I just opened a brand new roll of PETG last night and was shocked that the desiccant pack felt damp. The spool was vacuum packed and still perfectly sealed so it wasn't due to lack of sealing. So into the dryer it went. But this is also why I always dry every roll irrespective as to how old it is. I use a 5 gallon home depot bucket that I added a heater, fan and calcium chloride desiccant to and it does an amazing job at drying 2 rolls. One of these buckets also hold 4 spools perfectly for long term storage and they are air tight. So tight in fact that if you close them up on a cold day with high air pressure and open it on a warmer day with higher air pressure you can literally hear and feel the "hiss" of air escaping when you lift the lip of the lid. I found these to be a significantly better storage solution than "weather tight" bins.
5 gallon buckets are a good idea, thanks for sharing! Those lids do seal very tightly, that would work great. And they are very economical. I'll have to give that a try sometime.
Filament is made in large quantities using an extruder and a water tank. The filament is pulled into the right diameter and then cooled down with the water. The water will get into it and the desiccant wont be enough to dry it. So when the wrap is put on the roll it is still very wet internally. A single spool drybox can achieve sub 10% humidity. I made 4 cereal box dryboxes and I use palygorskite beads used in car desiccant bags (they are really cheap). I just tore the bags open and dumped the desiccant into the cereal box. When I put a new spool into the box I will take the palygorskite and throw it into the oven at some arbitrary temperature above 100 degreen celsius. Today I did 20 minutes at 160 degrees celsius. After that I cooled it for 3 minutes and threw it back into the cereal box while it was still hot it wasn't melting the plastic. Then I threw the filament spool into it on a roller and over about 8 hours the box went from 22% to now sub 10%. When I first opened the roll it was at 34%. So the palygorskite already took out 12% before I dried it. Palygorskite can also be dried using a microwave. Sometimes I do both. I usually print PETG but I got a roll of glow in the dark PLA and it was puffing up so it had to be dried. The PETG becomes weaker if it is print while wet and it also becomes really stringy.
So I have the same set up but what I do is to stack the spools one on top of another like a tower, the I put the same Eva-Dry and i put a portable fan with timer at low speed for 4 hours and seal the tote. The humidity stays between 16-20%. Now I'm working on adding a small space heater to that setup.
I love the simplicity of just using desiccant packs and a good sealing box. KISS. Complicated de-humidifier just seems un-necessarily complex. Anyway, we're constant battling humidity in the semiconductor industry, and your experience here matches what I would expect. I don't think there is any other cost reasonable strategy here, a nitrogen purged dry-box would be absolutely ridiculous for 20$ filaments.
The trick is knowing when to dry the desiccant packs. I know a lot of makers just take the pack from the sealed filament bag and throw it into their box. But they never dry out those packs. Meaning they are pretty much useless once they have absorbed all they can absorb. The de-humidifiers are nice because they have the color indicators telling you when they need drying. It is much more in-your-face.
Thanks, this was enough to show that it would be orders of magnitude too slow for a printing enclosure, but would be fine for a filament storage. So basically, nothing matches up to an active dehumidifier for printer enclosures(or a frozen water bottle).
@@kasberkhof7958 Yeah, a water bottle full of -ice- frozen water. When left out it gets wet, and that has to come from somewhere. I called it a frozen water bottle because that is what it is, you take a water bottle, and freeze it, making it a water bottle that is frozen, so a frozen water bottle.
Even though it took longer to dry the air with the bags open, doesn't mean you got enough water out of the plastic. That's the real question. Is the plastic dry now. I could see a state where the platic is wet, it gives off some water, the beads asorbe it, and it reaches a state where the plastic isn't going to give off water anymore on it's own without heat. And then drying the air does nothing to dry the plastic.
Would you then recommend using a filament drying setup to dry all new spools before placing them in a dry box? I have been using the same dry box setup (bin and dehumidifier) as you used. I purchased a food dehydrator and replaced the trays with a 2-1/2 gallon bucket from Walmart that fit near perfectly to allow 3-4 spools to dry at a time. I have the Switchbot temp/humidity sensor as well for monitoring my garage. Great channel.
