I found Wander Ridge vacuum bags recently. Far superior to any of those blue bags with a sticker for a valve. These are heavy weight with an actual valve on it, and the pump that comes with it is very strong and fast. 20 out of 20 held up compared to over 50% of the others failing
Those blue ring bags have been driving me crazy with the failure rate of the valves. Your post was all the endorsement I needed to try the Wander Ridge product. Ordered. I’ll report back on my experience.
I learned decades ago that water vapor goes right through plastic, you need desiccant no matter how IP-rated your case is. The Home Depot Husky cases with Hydrosorbent desiccants (not all desiccants are the same!) keep my filaments down to 10% pretty consistently.
When I open a new roll and put it in the case the humidity jumps up and then drops back to 10% over the course of the next day or so.
With the clear covers I can monitor the humidity and check inventory without opening the box.
Do those work with the vac pumps that come with the generic vacuum bags with the flat blue valves?
The one on the left is the one that comes with the 20 bag kit, the one on the right is what came with the blue sticker valve bags and it does work, but does not seal tight to the valve so you have to hold it in place until done. The one it comes with makes a tight seal that makes it stick to the valve until it is ready to be removed. It’s also got twice the speed of removal.
Ok, thanks for that. I’ll order one of the 5-bag sample packs and see how I get on with the pump i have.
What have you noticed about Hydrosorbent desiccants that makes them better than others?
[Edit: I have no idea why the link is showing that ganja image. Amusing, 
, and a sign of the times, but it’s not my doing. 
It doesn’t appear anywhere on the Hydrosorbent desiccant page that I linked to. ]
They seem to absorb a lot more moisture before getting saturated. I tried a couple of less expensive (per 500g package) desiccants from Amazon, and the humidity in my (mostly-)sealed enclosures rose a lot faster than with the Hydrosorbent.
Which kinda makes sense, if someone can cheap out on quality and sell it for less on Amazon, they will definitely do so. Hydrosorbent has been around forever, and I learned a valuable lesson by trying to save some money.
Interesting! I had always just assumed it was basically all the same, other than possibly different diameter spheres. Consequently, I never looked into it, nor ran any experiments to quantify how big the difference might be..
How does it compare to Dry 'n Dry or Wisesorbent? Those are two brands I have some familiarity with. There’s not a lot of space for desiccant inside the Bambulab AMS’s, so if Hydrosorbent truly is head and shoulder better, that would be one place I could see putting it to use over the others.
I bought a bunch of Wisesorb, and then some bags to put it in, and while it brought the humidity down in my enclosure, swapping in the Hydrosorbent gave much better results.
I did a little digging. Hydrosorbent appears to be both a material type and a specific brand name. But more to the point…
Hydrosorbent desiccants seem to be able to absorb a lot more water than silica gel. The downside is it’s not reusable for most home users; you need to heat it to over 500°C (over 1000°F) to get the water out. So unless you have a kiln on hand, and a cheap source of electricity…
I’ve also learned that (some? most?) silica gels will eventually reach a stable RH around 40%, which is much higher than we want filaments at. I knew tha it’s so important to change out and “recharge” it regularly, but I didn’t realize that it would reach such a high equilibrium point!
I might pick up a kilo of Hydrosorbent to try using in my large storage bin and see how it does, as measured by a hygrometer.
Wait! This seems like a disconnect. Where are you seeing 500C? I see two distinct Hydrosorbent desiccants: silica gel (that I linked to above) and molecular sieve. Hydrosorbent recommends recharging the silica gel at 125C, and their 4A molecular sieve at 320C.
