Great video as usual. Maybe a follow up could be the effectiveness of trying to restore a spool of old and brittle PLA filament by drying it for an extended time. It has been hit or miss for me, but I don't have anywhere near as many rolls as you.
Very informative! If you ever do something like this again, I would like to know: - how long you dried each filament for - what the humidity of the filament was after drying (and also before if possible) - if you printed from a drybox or open air - how much time has passed between drying, printing and then testing.
@@sandphotoNL I had some of the same thoughts. There was no information to quantify how wet each filament actually was. I think it could be shown by recording the weight of each filament before and after drying. Ideally also subtract the weight of an empty spool of the same type to isolate the weight of the filament. Could then be shown as a percentage. For example: 100 - (Wet Weight)/(Dry Weight) = % of water weight
As a newbie I really appreciate the info. I live in Florida so I chose to get an air dryer to hold my filament and now I’m concerned about over drying 😅 and wondering if I should take it out and re vacuum bag it while not in use or just let it be?
About the error you were asking about. Random errors are errors that occur from inconsistant outside influences that affect each measurement differently, while systematic errors come from every test being a set amount off due to the measuring equipment or other constants that cause inaccuracy. If you were talking about the actual values of how large you're error margins are you might mean the absolute error, which is the innacuracy that a given measuring device has (like it can only measure up to a certain amount of newtons, millimeters etc.), while percentage and fractional error are how large each absolute error is compared to the measurement you made (if you have a fractional uncertainty of 1 millimeter and measure a full meter with the tool, you would have a fractional unceratainty of 1/1000 and a percentage error of 0.1%)
Moved into a new house this winter with 50% indoor humidity and had this happen twice now on a MK4S. It prints fine visually but it will snap when I swap filament, etc.
The PLA micro-fractures and water moisture in the air is pulled into the fresh cracks(likely very similar to what a molecular sieve does), this happens to most of my PLA filament I bend and leave bent, it's a huge reason not to respool PLA if you don't have a means of annealing it afterwards. Some of my PLA has multi-fractured in 5+ spots while inside a PTFE tube, from being left there overnight. Granted it's white and likely has titanium dioxide, as it's from mid-2017. But still using it fine otherwise, just has to be checked at time of loading and unloaded promptly once finished. Then I have some "Ender Series" PLA that is notably more flexible than any other PLA filament I've encountered.. I can leave it in indefinitely just like PETG, and it has not broken itself a single time yet, great for AMS but I have no idea why it's different, that's not even a selling point it has, I bought it in bulk for prototyping in one color, then realized afterwards.
i have some cc3d silk pla (various colors) that shows no impact either way, but the hatchbox black pla i have seems to need some drying. most of the petg i have seems to need drying as well, regardless. i suspect its going to vary depending on brand and filment type within that brand, and perhaps even color.
Starts video acting like we are all fools for drying our filament, then immediately shifts into telling us our dryers are not good enough for engineering filaments and we need SUNLU's new offering.
@@T313COmun1s7 the thing is, he's right. Up until the sunlu e2s existence, none of these dryer boxes would actually be worth it for engineering materials
Yep! I called my boyfriend to tell him about this but I followed it up with “but he was sponsored by a filament company for their new dryer so it means nothing”
@@BelviGER Not really because many times there are literally multiple ounces of weight removed from the water vapor. The problem actually is made more difficult by the spool.. you don't know how much of that water content was in the cardboard/abs/PC spools vs the filament itself unless you are unspooling the filament, measuring, drying, measuring, and then respooling the filament.
@@BelviGER You don't care about sub-1% absorptions, it's considered OK, and just about anything can reach 3-4%. Plastics which are notorious for water absorption are simply more eager to reach their absorption under more usual conditions within mere days, but if it's humid enough, you can force anything to take on a significant amount of water after a long enough time. Also just buy medication scale for nearly single digit price tag and weigh a single 1ft loop that is stored alongside the spool that is experimented upon.