I am new on 3d , i have not one yet but i want to know what is the optimum humidity ? I leave in Houston (70-90%) , it is Very humid. I was to store the printer in the garage. I want to know how many precaution i need to take before the filaments are unsuable.
The lower the better. 20% or less would be the goal. Houston sounds similar to where I live in Tampa. I can certainly notice a quality improvement with dry filament compared to filament left in my ~50% humidity office. A much more humid garage would have more of an effect. I would recommend getting a weather tight storage box and a set of rechargeable humidifiers, and just store your filament in there when not in use. Keeping filament on your printer if you are printing is fine, but if you aren't going to print for a day or more, then unload and keep it in your dry storage box. There are a lot of filament dryers out there these days, but you don't really need one if you have a dry storage box. Dryers are only useful if you need to dry filament quickly, otherwise a week in the dry storage will do the same thing.
Thanks! It depends on how often I open the box to change filament. Could be a couple of weeks, could be more than a month or two. I look at the color indicators each time I go in, and recharge as needed.
With the exception of specialty filaments like woodfill, I would think the lower the better. From my understanding, dissicants can keep the humidity less than 20%, but most common humidity readers have trouble reading lower than 10%. I don't think you can get too dry, but keeping it with dessicant around that 10 to 20% should be just fine.
@@HoffmanEngineering I found a sealed tote with wheels at Menards so I am testing it out now, I put a Govee Bluetooth Hygrometer / temperature sensor inside and it is also a data logger so I can see the changes when new filament is added to the box as well as when the dehumidifier starts to slow down.
@@johnbuck5181 Hey thanks for asking, the relative humidity inside the tote is holding steady at an average 27.8% on box 1 and Box 2 is Averaging 31.4% . I think box two has some CF and wetter filaments, or print from a dryer filaments. TPU petg and paht-cf. I will say, love these Govee sensors I can just stick everywhere collecting the data.
Certainly seems odd that vacuum packed filament bags aren't fully dry. That definitely puts a kink in methods needed to help keep filament dry. So is +-25% the goal for dry filament? I would have expected lower value. I have a Sovol SH02 filament dryer which has an onboard humidity meter. Really not sure about it's accuracy however. I have some older PLA (3+ years old) that I know is wet and I'm trying to dry it out in the SH02. I'm starting the drying at 50C for 16 hrs and trying to watch humidity to see when it gets around 25%. It started in the low 30s and has climbed to near 40% after 6 hours. Guessing this is expected since the PLA should be releasing moisture as it continues to dry. But I'm wondering how long this may actually take to get the humidity down to 25%. Would be interested in what you think? Also is it possible to over dry filament? Any downsides to keeping filament in heated dry boxes for longer? Thanks.
Just wanted to check on you and see how you were doing after such a traumatizing experience. Did starting the therapy and joining a support group take care of those night terrors? Hang in there bud, I know you've been through a lot.
That is not true. Heat is not necessary for drying, it just speeds up the process. These dry boxes will fully dry your filament over about 5 to 7 days.
@@HoffmanEngineering How are you determining that the filament is drying and not just the air in the container? If only using plastic spools weighing them can give you and indication of moisture lost, but it won’t tell you if they’re dry. A proper experiment would be: - designate a high humidity box. Weigh 2 spools before placing them in. Leave them in for 7 days, then weigh upon removal. - Put one spool in a dry box. Put the other in a legitimate dehumidifier. - Remove both after 7 days and weigh them. If your scale isn’t precise enough then use more spools, as they’ll hold more moisture.
Weight is the main indicator. I've been testing filament dryers recently, and filament that had been in my dry storage does not lose any weight after 8 hours of being in the dryer. That indicates that no additional moisture was lost, so the spools were already dry.
