PETG-HF is a DISASTER imho

I’ll offer this advice, dry it well first.

I’ve printed delicate items that need to withstand some heat and have been pleased with the outcome. I’ve also printed some parts of birdhouses. Little to early to see how long it will hold up, but so far in the heat it’s been good. I prefer ABS or ASA for that though. It’s far easier to print than the regular PETG from BL.

I haven’t felt the need to tweak the standard HF profile, but have found it works well and worked just as well with the Elegoo PETG-HF. If you want a high gloss finish then the Elegoo is the way to go.

I think, if you give it a fair shake, you will find it a nice filament.

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I recently bought an A1 (coming from modified/improved Ender 3 Pro) so ABS and ASA are not really options for me.

I have only printed with PLA before and PETG HF appears to me as the better more (temperature) resistant filament that the A1 can handle.

And I prefer matte so Bambu is the better choice here.

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My daughter has the Mini. PETG-HF prints well on it.

I can’t share you opinion. If I want matte I buy matte or cf filament. The fact that you need to dry every spool is a waste of time. What if my spool gets empty in a print? Need to dry the next spool another 12 hours. I never had that much of struggle with other PETG spools from others brands.
I hope they bring a normal / basic version, without the Problems

I agree, it is indeed a waste of time. In the region I live, I need to dry my filament and build special dryboxes so that I can print out of them. Even with Basic PLA! But I get much better results by that, so no way around.

It’s different in my opinion. “Modbot” on YT for example tested and compared the flow/volumetric speed of PETG BASIC and PETG HF and the HF version has higher flow compared to basic. So I guess it’s not just marketing.

But I haven’t tested it by myself yet. I only have PETG HF and no Basic or from other brands.

So after 12h @65° and calibrating temp and flow. The print quality is great. I can’t deny that.
But that can be challenging when you have to swap filament midprint. Maybe buy a bigger dry box :joy:.
I guess for parts that don’t need the matte lock I will stick to Sunlu (yeah you have to dry it as well from time to time but not 12h at 65° before every print). Overall I m switching more and more from PLA to PETG because it’s more durable and foodsafe.

If you bag it or store it in a container you needn’t dry every time, at least not 12 hours. Someone will have to look at how quickly it absorbs moisture but it’s not on par with Nylon, which I would feed from a dry box.

I’ve been printing with a black spool that I’ve dried once. Swapped 4 times over the past week, and shown no to little impact. Relative humidity has been around 45% in the area the printer is.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it is absorbing moisture, just not quick enough to have to dry if stored properly.

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If that would work, why they aren’t dry after opening the sealed new spool?

Some have reported they are. Some not so much.
I think BL took that stance because there was some inconsistency.

For example, my black spool was pretty good after about 4 hours. Probably would have been good out of the package. The grey I got at the same time needed 12 or more hours before I could get a good print. I don’t know but could just be the nature of making filament. I’ve had others that were awful when I opened them.

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You can’t guarantee the conditions before it arrived at your door. It could be dry, it may not be. It’s a gamble to throw it directly into the printer. This is true of any filament from any manufacture. While most manufactures strive to properly dry and package filament, it just doesn’t always happen for any variety of reasons that are beyond their control and our control.

I honestly don’t think drying the filament is that huge of an issue, like some make it out to be. I feel like the whole complaint about the glossiness of the surface is an empty complaint to find things to complain about, too.

I’ve been printing a lot of the PETG-HF. I’ve gone through a couple of dozen rolls now. Printing big and small! The whole drying it aspect is such a non-issue. I don’t even plan things out that well. The last round of filament I got was delivered late, and so I was already behind on my self imposed schedule, but even then drying it was a non-issue. Drying filament, It’s not like some prison sentence you need to serve before you can finally live your life.

I don’t even get fancy with calibrating it and doing all that extra stuff. I’m having a great time though. I’m not like well disciplined, with a tight running machine full of procedures meant to produce the perfect results every time. I run my operation loosely with half the parts falling off. It’s frankly a shock I make it anywhere in one piece, let alone a beautiful printed one.

The whole argument about the glossiness of the surface to me is wild. Like PETG is glosssssssy, and always felt a little cheap to me. I would not call PETG-HF matte… It’s rough at best, but not matte. Not like PETG-CF, not like PLA-Matte. It’s more like a basic PLA. I think most people would agree that the surface finish of PETG-HF is a marked improvement. Regardless though, that’s more an aesthetic thing, and it’s weird to me that it’s part of what’s being complained about.

I get complaining about having to go through the process of drying it, because it does feel like a tedious extra step that can gunk up the flow of schedules. When it comes to aesthetics though, you either like it or you don’t. You don’t like it, why are you even bothering? At that point, the rest of your complaints don’t even matter, because if you don’t even like something so basic as the surface finish it has, why even bother with the rest? If the mechanical properties are what’s most important, why are you complaining about the surface finish? I mean, either it’s suitable, or you find a different suitable material that does have the mechanical properties and surface finish you want. There’s tons to choose from.

Hmm… That last line. There’s tons to choose from, tons of options. Remember that.