@@SianaGearz Who considers 1% ok? PLA will just about reach saturation at 1%, but you want to get it down to below 0.2% at least. 1% of 1kg is 10g though, so you don't need that good a set of scales to see if there's any weight reduction when drying. You don't even need to calibrate, since all you do is weigh it every 2 hours or so and track the rate of weight change. Once it's stable for a few measurements you're done.
I dry my filament during the winter by leaving it in the printer or openly laying around. Currently barely 20% humidity in the printers room. I only ever really dried TPU and Nylon and print directly out of the dryer. No problem with PETG so far, but once the humidity rises, it just goes into the bag it came in. Thanks for the amount of work you've put into it!
In my experience, living in an environment where the indoor humidity is typically >50%, ASA absolutely needs to be in a drybox and dried periodically. When it's really wet, the filament becomes so brittle it can snap easily from small bends. When it's only moderately wet it sizzles and pops like crazy in the nozzle, causing excessive oozing and pockmarks on the print surface. I've seen this in 4 different brands of ASA that I have used.
Same here. Had a spool of ABS that's been left out for years and it printed like I had fuzzy skin enabled. Drying it made so much of a difference. Interestingly though, HIPS filament that's also been left out for years prints flawlessly without drying.
@silvrcel I find the quality of the ABS also impacts how well it dries. I had another roll of about the same age as the other but it was cheap no named crap and whist drying improved it to the point where i could get a few small parts out of it the results where no where near the results i got from drying the good quality verbatim ABS.
IMO, most any filament that can hold moisture, and needs to print above 220-230c, is usually where I see these issues. It's odd because water boils at 100c, but above a certain range it just seems to get way more violent about how it boils off in filament strands. Stuff like CHT inserts probably amplify this effect.
I live in South Georgia, US where summers can feel like swimming through the air. I have used FormFutura's Volcano PLA, and that stuff will absorb moisture to the point where feeding it through the nozzle, you can visibly see and hear bubbles popping in it.
We have found PLA+ works VERY VERY well for 3D Printed pew pews.. most designers model around its strengths and weaknesses. Layer Lines and Adhesion are paramount and we usually only use Nylons or ABS for where heat is a concern, for example barrel mounts.
@TedyHere I've always had a feeling most filaments with those added are either a gimmick, or benefit mildly from the resistance to dimensional warping. From what I've gathered, PC and PET, seem to be the least impacted in the Z direction so stand to gain the benefits more. But if Z strength was already the shortcoming, it will still make it slightly worse. But also I have a vague notion that those filaments might actually be bonding with it, rather than just extruded together. PETG-GF makes sense, in that if you print PETG on a glass plate. It might permanently fuse.. by accident.. uncertain if that applies to PET as well. But it implies an actual cohesive bond of sorts.
I live on the east coast in a port town, so plenty of things need dehydrating. The wet filament thing has went from being a meme to a way to dismiss newbies. I always do my part and add other possible fixes to the issue.
I watched some videos related to filament moisture, seeing the 20% to 50% values in people's meters and then I finally got one to leave inside my cabinet and thought it was broken when the screen displayed 85% I guess that's it really, Brasil is just insanely humid Edit: to be fair it varies a lot as well, the peak was at 85% but right now for example it's at 59%
@brdevll I think humidity is the only problem. Even you buy a brand new filament, it needs to be dried, it's seems that the manufacturers don't have good quality control or the volume it's so small that the filament keeps months on stocking. Only Cliever was less humid in the national brands, but even do i have to dry a bit.
@@brdevllkinda why I love Canadian winter. Electric heating + overall low humidity makes my printing room literally under 10% humidity. Makes drying filament and storing it a breeze
This. Maybe you don't need to dry filament if you like in a place like Arizona, but everywhere else? Yeah, come tell me I don't need to dry it when the humidity here is between 60-95% almost year-round. Drying ABSOLUTELY makes a night and day difference for me.
