I can’t see that it’s misleading as you can clearly see the temperature is only 22c and as I said it’s just to show the setup and not a guideline for drying filament as that is dependent upon what you are trying to dry.
I’m not having any issues with my prints and it’s very rear I do. like you I’ve been advising people on how to get round issues they are having. If I can PETG dry and printing at good quality with the humidity I face most the time here then surely my methods should be able to help others with their issues. I think good airflow while drying is 70% of battle then dry air after.
Here’s one of my recent PETG prints. Filament is Esun PETG solid white printed on a P1P with a 0.4 nozzle and 0.2 layer height.
Edit: the rings on the dryer look bad because I was using them to setup the filament they were printed in at the time as mentioned a few posts up. As they are just for the dryer I never bothered to reprint them😂
No worries, yes you are correct it’s not as much help in higher humidity’s, its almost like the wet bulb effect where sweating no longer cools at high humidity at a certain temperature.
I have worked in a few areas of construction here in the uk and when we dry houses after leaks or flooding we use forced air movers with dehumidifiers to dry them. The force air mover’s really helped to evaporate the moisture from the surfaces so that the dehumidifiers can do their work. Without the air movement the process can take 4x longer, no heat is used except what is produced by the machines.
I was looking into a way of drying my air pre dehydrator using a sort of dehumidifier condensing coil but gave up once I found out that I could get good enough results without it.
OK… so as soon as I take this filament out of the package, I need to put it straight into a dryer… I have a Sunlu dryer… and it seems to be ok…
Anyway… am i to understand, that if i take the filament out of the new package and put it into the AMS to print… It may not come out nice?
There’s a lot of qualifications before saying that’s a good idea. The cheap filament dryers can actually add water depending on ambient humidity and how dry your filament is.
To really know how filament drying is going requires a scale that can weigh a full spool (<2kg) to a precision of 0.1 or 0.01g. A warm spool will cause air currents so the “dry” number will bounce a little but it’s the only way to know if you are truly drying the filament.
So my Elegoo has exited the dryer. Just trying to find something to print with it. Been in the dryer for 24hrs only because I forgot about it. Really only dried for about 8.
I got the spool for $11. I’ll give BL a try at some point, but to be 100% honest I don’t use PETG that much.
I couldn’t say. Doubling the cost would cut into sales, but also it’s not easy to find things that are happy at fairly high temperatures of drying especially when asking for high precision. Olias mentioned elsewhere that leaving weight on a scale for long periods will also affect accuracy.
But if you want a real answer, which I doubt they would give you anyway, would be to ask a dryer company.
I’ve now printed 2 objects with the Elegoo, which I am guessing is very similar to the BL PETG-HF.
Both came out perfect. I’d post pics but does anyone really care what I printed, lol?
It is very similar to PLA printing. No stringing and a nice finish (kinda satin for the Elegoo).
I’ll test some other properties. I just got a new sapling for bonsai and printed a little pot to let it grow a bit in. May also just print a larger container for another one I have, but need to get a different color than black.
Another 20h of drying with a slightly open Sunlu S2 and the same print results. Even reduced Room humidity from 70% to 45%.
The Filaments sat in the dryer for over 2 days without removing it and and it’s still as wet as day one. I don’t know if it’s really the dryer, me or something else.
Whatever the problem is, I am super frustrated after all that I can’t get this damn filament DRY.
Throughout this thread, we’ve discussed drying the filament. I think it’s safe to say the filament is dry enough. Clearly, one doesn’t need to be a material scientist to concede this point.
The question I have not seen answered (forgive me if I missed it) is: Have you calibrated the filament using Orca Slicer?
Do not waste your time using the default Bambu settings or attempting to use the Bambu calibration routines. They are hopelessly flawed, and it’s clear the default settings are not working for you. You should assume that this individual filament spool did not meet the manufacturer’s specifications. This won’t be the first or the last time. In such cases, manual calibration is your best option.
