11, but for Bambu, with the sheer number of scammers they deal with, it adds up to a significant amount of money.

A log and a photo are simply the quickest way to prove that you’re a honest customer, and it doesn’t require much effort on your part. It takes less than 5 minutes.

What you’re asking for is essentially VIP treatment. But no company really offers that anymore these days - except maybe Amazon, and you pay higher prices for it. Almost every company handles things this way now, largely because of the sheer number of scammers out there.

I worked in customer support in Germany for years (not at Bambu), and if someone told me they didn’t want to spend five minutes taking a few photos and sending a log, it would definitely raise a red flag.

Try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes for a moment. There’s a lot to criticize about Bambu, and the support isn’t perfect either, but right now, your statement is a red flag.

Essentially, asking for a free replacement without any effort on your part is a bit much, no matter how you feel about Bambu.

If you had cooperated, there’s a 95% chance you would have received your replacement spool, as numerous cases in the forum have already shown.

You’ll just have to deal with it:

  • Bambu messed up the Filement, and you messed up by refusing to work with support.

Edit: …and please don’t take this personally - I’m sure you’re an honest customer! But still, you wouldn’t believe how often stories like this have been told just to get free filament combined with the refusal to provide a log to support.

7

He’s not asking for a “free” replacement, he’s asking to exchange his defective one.

And yes, having done this before, they really do have you send it back.

8

A log is easy. How to make a picture from a cloaked nozzle (to see it is cloaked) with a simple basic equipement? Sure, I can make a picture of that nozzle, but one could never see if it is cloaked or not. Anyhow, I never asked them for a replacement of that nozzle. The moment I used the faulty filament the first time, there have been already 100 or 200 hours on that nozzle. I could not tell if the cloaking was the filaments fault or just age.

Nope. Its normal. Something ordered is defective? Just send it back. In a german company I would just sended the spool back with a simple line of text: Defect, please replace.

I know we have companies in Germany, which try everything to avoid replacing defective stuff. If you really worked with customer support (end-customers, not businesses) in Germany, you should know how it works. Customer complains - customer have to send it back - company checks. In cases of cunsumables: If half of the consumable is already used, customer has to pay for the part he already used before the new item is send out to him.

On more expensive stuff one easily finds a lawyer who will handle this. On less expensive parts (like a 11 Euro spool of filament), no lawyer will work for this. And even if I would have used 50, 100 or more grams of that spool, it is the right of the vendor to charge me for this. But it was never even 50g. Already during my very first attempt to print with this filament, it slipped through the extruder because the extruder couldn’t properly feed it. I cut off a few centimetres and tried again — and voilà: clogged nozzle.

Which kind of photograpic equipment Bambu expects from their customers? As above, I have no option to make a picture of a 0,4mm Nozzle, to proove it is cloaked. The maximum: I can make a picture of the nozzle. But that is not what they asekd for.

I never asked them for a free filament. In my first ticket I asked them to which address I have to send the faulty one. And how it would be a “free” filament, when I send back the defective from which I could use how much? 10 grams? Yeah, charge me that couple of cents.

Plus something very important in Germany (as you should know, as you worked in customer support): In a disputed case, it is not the customer’s responsibility to prove that something doesn’t work. Under German consumer law, during the applicable period, the burden of proof lies with the seller to show that the defect was not already present when the product was delivered. It’s simply how the law works in Germany.

And this is no “VIP-treatment”, this is the simple minimum granted by law.

9

Bambu is simply trying to avoid unnecessary back‑and‑forth shipping. If a spool is defective, you keep the old one and they send you a new one. That’s actually better for you as a customer.

You’re falling into the same trap a lot of Germans do when they come to this forum and try to apply their own mindset to a Chinese company. Nevertheless, Bambu complies with the laws, as I will explain below:

That’s not entirely accurate. The law also requires you to cooperate with support instead of refusing to engage. Even German consumer law isn’t a free pass to claim free replacement products without following the proper process.

You’re interpreting the rules incorrectly. The company has up to three attempts to resolve the issue, but you’ve essentially given up that right by not cooperating in the first place.

The law does not require the retailer to exchange or accept a return across the board; they can also offer you the option of simply sending a new one to you, which is 100% in compliance with the law.

Definitely not, since you’re refusing to cooperate with support / company.

Support isn’t perfect; we all know that. Could it be easier? Oh, yes!

But based on what you’re saying - there’s something fishy on your end.

10

It takes some extreme stuff for filament to be defective. If it was brittle and breaking at minor bends, that would be defective.

Clogging a nozzle is something wet filament likes to do. My guess is that the filament is fine but just needs to be dried.

If you have a cheap hygrometer and a gallon ziplock bag, seal the filament and hygrometer in and read the humidity when the reading stops changing (30-45 minutes).

Bet the number is 30% or above.

It would be a way to sort what the actual issue might be.

11

Above all, that wouldn’t just be one roll, but a whole batch. This means that Bambu could even track this if customers are willing to cooperate.

OP doesn’t say whether he at least tried to dry it. That sounds more like the filement was delivered in a somewhat moist state as you’ve already described. :+1:

12

It might not be the problem but I suspect it is. No print to go by though.

But with what sounds like a new user, wouldn’t surprise me if no protective handling or drying, and possibly a spool that sat for a while before being included in his shipment.

That’s why getting a read on the filament humidity value would be a useful metric. If a good number then more troubleshooting and another thing to point out to customer service. But if it’s “wet”, it can save more bother and trouble and OP can have a path forward and sidestep Bambu CS.

13

I can’t tell you that the problem filament spool was wet but one symptom of wet filament is clogging extruder nozzles. The clear bags filament gets packed in unfortunately are semi-permeable and let water slowly leak in. That’s why the desiccant pack is in there - to help minimize water pickup.

