Hi All,
I’ve got hold of some of this filament.
Any advice as to how best print it?
I note that BL make a lot of noise about drying out before use.
Gerard
Dry it, lots of user have posted that hey had bad prints until they were told to dry it…then they had good prints.
I dried my overnight, cause why not…I was sleeping anyway.
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One of these Benchies was printed with filament straight out of the factory seal, and the other was printed with filament dried. Guess which one?
Most importantly, weigh your filament and write down its weight on the spool so you know the starting value when it comes out of the bag. Then, dry it while checking the weight every 2-4 hours. Over time, it will stop losing weight, which indicates that all the moisture has been removed. Record the final weight on the spool along with the amount of moisture lost. This will show you exactly how much moisture was present in the filament.
A noteworthy point: 1g = 1cc = 1ml of water. I’ve had 1kg spools that contained as much as 13g of moisture. However, in fairness, I couldn’t determine how much of that moisture came from the filament versus the cardboard spool in that case. For Bambu spools, since they are plastic, this concern does not apply.
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Thanks for the good information.
I’ve invested in a dryer that will dry 2 spools at a time.
My electricity tariff is 1/2 price overnight so I can take advantage of that.
I’ll post up some pics when I get cranked up.
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My dryer is an epic failure as it cannot go higher than 50C!
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It will just take longer to dry.
What dryer did you by…??
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I will note that before I got a purpose-built dryer. This is what I used:
It got the job done.
Exactly!!!
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It doesn’t get hotter than 47C (I recorded that later) and I ran it overnight…10 hours.
There was no change in the mass I recorded before I put it in. Not even 1g!
It’s a Comgrow
That could also mean that there wasn’t any moisture present at the start of the cycle. This is why it’s so important to measure right out of the bag and right after drying.
However, I can totally understand that one may have doubts. When I did, I would place it in my kitchen oven at 140F/60C. I’d measure it at two hour intervals. At 60C, it should be more than enough to force any moisture to evaporate. But be careful to monitor the oven… lest you have one of these beauties for your hall of shame trophy case. 
This was a spool of PETG. At 60C it worked great in my oven, so why not 85C??? Sure… that’s the ticket… except the spool wasn’t rated for that. I keep this around as a humble reminder. 
Actually, I didn’t think of zero moisture!
I have put the filament in the oven at 63C. Let it run for several hours and redo the weight test.
Similar to your pic, I pretty much did that with one of the BL spools rated to 70C. I had it in a small oven where you could set the temp. I figured 65C. What I did not count on was the oven runs about 10% hotter than indicated. So, just north of 70C and it was goodbye to the spool!
The results of drying were pretty consistent.
Being cooked at 63C for 10 hours showed little reduction in mass. About 4g per spool. Say, for example, 1278g >1274g.
I’m going to give it a try now and we’ll see the ‘proof of the pudding’ so to speak/
That’s .4% and for PETG that is saturated. Maybe PETG-HF can soak up more, but that sounds like a lot to me. Sometimes hard to know with the spool in the equation also.
What I failed to mention was that I measured the mass (weighed on a scale) several times and the loss of mass was a fair bit to start with and tapered off as time went on. Like Newton’s Law of Cooling.