One thing I really haven't noticed is people weighing the filament before and after drying-- that should give an idea of how much moisture was removed by drying (or, added by leaving it in a damp room for a week or two). Nice video, and you've confirmed what I've suspected for years-- drying PLA is overrated. I have some PLA that's over 5 years old, and never been stored properly, never been dried, and it seems to work fine. I've got some other PLA filament that was brittle and snapping after a few weeks of use. Your work is appreciated!
I mainly print with PLA and PETG and whilst PETG absolutely needs to be in a dry box. PLA simply doesn't care. However almost all PLA+ filaments I've used required significant drying and proper storage. PLA+ usually makes a lot of popping noises if it's wet while printing.
@@SianaGearz Yeah, that’s the hard part - “PLA+” can mean pretty much anything. It can have additives for handling higher temperatures or strength or whatever but there really aren’t any standards or definitions.
I see drastic improvements in my pla prints when i stick the rolls in my dehydrator at 105 degrees for 5 hours. I print on a A1 mini, P1S and i still used my ender 3. I just dryed 5 rolls of very brittle 6yo pla and it printed like new.
Thanks for all the work on this, and good timing for me. 6 months ago I unloaded a mix of PLA, ABS, and PETG from my AMS and lazily left it sitting out on the table. It's still there, and lately I've been dreading how much drying I'll have to do the next time I want to use it. Nice to know the PLA and ABS should be fine!
I prefer to err on the side of caution and dry everything, especially since I live in the UK near the seaside, where humidity is very high. Additionally, I use vacuum bags primarily to keep items dry, neat, tidy, and clean.
@@SianaGearz True. It's a great use for that. Unfortunately all my printers are lacking this feature.They will "timeout" and turn off the bed after 30 min or so. I do have an old Prusa i3 collecting dust in the corner. I considered to scrap it for parts and use the bed for just that purpose, but haven't put my ass in gear.
Without a very expensive moisture balance or moisture analyser, you really do not know what saturation you have in the product before and after drying. Also you need to test elongation not just tensile strength. That being said your conclusions are correct in terms of the 3 materials being relatively unaffected by moisture. One last caveat, the additives used in the materials, PLA especially will also determine its susceptibility to moisture
Visually I get a HUGE difference in PETG. I print transparent for lenses. They're cloudy with tons of issues throughout if I don't dry. Dried they print perfect and transparent.
Awesome! Now do it again. Suggestion. First, test straight out of the shrink wrap. Second, leave the filament out a specific amount of time (1 week?) and print again. THEN dry it, and print it a 3rd time. Some filaments seem to degrade over time from drying. Super bonus.... store the filament in a drybox with silica for a week/month, and then print with it again. I'm really surprised by the ABS test, always understood that to be very hydroscopic. Finally, TY for the shout out to Igor of My Tech Fun, Stefan of CNC Kitchen and James of Clough42 all great channels I've followed for a while now.
Really enjoyed this. Sometimes people are “too” scientific when they should instead be more practical. A result might be statistically significant, yet still not particular relevant. I think you are especially good at blending the hard data with practical take-away advice.
For me, PETG seems to need drying or the surface quality suffers (stringing). PLA while needs drying less often I can tell when it does because the surface quality gets bad and mostly notice it if it's been sitting open for 6+ months. I use to print only ABS for years and if it can suffer from moisture though far less than others, I once was having issues and took some extrusion right from the nozzle and looked at it under a microscope and noticed many tiny potholes in the surface, turns out they were pockets of moisture that popped into steam as it exited the nozzle, dried the same filament and did the example under microscope again and it was perfectly smooth on the outside. Now this ABS had probably been sitting in 51% humidity for more than a year (likely 2 years) so was not affected right away. All filaments are hydroscopic just some are more prone to it than others and probably even some brands more than others.