If you don’t have a filament dryer, you can use the heated bed and an empty filament box to at least dry the spool some and maybe enough to be functional again.

I put how to just test it in an earlier message. If you have a hygrometer and plastic ziplock bag you don’t need to do the dry steps that may or may not be enough anyway depending on the water level to test this out. Ultimately, though, if it is water it sounds like you will have to dry it to be able to use it.

And bonus - leaving a spool sit with significant water content can lead to the water breaking the polymer chains enough to make the filament brittle/unusable. Once it gets brittle, it doesn’t fix by drying, either. The spool is dead.

Filament picking up water even while still vacuum bagged in a sealed cardboard box is just a fact of life. The only way to prevent that is using special metallized thick-wall bags but those are expensive.

That other filaments print OK says it’s probably not the printer. The clogged nozzle may point to it just being wet filament. And depending on how you handle and store your filament, ambient humidity, etc, you might see the filaments printing well now also start to have issues.

I don’t know water is the root issue but with a little legwork you can find out. It’s something many of us have to deal with and can be a real problem. It’s not really a defect though. More something we just need to learn to identify and mitigate.

14

Hmmm… I do not see the benefit here. What should I do with a defective filament? Keep as decoration? I need to bring this spool in any case somewhere, to the “Wertstoffhof” (as it is not allowed to simply throw something like this to the rest of the garbage) or to some DHL office for sending it back. Anyhow, for me it is not better. Just different location where I need to bring that spool.

Of course. Our country, our mindset. If they don´t like it - simply don´t sell anything in Germany. Even Apple complies to our regulations and laws.

Nope, they don´t.

And now we dive into the details: I have to cooperate as far as it is possible. I do not have to have the neccessary equipment to take pictures of a nozzle with a 0.4mm diameter. Companies can only ask for cooperation within the borders of something a normal person without specialized equipment can do. As written before: I can take a picture of that nozzle. I can not take a picture which shows that the nozzle is cloaked.

Nope. They don´t have. They have two as stated in §440 BGB for normal products. For more complex products it can be more than two or three. For simple products it can mean not only one attempt to repair is needed. There are different court decisions for those topics. Also §439 says my first right before any repairs are tried is “Nacherfüllung”, which roughly means, the seller has to deliver a working item. And up to the logical part: How do you want to repair a spool of filament? Go on, I´m listening…

I´m not refusing. I simply cannot deliver a detailed picture from a cloaked nozzle. Why I do not have to do that, I explained above.

Was my first guess as well. It spend 8 hours in the dryer an that did nothing. And yes, my filaments are stored in those 4l boxes along with silica gel.

I said, in the initial posting :wink:

Jepp, new user with currently 560 hours on the A1. But as above, dryer, 4l boxes with silica. I might be new to this topic, but I´m not an idiot. At least I believe I´m not :wink:

I did not want to waste any more efford in a faulty filament, but ok, I just added a hygrometer to the box (silica was already there) and report back with the number in one or two hours.

But even when it is dry, it spend 8 hours at 50°C in the dryer. How long it should be dried then?

15

I wasn’t in any way trying to call you an idiot. Not my intention at all. Note that I said new user - not idiot. It’s just those new to 3D printing can’t know everything from the start.

In my opinion these things are being marketed to people new to 3D printing but there isn’t enough “but wait there’s more” stuff included. It’s a turn off to new users to tell them you may need extra hardware and then all the qualifications on how and why would leave them thinking it’s too hard and sale lost. Bambu and others want to emphasize turn-key and ease of use and not all the caveats on drying that gets even more confusing because not everyone even has filament moisture issues.

And any desiccant in there ruins the measurement. Take the desiccant out and restart the clock. What your hygrometer will read is the humidity value of the desiccant and that swamps the humidity value of the filament.

Desiccant is much stronger at controlling humidity than filament. But between filament and air, filament is stronger and its humidity will assert over whatever ambient air is in the bag.

16

Oh, I did not feel like you called me an idiot. It is more a german saying to say: Of course I did that. So, no offense taken here. Sorry, if that was not clearly.

Indeed I have silica gel in the box. I have taken it out and wait for the results. So far: With silica in the box it shows 26%. Lets wait for the numbers without the silica.

17

We just have different opinions on that - let’s agree to disagree.

But I can tell you right now: you’ll run into the same issues with Anycubic, eSUN, and Sunlu as well. Most companies don’t actually manufacture their own filament; it all comes partly from the same factories in China. Their support isn’t really better or worse than Bambu’s.

You’ll need to get used to being a bit more flexible, especially when dealing with Chinese companies or with 3D printing as a hobby in general. Otherwise, you’ll end up facing the same problems again when it comes to parts wearing out on the A1.

18

Will be curious. For my system that’s high for PLA and my prints would show some level of water issues. That silica gel should be regenerated before using it with filament again.

The reason is silica gel holding water is reversible. It gives up water in a more dry environment and picks it up in more humid ones. Pack that silica with a spool and if it was dry before, the silica gel will increase the filament’s moisture content.

19

Sounds fair to me.

So, for the results, the hygrometer shows 18% rH inside the box. Without any silica inside. For simple PLA this is more than fine. So whatever the problem on that filament is, it is not moisture.

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20

Just came here to see the result. 18% should be good. 25% is my absolute cutoff for PLA but it may be different for others and some water effects can also just be tuned out.

But I don’t see any real problems with that number and you have another bullet point to use with Bambu if you talk to CS again.

Added - I’ve had problems with pink PLA before but it was before I sorted testing so I don’t know why. It could also be pink is just a tough formulation to get to behave. But I can’t say for sure. 18% should at least print and the other filaments printing properly still point to the spool of pink having some kind of issue, at least to my thinking.