@@HoffmanEngineeringSo you choose not to test scientifically. You’re doubling down on omitting a control. If you put a sealed water bottle in your dry storage box for 1 year, then in a filament dryer for 8 hours it will not lose any weight. And yet your conclusion is there is no water inside the water bottle…
@@TheOfficialOriginalChad If I put a sealed water bottle in a high-humidity environment, it also wouldn't gain any weight. Thus we could conclude there was no water in the bottle to begin with. Am I following with your logic? :D
Is this PLA? I remember a youtuber putting a spool of PLA submerged in a water bath for weeks and then printing with it without any problem at all. My feeling is that drying of filaments has become an obsession for many enthusiasts but is in fact useless :) Excluding some special cases.
Most of my filament is PLA, with some PETG/ABS/TPU/others mixed in. I've definitely had ABS bubble from moisture before (see my old drying filament video). But I agree, with PLA you don't need super dry conditions. I haven't seen bubbling, but I do see brittleness after sitting in the open air after a while.
The people saying that don't know what they're doing, and are apparently satisfied with abysmally low quality prints. You can *kinda* compensate for wet filament stringing by using extremely long retractions to get your filament all the way out of the melt zone during travel so the water boiling off doesn't make it ooze and string, but this makes printing really slow and risks all of the problems associated with excess retraction length. And from a layer adhesion standpoint, wet filament prints like it's about 20° cooler, because the water's phase transition robs so much of the heat. You can compensate by jacking the temperature up, but then you get even more popping, stringing, and bad surface quality.
![ปฏิเสธไม่ไหว (Crush on you) - LIPTA feat. No One Else [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NBw1jF342vw/mqdefault.jpg)
I just opened a brand new roll of PETG last night and was shocked that the desiccant pack felt damp. The spool was vacuum packed and still perfectly sealed so it wasn't due to lack of sealing. So into the dryer it went. But this is also why I always dry every roll irrespective as to how old it is. I use a 5 gallon home depot bucket that I added a heater, fan and calcium chloride desiccant to and it does an amazing job at drying 2 rolls. One of these buckets also hold 4 spools perfectly for long term storage and they are air tight. So tight in fact that if you close them up on a cold day with high air pressure and open it on a warmer day with higher air pressure you can literally hear and feel the "hiss" of air escaping when you lift the lip of the lid. I found these to be a significantly better storage solution than "weather tight" bins.
5 gallon buckets are a good idea, thanks for sharing! Those lids do seal very tightly, that would work great. And they are very economical. I'll have to give that a try sometime.
Filament is made in large quantities using an extruder and a water tank. The filament is pulled into the right diameter and then cooled down with the water. The water will get into it and the desiccant wont be enough to dry it. So when the wrap is put on the roll it is still very wet internally.
A single spool drybox can achieve sub 10% humidity.
I made 4 cereal box dryboxes and I use palygorskite beads used in car desiccant bags (they are really cheap). I just tore the bags open and dumped the desiccant into the cereal box. When I put a new spool into the box I will take the palygorskite and throw it into the oven at some arbitrary temperature above 100 degreen celsius. Today I did 20 minutes at 160 degrees celsius. After that I cooled it for 3 minutes and threw it back into the cereal box while it was still hot it wasn't melting the plastic. Then I threw the filament spool into it on a roller and over about 8 hours the box went from 22% to now sub 10%. When I first opened the roll it was at 34%. So the palygorskite already took out 12% before I dried it.
Palygorskite can also be dried using a microwave. Sometimes I do both. I usually print PETG but I got a roll of glow in the dark PLA and it was puffing up so it had to be dried. The PETG becomes weaker if it is print while wet and it also becomes really stringy.
Thanks for this. Exactly the kind of info I'm looking for (and the type of experiment I would do myself, but you saved me the time:)
So I have the same set up but what I do is to stack the spools one on top of another like a tower, the I put the same Eva-Dry and i put a portable fan with timer at low speed for 4 hours and seal the tote. The humidity stays between 16-20%. Now I'm working on adding a small space heater to that setup.
Does tough pla and regular pla really need a dry box? Many youtubers have shelves just out in the open.
I love the simplicity of just using desiccant packs and a good sealing box. KISS. Complicated de-humidifier just seems un-necessarily complex. Anyway, we're constant battling humidity in the semiconductor industry, and your experience here matches what I would expect. I don't think there is any other cost reasonable strategy here, a nitrogen purged dry-box would be absolutely ridiculous for 20$ filaments.