I bought some cheap PLA that was so wet from the factory that I could see the lines exploding as they were being laid out. Stored it in a sealed vox with desiccant and heated it with a heating pad for a day and it solved the problem. Can I store it out of my dry box after drying? Maybe, but I already have it, so I keep it dry.
I live in South Africa at the coast in the Eastern Cape region, I'm less than 150 meters from the ocean. All filaments (well ones that I've used) need to be dried over here. There's a massive difference between the quality of prints regarding if they are dry or not. Seriously, we often have a humidity of 99% in the summer. And the typical humidity is above 85%. I'm gonna be moving up north soon so soon I'll be dealing with low humidity, which will be great for my printing.
Hey, thanks for testing this! It's been on my mind for quite a while now. I have noticed print quality issues with wet PETG and TPU, but rarely with PLA, except for some spools I got from someone who stored them unused in a very humid basement for one or two years. Some of those spools are extremely brittle and almost unusable. My method is to dry new PLA when I receive it and then store it in sealed food containers or vacuum bags with desiccant when not in use.
With the variable we get where I live, and the humidity bouncing around from 20 in August to super saturated right now I've learned a few things. If it starts stringing when it didn't before, dry it. If it bubbles or hisses, dry it. If it is PETG or TPU, dry it. Some of my best prints have been PETG. But it was a struggle until I found Elegoo Rapid PETG, which isn't pure PETG. I always put it in the dryer for a while before printing though, because of my third rule. 😂
If you have any color change filament, you have to dry it or it won't change color when it cools back down to ambient. The appearance of the part is fine, but the moisture flash boiling out during extrusion destroys the temp sensitive pigment for the low temp state. This is consistent across PLA, TPU and ABS. Just another reason to dry your filament, even if you're not going for strength.
Interesting experiment. I have had very few issues with my mostly PLA 3D printing in a basement with about 30% humidity and wondered why I'd never noticed wet filament issues. Now I know to focus on keeping my PTU and PETG dry.
My biggest problem with PLA stored in the open is degradation. Some brands more than others. They print fine if they make it to the printhead, but causes issues with braking while printing getting stuck in the AMS. Drying only made it worse.
One major issue is that things can vary roll-to-roll, or rather batch-to-batch. I've had a Canadian brand of PETG I've used for years right out of the box without issue and had good results. However, I did a refill order recently and while the white filament printed fine out of the box, the black all needed to be dried for 8+ hours each due to surface defects while printing. I had never ran into this before, and it drove me nuts trying to figure out what was wrong, when it all turned out to be wet filament. So frustrating that all those Reddit people who ask about drying filament were right in this one case.
Thanks for this review. Just got my first filament printer, will be going over the data you collected again with note-taking. I'm starting with PETG-CF, but did buy a dryer too.
i have 3d printed a few days ago. i always prim the filament into extruder... from old printing, there is always about 5 cm of filament from last printing. It was ASA filament of 3DJake brand. That piece was about week there without drying. I have let it follow by dried ASA filament(Dried till the drier shows bellow 15% humidity) of the same brand. Extruding shows rough extrusion of undried ASA, followed by smooth one when dried filament comes through. Home humidity is 55% these winter days
Yeah a lot of people are commenting about other brands of ASA doing that. I think it’s important to note that many companies blend, particularly Polymaker, which is really a material science and chemistry company at heart.
@@thenextlayer There are so many brands. I'm not sure polymaker is the best. I ahve seen test of ASA brands and Polymaker was between the worst. 3DO was best... But... So many things depend on the printer, temperatures, speeds... Hard to say how much mechanical qualities and printability depends on the brand, and how much it depends on other factors.
Definitely a fan of this type of video! I can slowly learn lots of tips on my own, but this kind of rigorous testing I wouldnt be able to/wouldnt do on my own. Thanks!
