My X2D nozzles ooze a lot and create a lot of mess. This printer is brand new and i only have about 8 hours on it. It happens mainly because they don’t wipe themselves before and after nozzle offset calibration (the final step where they use the new calibration pad on the X2D that wasn’t present on the P2S). The calibration begins by them changing filament, wiping any leftover ooze and then continuing by cleaning themselves on the metal pad with the dots. But the nozzles won’t stop oozing, they continue to ooze as they calibrate offset which makes a mess and covers the calibration pad with filament, they don’t wipe either after this step and move on to printing immediately after. So any filament ooze that was smushed onto the nozzles in the calibration process would stay on the nozzles, as seen in the attached image. This becomes a problem when there’s so much filament that it gets dragged into print lines and ruins them. And that’s only the first issue i have been experiencing. There’s so much ooze sometimes that the wiping pad makes the filament strings fly off, it has landed on the XY axis rods before or even on the glass side panels. The whole wiping station is covered with pieces of filament like that. My country has recently been hit with a heat wave and my room can get as hot as 30 degrees Celsius with 70% humidity. These issues don’t really affect the print quality, but it just creates a lot of mess that i have to clean up.
I mainly print with elegoo PLA. On the spool it says that the temperature range is 190-230, and i run my prints at 210. Don’t know if that’s too hot considering the weather is horrible here at the time of posting this. But my bambu pla has the same problems.
Nozzle temperature isn’t affected by ambient temperature in this situation.
It sounds a lot like you have a humidity problem. Dry your filament, then feed it from either a well-dessiccated AMS or other drybox.
Moisture trapped in filament expands significantly when heated, so if it enters the hotend and sits there being heated, it will expand and push out filament.
Uncommanded extrusion is often a moisture problem first
You can remove some mystery [calibration procedure] by just letting the extruder work alone.
Walk up to your machine, load a filament, set the nozzle to 220 [or whatever] and extrude. When the gear stops moving, do a quick wipe of the nozzle with a cloth. Does more spaghetti keep coming out, like, a lot? Wet. If youre lucky you might even see puffs of steam.
But then how do i get rid of the moisture. I already dried my filament for about 12 hours at 45 degrees. Should i buy a dehumidifier to lower the humidity of my room? Because currently it’s about 65-70%
One more round in the hotbox IMO lol and make sure the environment it cools down in is very dry [a bag, still in the closed AMS, etc, ideally with some form of dessicant] or itll soak it back up right away.
If you have a scale that goes to 0.1g, you can weigh, then dry, then reweigh. At some point you’ll stop losing weight so fast and thats a good indicator it’s taken enough dry. [cardboard interferes slightly with the fidelity of this measurement, since it absorbs moisture too.]
Unfortunately this is a common misconception. Weight difference tells you very little about filament moisture unless you get a big number. That can tell you the drying method got moisture out but even then it doesn’t tell you if it’s “dry”. In the extreme, if you weigh a spool, just put it in a box for 24 hours, take it out and weigh it again, you should see no difference too even though no drying was performed at all.
The way to gauge filament dryness is using humidity. There is a relationship between humidity and moisture content. The archival and museum industries do it all the time. They use desiccants to both dry and wet and determine moisture content of silica gel using humidity in a closed environment.
Filament acts like a desiccant in this respect and even though we don’t know the actual moisture content, if we measure the humidity in a closed environment we get a reproducible handle on filament moisture. Put a spool of filament in a sealing polyethylene cereal box, or even a gallon ziplock bag, with a hygrometer and read the humidity when it stops changing. For my printer setup, over 25% RH and PLA starts having issues. Over 20% with PETG and it will have issues.
The humidity measurement test will also tell you if drying is effective, ineffective, or if it’s even needed.
Caveat is ziplock bags leak humidity. Over short times you’ll still get good numbers but leave it for a day or two and it could leak up.
the hygrometer inside the AMS tells me the humidity is 40%, i am guessing that’s a lot and probably the source of the oozing. When i dry the filament inside the AMS, it goes down to as low as 16%. But quickly jumps back up to a 30% once the drying procedure is finished. Should i print one of those desiccant holders and buy desiccant silica gel in bulk? My setup is very amateurish, i don’t know what to do about the humidity.
Relative humidity has a big dependence on temperature. Hotter air can hold more water so RH drops. When an empty dryer heats up it’s normal to see a humidity drop. When there is filament in it it’s another story depending on how wet the filament is. Depending on the dryer it can easily cause humidity to spike.
Dealing with high humidity is a big subject but understanding it pays huge dividends. There’s a lot of threads here about humidity, drying, and filament storage.
Basically you want to keep your filament dry once you dry it because it’s a bother but also because water can damage filament and even make it brittle. You also want to dry effectively from the get go.
