Desicant - so, i finally made my hygrometer to show 11% this morning. What i did was to get all the Desicant out (which was store bought, not reused) and dry it for 90min at 120C. Put it in again and now thats good.
I think Bambustudio (and i will file feature requests for this) could help a lot here in the day to day management:
a) show me how long a spool is in the AMS. Give me custom alerting (like alert me if a spool is in there longer than X days)
b) show me how much is still on the spool (unrelated, but would be useful).
My current plan is to leave things in the AMS for X days pending filament, then dry it out in the S2. Redry the desicant whenever the thing hits 20% again.
I do not use an oven for drying though. Up to 3 1/2 Minutes at 80% power in our 800W microwave and a good warm, uncovered rest.
I have also used my filament dryer to dry desiccant bags. Just fooling around really, but it does work.
You will destroy your silica if you use a microwave!!!
German advice from a manufacturer:
Fortunately, that is heat driven, not radiation driven. Indeed you can hear it pop when you experiment with durations and are too ambitious
The reason why the manufacturer can not recommend a microwave is, that they can not know how much material is put in the microwave by the consumer. So they need to play it safe as they can not give a good duration.
They are supposed to be rechargeable 6 times on average, but I am not there yet with the AMS load. Only needed to dry once in 3 months.
The ones I put in with the spools in the dryer have had around 1-2 dozen (low) heat cycles and still appear as new. However, I rarely allow them more than a handfull of green pearls.
The most challenged load is actually living in the secondary freezer to help a little with humid air in that room getting in. They were the ones I got overly ambitious with as they were soaking wet. Done that once so far.
When they fail from heat, they go off like smelly popcorn and disintegrate into chunks and dust. Still dryed to a nice orange though
When drying desiccant in my microwave, I assumed 50% power was defrost. It turns out that at 50%, it will nicely brown the desiccant. Defrost is 30% power on my microwave. I shoulda read the manual. One of our process air dryers at work used 250kg of non indicating silica desiccant beads in a drum something like a double walled washing machine tub. 3/4 of the diameter was drying process air while 1/4 was being regenerated with air heated to about 225°F. The drum turned 1/4 revolution per hour and it ran 24/7. We could get several years out of it before it needed new desiccant.
