This is what the humidity is over a six month period we are now going into our wet season.
Nelspruit South Africa
I do not totally agree with this. I had some old pla about 6 years old didnt care much for the color. I dried it in my drier for 3 days and then threw it in and it printed perfect. Before I dried it the filament would snap easily but after drying it didn’t have that issue.
Seeing that you are based in London, I would advise at least a single low cost filament dryer.
Three main reasons:
- Moisture will not leave the filament without heat. Desiccant may reduce the water uptake rate, but it will not remove moisture from a filament. So you’ll want to be able rule out filament moisture as a cause for print failures which you can only do if you dry your filament. And you probably do not want to do that in your kitchen oven or occupying your printers heatbed.
- It is unfortunately common nowadays to get saturated filament straight from the bag. Bambu themselfes recommend drying after opening. After all, it is rare to know in which climatic conditions filaments were extruded, wound and stored prior to packaging. Chances are, that does not happen in a dry-room.
- I do indeed remember nice and warm summer periods from my London period. All the more cherished for all the fog, drizzle, sprinkle, rain, sleet, downpours and deluges
1 Like
Get a gasketted airtight bin from Amazon or Costco. iris makes some good ones for like 20 bucks. You’re good to go. If you want to be sure just add a rechargeable silica gel thingy from Amazon.
could somebody recommend a good airtight box from amazon.co.uk ? There are loads of plastic boxes, but in my experience they’re rairly airtight :-/
Look for plastic boxes with a rubber seal in the lid.
A 20-pack of filament vacuum bags with a hand pump + desiccant bags you toss in are less than 20 USD/EUR on Amazon or less than ten USD/EUR on Ali. I just dry my spools and put them in vacuum bags. Every few months I check the vacuum seal and pull a new vacuum and swap the desiccant bags if needed. I also have a bucket of silica gel beads that I fill my additional AMS dryboxes with (less than 10 USD/EUR per kg).
The only more expensive part is a filament dryer (< 100 USD/EUR if you go for a Sunlu or similar), if you don’t want to use your printer’s heatbet or an industrial drying oven (people use their ovens in their kitchen, which might be a health concern).