The trick is knowing when to dry the desiccant packs. I know a lot of makers just take the pack from the sealed filament bag and throw it into their box. But they never dry out those packs. Meaning they are pretty much useless once they have absorbed all they can absorb. The de-humidifiers are nice because they have the color indicators telling you when they need drying. It is much more in-your-face.
Thanks, this was enough to show that it would be orders of magnitude too slow for a printing enclosure, but would be fine for a filament storage. So basically, nothing matches up to an active dehumidifier for printer enclosures(or a frozen water bottle).
A frozen water bottle?
@@kasberkhof7958 Yeah, a water bottle full of -ice- frozen water. When left out it gets wet, and that has to come from somewhere.
I called it a frozen water bottle because that is what it is, you take a water bottle, and freeze it, making it a water bottle that is frozen, so a frozen water bottle.
@@civilisedzombie lol yeah it’s genius. Probably quick too
Do dryer heater boxes remove water from fillement if there is desiccant in the bottom of the dryer box?
Even though it took longer to dry the air with the bags open, doesn't mean you got enough water out of the plastic. That's the real question. Is the plastic dry now. I could see a state where the platic is wet, it gives off some water, the beads asorbe it, and it reaches a state where the plastic isn't going to give off water anymore on it's own without heat. And then drying the air does nothing to dry the plastic.
Would you then recommend using a filament drying setup to dry all new spools before placing them in a dry box? I have been using the same dry box setup (bin and dehumidifier) as you used. I purchased a food dehydrator and replaced the trays with a 2-1/2 gallon bucket from Walmart that fit near perfectly to allow 3-4 spools to dry at a time.
I have the Switchbot temp/humidity sensor as well for monitoring my garage.
Great channel.
I am new on 3d , i have not one yet but i want to know what is the optimum humidity ? I leave in Houston (70-90%) , it is Very humid. I was to store the printer in the garage. I want to know how many precaution i need to take before the filaments are unsuable.
The lower the better. 20% or less would be the goal. Houston sounds similar to where I live in Tampa. I can certainly notice a quality improvement with dry filament compared to filament left in my ~50% humidity office. A much more humid garage would have more of an effect.
I would recommend getting a weather tight storage box and a set of rechargeable humidifiers, and just store your filament in there when not in use. Keeping filament on your printer if you are printing is fine, but if you aren't going to print for a day or more, then unload and keep it in your dry storage box.
There are a lot of filament dryers out there these days, but you don't really need one if you have a dry storage box. Dryers are only useful if you need to dry filament quickly, otherwise a week in the dry storage will do the same thing.
@@HoffmanEngineering great comment, many thanks!!!
You'd do a lot better getting humidity low fast and keeping it there with molecular sieve desiccant instead of these dehumidifiers using silica gel.
THANKS
Why would you store sealed filament in a dry box?
excellente vidéo de teste ! merci
Great experiments and very helpful! How often do you charge your Eva-Dry dehumidifiers once you get your filament dry?
Thanks! It depends on how often I open the box to change filament. Could be a couple of weeks, could be more than a month or two. I look at the color indicators each time I go in, and recharge as needed.
I'm not finding recommended filament humidity for storage/printing of various filament types. Does anyone out there have a reference?
So what is the ideal % of humidity for filament?
With the exception of specialty filaments like woodfill, I would think the lower the better. From my understanding, dissicants can keep the humidity less than 20%, but most common humidity readers have trouble reading lower than 10%. I don't think you can get too dry, but keeping it with dessicant around that 10 to 20% should be just fine.
did you leave all the desiccant that came with the filament in the box?
No, I removed them. The rechargable dehumidifiers are more than enough to control it.
@@HoffmanEngineering I found a sealed tote with wheels at Menards so I am testing it out now, I put a Govee Bluetooth Hygrometer / temperature sensor inside and it is also a data logger so I can see the changes when new filament is added to the box as well as when the dehumidifier starts to slow down.
@@JBGecko13yt any update you can provide us after 3 months?