In my opinion, in my realm, in my world, in my corner, on my printer, in my room with humidity currently at 40ish%. The PETG-HF is a marked improvement in a number of ways. I prefer it leaps and bounds over the PETG Basic that Bambu use to provide, and in general it is one of my favorite PETGs to print with now. I still like PETG from other companies, like Polymaker, and I like Bambu’s PETG-CF a lot!

My only complaint is that I want more colors. MORE. You hear me Bambu?! MoreeeeeeEEEEEeEeEeeEeeEeee

For me, PETG-HF hits the nail on the head. It’s what I wanted. It’s making me excited about PETG again.

[edit] A little addendum here. As it relates to my personal experience with drying. I can appreciate the need to dry filament. In the way back days, before filament dryers were so easy to get… I printed with petg and it was a huge issue, moisture. There’s a few times I threw rolls out because the roll got too water logged. I melted a roll once, accidentally, trying to dry it in an oven.

I’m a little better sorted now. I was still hesitant about the requirement of having to dry it. With the PETG Basic line gone though, and PETG-HF here to replace it, I figured I should at least give it a try. In practice, I just realized that it wasn’t such a big issue. Drying is a different process than printing, and I don’t feel like one hinders the other. They can be managed to work together, to keep the plastic flowing.

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New spools fresh from the sealed bag can lose around 2g of water drying to a drying chamber humidity of 20%. That’s typical of what I’ve been seeing. As others have noted, though, there is no good guide on best water content for printing and best is probably just as low as you need to go to get good prints. Drying past that is wasteful.

Those bags the spools are shipped in are thicker than a lot of bags and may have a water impermeable coating or maybe they count on just the thickness of the bag to keep water out. The water loss could be from water in the filament when packaged but it could be water picked up in storage.

We don’t really know where the water is coming from but do know it’s there. Is it enough to ruin prints? Seems to be for some and not so much for others.

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How did you do it?? I had the exact same experience! After drying it for days on the print bed, I gave up and bought a Sunlu S2, getting the same print quality and 50 euros less in my pocket. No matter how many hours it spends in the dryer, those darn holes caused by water evaporation remain constant. I’m going crazy! I read that you solved it by calibrating with Orca Slicer the retraction and the zhop, could you be more specific? Have there been any new developments since this comment?What do I need to do to fix the problem?

For me, the stuff prints really nicely. No magic or anything weird. I’m using stock slicer settings in the Bambu slicer. I dry the stuff for 12 hours @ 65C in a Creality 2-bay dryer, and store the spools when not in use in home-made dry boxes (using those plastic cereal boxes). The stuff works really nicely. Better than the Sunlu PETG stuff I was using before.

I take it you’ve verified that the dryer’s actually doing something? Like weigh the spool before and after you dry it? If it’s not losing weight, you’re not doing much more than warming it up a little.

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I reduced retraction to 0.2mm. My guess is, that it sucks air in the nozzle, which causes those holes.

Red in my case works with standard settings, grey needed tuning. I let the rest calibrate automatically by the Flow Dynamics Calibratoon of my A1 mini.

Just a general comment on PETG-HF - I’m loving it! (TM by some clown)

Really, though. What I’ve printed so far are little white clips I need a couple of hundred of to replace all the PLA ones I printed before (knowing they would need to be replaced each year). The PETG-HF ones so far are printing really nice and should take the heat and UV much better than the PLA. And bonus - no acrid odor like with ASA.

It’s a fairly precise clip and they are coming out beautiful. Will be printing more PETG-HF stuff based on this. I don’t know for certain why my experience is so different from OP’s. Maybe it’s moisture but the filament was printing really well straight from the bag. Drying it improved print quality a little but it was already good. Now it’s great.

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Did you change the retraction in the filament setting, right? I tried a retraction test yesterday but nope, zero improvements. I only have a better finish with a max flow rate = 1. That’s like 40min of printing for 3 grams. Not the high flow i had in mind

Also, what did bambu support told you in the ticket? I’m waiting for a response, they just asked the 3mf of the file I printed for now (I’m having the same problem on every file and every geometry, obviously)

First check if you are really drying your filament by a scale. I used this one, it’s precise enough: Küchenwaage Digital, Mafiti… https://www.amazon.de/dp/B089SY2MDL?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Note that the retraction test using orcaslicer, really only makes sense to reduce stringing. For other purposes for example seeing if there are artefacts/holes it’s simply not made for, at least in my experience. I would rather choose a test print of your choice (for example a benchy) and print it with various settings to see real differences. If you want to save filament, you could also rescale it or cancel mid print or something. By that you can see a reduction in holes when reducing retraction, or what ever else works for you. I changed retraction length to 0.2mm and turned off Z Hop.
Let me know if that helped:)

I had really good experience with the bambu support. I showed them my problem and they helped me. But because I fixed it myself, there was no need for them to give me advice.

(They even sent me a new nozzle plus 3 socks because of another problem although it’s a consumable and usually not under warranty)

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Which color of PETG HF did you use?