Where you live has an effect on all of this. I can say in the deep south that it does not take long for my filament to go to crap if I do not keep it in the S4 unit. I just got the S4 it has been great. Before I was using a re-purpsed dehydrator and it worked ok but was inconsistent with results. Better nozzles has also helped me a lot and building my own printer.
Well, I got a 3 years old roll of ABS producing perfect prints on my SV08, so if it comes to ABS, I'd say that more than hydration, it's more important to have a reliable, enclosed printer.
I used to dry all spools, then I stopped drying PLA, I still dry PETG at least once, and refresh if it’s been sitting for more than a month or two. I always dry everything more exotic.
Friendly reminder: the number behind the PA stands for the number of hydrophobic (methylene) groups in a chain. That's why Pa12 is LESS hydroscopic, lower h2o saturation and less affected by moisture overall than PA6. I don't know why your pa12 was so much weeker in your test, but the material is better suited for humid applications and is being used for exactly those (compared to pa6) Also I don't see any difference in wet VS dry for my elegoo Petg (visually and close to none for the tensile test), so that might be something for anyone annoyed with petg humidity problems (beige and Grey elegoo petg(plus))
This was very useful for me, many thanks for the effort. As a next step you could concentrate more on "How dry is dry enough" only for the filaments affected by moisture. That is, weigh the sample before and after drying for different lengths of time. Then you could put together a chart of strength/appearance vs. the level of dryness. Also, a better test of strength would be to print solid samples to eliminate the variability of wall layers and infill. The downside is this would require more robust equipment to test to failure.
I live in Far North Queensland, I routinely see steam coming from the plastic leaving the nozzle during wet season. PLA will go brittle and have issues after about a week. ABS, I've never had a major issue. PETG and TPU absolutely need drying before printing. I often wonder how soon the printed parts will lose their mechanical properties from moisture absorption.
Usually moisture affects the printing process more than the printed parts, as you're creating steam in the nozzle. The one filament I'm concerned about with printed parts is PLA, as it actually becomes brittle on the spool. I think the moisture is going deeper into PLA, but on other materials I've tried I think it's more surface level. But that's mostly conjecture, as I'm not a materials scientist.
I typically only dry my filament if it's been outside of a plastic baggie for a few weeks or if it's been several months (like more than 6) between uses.
Important data points would be how much moisture was removed total and how much was removed in the final hours of drying (multiple samples to see the change in rate of water removal). This would give us an idea of how wet they were initially and how wet they still were
PETG won't print for me until I let it dry for many hours in a dryer. Then it prints without hissing and bubbling. Humidity here is usually 25% to 35%, but PETG is just a dang moist jerk. Other filaments benefit from drying if they're very old. Drying has resuscitated disastrously brittle 6-year-old PLA. That's a big help for me, because I bought a huge amount of PLA in 2018 when the price was too low to pass it up. I still have a bunch left, and a dryer box stint has become necessary to use it, after which it prints like new
"So I know some of you will have skipped to the conclusion of the video"... Now I feel caught! But I watched most of it and I have to agree. I have been doing this for about 8 years now and I still have PLA and PETG spools from back then. Most of them don't give me issues, but I see a lot of modern printer users (read Bambu) complaining about moisture. Apparently my PETG was just higher quality but I also think that the higher print speeds need higher temperatures and therefore result in more bubbliness of the moisture. I both have a Bambu and my trusty old Dutchy (I designed) and the Bambu seems to give more filament related trouble (over/under extrusion and moisture artefacts) than the old workhorse. I had the assumption that Bambu was set and forget but it looks like that speed comes at a cost where it creates headaches instead of taking them away (filament calibration, input shaper that sometimes makes things worse, drying ALL your filament before EVERY use, asking for monthly maintenance, etc...)
You noted Tel Aviv's humidity, but what's the humidity in your space? Do you use AC? That will SIGNIFICANTLY reduce your humidity indoors. I live in Hawai'i with no AC indoors and in a particularly wet zone at that. I have no desire to take chances with avoidable issues, so I use the dryer as often as is practical.