In my experience, outside of the PLA profiles, I have always achieved better filament performance when I calibrate manually. Often, with materials like PETG, PC, and TPU, I find I may even need two different profiles depending on the application—one for strength and another for reduced stringiness. With clear PETG as an example, I have a special profile which is the only way to produce near optically clear prints, all other profiles simply did not work in that application.
Look, I sense you’re frustration and you have a right to be pissed off. But seize the day and take back control. If you master calibration I can promise you the feeling is one of empowerment knowing that you can beat anything. Of course, I concede that one shouldn’t have to waste one’s time fixing a manufacturers problem but what choice do you have? Bambu’s return policy is sub-standard. All I can offer is, next time, buy a competing filament from Amazon so you can get your money back if you get a bad spool.
Thanks for your feedback. Okay, I haven’t used Orcaslicer before, so no I didn’t calibrate my filament with it. I will try that tomorrow.
But one thing I wonder, what are the noises I hear and from what does the bubbles come from? Could it be some clogging inside the nozzle or something?
From the YTChannel „Figure Feedback“ I know that these bubble could get caused by some missing calibration, as you Olias suggested as well. After he calibrate this filament calibration (I am not sure which one, might be the calibration in Orcaslicer), the bubbles etc. went away.
Anyway, tomorrow I will definitely try Orcaslicer and hope that something improves.
The sounds and bubbles are caused by water being heated above the boiling point in the hot end. The moisture rapidly boils and turns into vapor, forming bubbles in the melted filament, which is then expelled from the nozzle in an uncontrolled manner.
As Mzip says if it pops and crackles it’s probably because of moisture, also if you look closely at the filament you can see it bubbling. You can check the poop from the back to as this will be covered with loads of tiny craters where the bubbles have popped.
I have noticed though that if retraction settings are bad after a retraction you will get a few pops after exstution starts again and it will also leave a few holes in the print when this happens. The easiest way I have found to check for this is to print something that has a long flat side of about 200mm and se the seem to the centre. If you watch the print whe the nozzle starts to extrude a layer at the seem as it move you will hear a few pops in the first 50-80mm of travel and will see holes and possibly some stringing. Reducing the retraction will solve this. Some filaments I have it as low as 0.1mm but you would need to run a few prints to test you filament.
Here’s some riser rings I was printing when I setup the retraction for the filament used. If you were just to look at the top one you would assume that the filament is wet but it’s not. The top is with generic settings retraction settings, the middle around half and the bottom was 0.2.
So, do you think excessive retraction is actually pulling air back into the nozzle, where it is heated, expanded, and then “spits” out inconsistent amounts of material?
It’s either that or causing an air gap at the rear of the heating chamber by the extruder gear.
Every filament acts differently depending on what it’s made of and its viscosity when heated and this can even be between different batches of the same filament and colour. this is due to the chemical makeup of each each filament and the ratios of those chemicals.
This is the main reason I took the time to learn how to setup print and filament profiles, I thought I was having trouble with moisture in the filament because of the results I was getting. It turned out to be a bad profile for this specific filament, which is now one of my favourite to print.
I just read a lot of stuff to get a broad idea of different opinions of what could be happening, most were screaming wet filament but there were a few that had quite informed opinions on other ideas and combinations of them.
I then went about testing each setting to the extreme to see what happened. This allowed me to start to understand what was happening when I was getting problems because I had seen the extreme ends of things like excessive cooling, heat, speed, retraction and many other things and combinations there of. I even left some filament in water for a week and printed with it for the experience.
I learned a lot, which is why I carry the opinion that Bambu is going to struggle to make a filament that prints to good standards in all there printers with a generic profile. The printers are built to a within a give tolerance and depending on where each printers components lay within this range will govern how well it will print and what tuning it will need for this.
That’s the main reason why some people have trouble with generic settings and some don’t, and it’s always going to be that way unless Bambu blueprint there parts like engines are blueprinted and everything is exact to design measurements with no tolerance. Or the other option is that they put the time and effort into making decent and easy to follow guides for users on how to setup and tune the profiles from scratch.
