Dry your filament!
Dry your filament!
I love in Colorado, which is a pretty dry state, so while I had heard of "wet filament", I never considered it to be a problem that I would have to worry about. I had seen people creating dry storage bins for their filament, but figured that must just be for people in humid climates.
When I first bought my 3D printer a few years ago, I did what most people probably do - I bought a 10 pack of different filament colors. Everything printed great for a while, but eventually, my prints just started to kind of suck. I made a few upgrades to my printer, but still couldn't pinpoint what was going on. What was frustrating, is that some times my prints would be great - but other times I couldn't even print the most simple prints without problems.
I eventually noticed that my great prints were from newer filament that I had recently purchased, but my bad prints were coming from spools I've had sitting out for a while. So I purchased a $40 filament dryer on Amazon and it instantly fixed all the problems I'd been having.
I feel dumb, because I had gone through three different extruders, new hot ends, new nozzles, tubing, and spent tons of time cleaning and tightening stuff on my printer. I had left my printer untouched for months because it was just so frustrating. Something as simple as old filament left out never occurred to me until much later.
TLDR; If your prints have started to suck after a while, you might want to try drying your filament.
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I live in high humidity, so that's a big part of my setup. I print from a custom dryer with 4 spools in it, which feed to the printer through PTFE bowden tubes. I have a wifi switch for the dryer that just turns on once in a while to keep the ones sitting there from getting wet by keeping the inside of the dryer, well, dry. I store all my filament in containers with a 3d printed silica containers that go into the spool. I use the "rechargeable" silica beads that change color when saturated. Once in a while, when I see that the beads are turning blue in the containers from opening and closing, I will do a drying session where I dry all the silica containers and the spools for a good while and put them all back into the containers. Can be a bit overkill, but it fully eliminates that factor for me!
I'm thinking about getting some of those activated alumina beads. I've heard they are both more efficient at absorbing moisture and can be recycled indefinitely without degrading. Sounds like a perfect fit for your setup.
Just had to look it up, never heard of it! Thanks for the suggestion.