I live in Houston Texas and have started noticing the same conclusions you've come to. I print primarily with ASA and PLA and find myself leaving the dryer unplugged. I'm still working on being able to utilize PETG and TPU. Once I get to Nylon printing I'll definitely have to look at a better drying setup.
Something worth adding here, for TPU specifically. Try lowering the temps between the dry/wet samples. Some TPU I never dry prints like hot garbage at 240c, but then is totally fine at 230c. I think the important bit is if it starts foaming up from boiling hydrolysis, then you are leaking filament where not intended(stringing), and what you do lay down ends up with air bubbles(voids and weak bonds). Lowering temperature sometimes means you just have to print a bit slower, which isn't a bad tradeoff for never needing to faf with baking filament, and it always being ready. That said, you still will manage better surface specifications with less moisture in your filament, so depends how far you want to chase perfection and money spent doing so.
Sometimes I've wondered if this is why I had so much success with PA6 on my Ender 3--I was forced to print slow and at 250 C. I haven't achieved better plain PA6 prints on my modern Bambu and Qidi machines, regardless of enclosure and heated chamber.
@mattbirt114 that might be part of it, nylon is also absurdly hygroscopic and if not dried properly will still print as though it was never dried at all. Usually requires a good active dryer while being printed that can hit the right temps. You also might have gotten away with some things fresh out of the bag if the manufacturer sealed it as it rolled off the line. But yes, going slower and at lower temperatures, might yield better results there as well.
You should test multiple samples for each variant/wetness to get a variance within each category and then you also have a better idea whether the windows defined by the wet and dry variant overlap (and hence aren't significant) or don't overlap and hence ARE significant. Just putting a vague X% threshold on that says very little. Also, that's for your climate. Other people's experience may differ: maybe they are in a salty ocean environment or in a tropical forest, so ...
if you hate PETG you haven't done it right, it was finicky on the textured pei. I use it in my p1s, elegoo or jayo has been great so far, I haven't tested many others. I did buy a dark moon g10 plate and since then I've had no issues running PETG. I have even upped all the speeds by 50-100mm/s and am printing with petg right now at 250C and a bed temp of 75C. Put a g10 plate in your x1c and run the stock profile for petg, if you have issues I like to increase the first layer thickness and run hilbert curve bottom surfaced to reduce warping, and I usually run 5-10 degree warmer on the build plate.
I love in the UK and PETG absolutely needs drying. PLA depends on brand, Bambulab is ok but most others most definitely need drying, especially silk, you can dry it and see immediate improvement printing the same file.
I made the experience that moisture can impact dimensional accuracy of PLA. I experienced this within 1-2 mm which made a huge difference with pcb alignment holders etc. also for gardenhose equipment i noticed the impact as the part where the sealant ring sits will fit tightly or just not engough to seal the whole thing
While PLA prints fine unless it's absolutely soaked, the real trouble is embrittlement. A spool of completely embrittled PLA can be rejuvenated by a hotbox and, for reasons I can't quite work out, keeping them in a drybox seems to keep them from becoming embrittled in the first place. Drying without heat does not seem to bring the filament back to it's springy self.
To me, I still keep PLA dry, as i dont always go through it very quickly, and I have had many of them get brittle on me. So it may not cause an issue in print quality, but over time it certainly damages the filament.
Here's a question from a newbie... Filaments have temperature ranges not only from the extruder but also for the bed. What do you recommend on the scale of that range you use for the first time? For example a 230 to a 250° c range do you set it at 240? Same with the bed.