@@johnbuck5181 Hey thanks for asking, the relative humidity inside the tote is holding steady at an average 27.8% on box 1 and Box 2 is Averaging 31.4% . I think box two has some CF and wetter filaments, or print from a dryer filaments. TPU petg and paht-cf. I will say, love these Govee sensors I can just stick everywhere collecting the data.
@@JBGecko13yt nice, thanks!
Certainly seems odd that vacuum packed filament bags aren't fully dry. That definitely puts a kink in methods needed to help keep filament dry.
So is +-25% the goal for dry filament? I would have expected lower value. I have a Sovol SH02 filament dryer which has an onboard humidity meter. Really not sure about it's accuracy however. I have some older PLA (3+ years old) that I know is wet and I'm trying to dry it out in the SH02. I'm starting the drying at 50C for 16 hrs and trying to watch humidity to see when it gets around 25%. It started in the low 30s and has climbed to near 40% after 6 hours. Guessing this is expected since the PLA should be releasing moisture as it continues to dry. But I'm wondering how long this may actually take to get the humidity down to 25%. Would be interested in what you think? Also is it possible to over dry filament? Any downsides to keeping filament in heated dry boxes for longer? Thanks.
Just buy a peltier module, CPU fan+radiator and trap the moisture using condensation
When humidity below 30% what showing this small sensors is total fake. You should use some serious industrial sensor for such testing.
Watching you put your filament in the box while holding a hobby knife toward your other hand is the definition of anxiety.
Just wanted to check on you and see how you were doing after such a traumatizing experience. Did starting the therapy and joining a support group take care of those night terrors? Hang in there bud, I know you've been through a lot.
Remember: these boxes DO NOT dehumidify the filament. Heat must be applied to the filament for moisture to be released
That is not true. Heat is not necessary for drying, it just speeds up the process. These dry boxes will fully dry your filament over about 5 to 7 days.
@@HoffmanEngineering How are you determining that the filament is drying and not just the air in the container? If only using plastic spools weighing them can give you and indication of moisture lost, but it won’t tell you if they’re dry.
A proper experiment would be:
- designate a high humidity box. Weigh 2 spools before placing them in. Leave them in for 7 days, then weigh upon removal.
- Put one spool in a dry box. Put the other in a legitimate dehumidifier.
- Remove both after 7 days and weigh them.
If your scale isn’t precise enough then use more spools, as they’ll hold more moisture.
Weight is the main indicator. I've been testing filament dryers recently, and filament that had been in my dry storage does not lose any weight after 8 hours of being in the dryer. That indicates that no additional moisture was lost, so the spools were already dry.
@@HoffmanEngineeringSo you choose not to test scientifically. You’re doubling down on omitting a control.
If you put a sealed water bottle in your dry storage box for 1 year, then in a filament dryer for 8 hours it will not lose any weight. And yet your conclusion is there is no water inside the water bottle…
@@TheOfficialOriginalChad If I put a sealed water bottle in a high-humidity environment, it also wouldn't gain any weight. Thus we could conclude there was no water in the bottle to begin with. Am I following with your logic? :D
Is this PLA? I remember a youtuber putting a spool of PLA submerged in a water bath for weeks and then printing with it without any problem at all. My feeling is that drying of filaments has become an obsession for many enthusiasts but is in fact useless :) Excluding some special cases.
Most of my filament is PLA, with some PETG/ABS/TPU/others mixed in. I've definitely had ABS bubble from moisture before (see my old drying filament video). But I agree, with PLA you don't need super dry conditions. I haven't seen bubbling, but I do see brittleness after sitting in the open air after a while.
The people saying that don't know what they're doing, and are apparently satisfied with abysmally low quality prints. You can *kinda* compensate for wet filament stringing by using extremely long retractions to get your filament all the way out of the melt zone during travel so the water boiling off doesn't make it ooze and string, but this makes printing really slow and risks all of the problems associated with excess retraction length. And from a layer adhesion standpoint, wet filament prints like it's about 20° cooler, because the water's phase transition robs so much of the heat. You can compensate by jacking the temperature up, but then you get even more popping, stringing, and bad surface quality.