I recently got into 3d printing and bought a Bambu A1 mini then 2 Bambu P1S. I was also made aware of keeping my filaments dry and was worried about it. I bought a couple of hydrometers and was shocked to see that my natural humidity was 10% throughout the house! lol I live in Las Vegas (for those that don't know it's in the middle of a desert) so I guess it was to be expected but I had no clue before I checked. The previous videos I had watched had humidities of around 60% naturally and they were using dryers to get their filaments down to 20% range. So being naturally at 10%, I'm guessing I don't have to worry about drying for stored filaments. I'll still monitor with hydrometers just in case. Probably smart hydrometers that I can tie into my home-assistant for alerts.
And those of us in the south are jealous of that fact.. as we struggle to get our homes below 60% most of the time without a dehumidifier in addition to constantly running the AC. I cant keep a spool of anything out in the open air more than a day without needing to dry it, regardless if PLA, petg, or anything else or I get visible bubbles in my layers. While your filament literally would get dryer than it arrives from the factory most of the time just sitting out at home.
@@MattWeber 🤭 That makes me feel bad!! You're right that my filaments actually get dryer when I open them out of the sealed desiccant bags 😋. I'm sorry that it's such a pain for you to deal with. I'm originally from southern Mississippi so I totally understand about the humidity and sweating just walking outside to your car 😩. Living in the desert has its cons but I guess this is one of the few pros...
These digital hygrometers their bottom of the measurement range is 10%. If you have 3% humidity, they'll still show 10%, they can't measure any lower. You do live in a desert. This is why it keeps showing 10% and doesn't keep fluctuating 9% 11% :D
@@SianaGearz Ahhhhhh that's a great piece of knowledge to know!!!! Thank you for sharing. They do indeed always show 10% on multiple different ones so the actually humidity must be something below that! Awesome.
@@jocelyn-n-tech One more random fact about hygrometers is that they need some care, it's a ceramic substrate with some gold traces and a salted paper on top... i don't really understand it... but apparently twice a year you should put them into about 80% or higher humidity (wrap in a damp towel) to regenerate them so they don't become permanently stuck on low readings. If they don't recover and don't show high humidity during this treatment well time to replace the sensor.
I def would like more of this type of content, since its hard to get info on this stuff if you dont have it yourself like this. But I would like it if there could be 'cliff note' segments of the charts before getting into the more detailed 'breakdown'. Just for people like me that arent very knowledgeable on this stuff yet to not get drowned in the details, before we build some sort of 'on the fly' understanding of what it means.
You probably would have benefited from *weighing* the rolls before and after drying to see just how much water they had removed by drying… and perhaps try repeated weighs to ensure that all the absorbed water is removed
Hey Jonathan, thanks for the video, that looks like massive work! TBH I'm not sure how much it can serve the community since variables like regional humidity and print settings (i.e. speed) or printer type could well override your results. And for really accurate results you should be able to do this tests like 20 pieces each filament at least. What I would really be interested in, is a (scientifical) test of filament DRYERS/methods including how much they are able to dry a certain filament and also, how much energy the consumpt do a full drying cycle (not just max energy draw or "when it's heated up, it's not using much", I would like to see the numbers for 6 hours of drying PETG). Since I mostly use PLA or ASA at the moment I just use the great EIBOS vacuum system with a bag of desiccant in it. If I leave even PLA out in the open for longer times (couple of weeks) it gets brittle (even breaks inside the bowden tube) and produced bad prints, so much for "does not need drying"... ;)
I think the test for PLA needs to be done with multiple brands rather than saying you don't really need to dry it. You can see that the easy PLA was horrible compared to other more expensive PLA's. I personally have to dry ALL of my PLA because just leaving it in the AMS for a week or two results in very brittle filament that just snaps in multiple places leaving it useless sometimes. That has happened the most with filament from Sunlu, Jayo, Esun, and certain colors from Freemover. I also experience a lot of layer inconsistencies and artifacts when my filament is wet. After drying, the print quality is back to being perfect. I'm not sure what has changed in some of the PLA pellets these companies are using but when I first got into 3D printing back in 2017, I would leave filament out for 1-2 years without ever needing to dry them. Now I dry all my filament as soon as I get them and put them in a sealed bag. I will say that I just opened up one of the filaments that was dried and tightly sealed with desiccant packs and it was very brittle too. Not sure how any moisture could get into the bag at that point so maybe something other than moisture is causing the problem here. After drying it for 12 hours, it prints fine though.
I think you missed a quality test: transparency. I print quite a bit with recycled PET bottle filament which is almost always very transparent. The amount of water in the filament has a MAJOR effect on transparency vs cloudiness. Never mind the layer bonding issues of general brittleness the amount of clarity I can get with colourless filament when dry vs undried is night and day. I find the same thing with regular transparent PETG. If you're ever going to try for that glass look you had BETTER dry the living daylights out of the PETG or else just don't even bother trying. I see similar, albeit not as severe, effects with transparent PLA.
Good job and really good point that drying is not only helping with wet but also helps to correct structal of filament (renew ??). So it is a good practice to dry filaments that need to be dryout ( PA, TPU, and filaments with CF) but also filaments that have waits for long time open for external conditions. Jonathan really really good job and thank you for another great video :D
It would also be nice to have a comparison to the desiccant. I live in a dry climate with about 20% humidity. Would it be sufficient to store all filament in airtight bag with desiccant?
I think the results could vary quite a bit depending on how wet the filament is before drying. Not all manufacturers produce the same level of dryness in their filament directly from the factory for a specific type of filament. I would even think that it would even vary from batch to batch. It has been shown in multiple testing vids that even color of a filament can make a difference in strength. Overall I think the data is worthy of showing that drying does make a difference most of the time. I have found that not all PETG is create equal and I do dry my PETG before printing. Certain PETG manufacturers like Overture and Newmakers prints like total crap on my Bambu X1C while Naga PETG, Sunlu PETG and Sunlu PETG-G print really well.
Everyone talks about drying but no one talks about the ambient temp best for the room of the printer. My printer sits in my unheated garage and can get quite cold and/or hot. Have there been any studies of the temperature range of the room best for printing?
Just a chance me t on the testing procedure. Since you can't tell how damp the filament is out of the package, it probably makes sense to dry the filament first, run a test, then let all the filament sit together for a set amount of time, and then run the wet test. That way they are all starting at relatively the same place.
depends on where you live and where your printers are... I'm on the coast and print in a basement. with the dehumidifier running 24 7 is still 45rh at best year round. I have to dry my filament and keep it in dry boxes if I'm not running through a spill in at most 3 days. luckily making dispenser dry boxes is pretty easy with a 3d printer.
I have worked with ABS for a long time. Whist i do agree that its somewhat overblown how dry you need to keep it, it is 100% a consideration. I have had 5 year old ABS that was completely unusable work flawlessly after a good drying. So whist ABS wont absorb water in a few days or even a few weeks it 100% will over months and years and WILL need to be dried. EDIT: Side note, you are right that modern PLA is way stronger than its given credit for, but say 5-10 years ago PLA was very different than modern PLA.
@@thenextlayerI still have a spool of silk pla I bought with my first Ender 3 back in 2018 as well as a few other spools. However, there are a select few materials I'm constantly turning over, so it really does depend regardless on the volume one might go thru.
I have 8 year old PLA and my experience is that it produces prints that are initially spectacularly strong, but change and fail within 2 years if mechanically loaded.
Anything with CF or GF in it besides PLA needs to be dried. You can feel the carbon strands going in and out of the filament. This allows more air which allows more moisture. The main reason you don't need to on pla is people like the matte finish it's actually makes it more brittle. Nylons need to be dried as well as other filaments to get the best results per your tests. PLA can sit in a humid garage for 2 years and still print almost 100 percent the same if not the same.
This is a great video! What would be the cherry on top is if you did a followup video only for the most hydroscopic filaments - dried them and measured the deterioration of strength over time ( days weeks and months). This is of course very time consuming but would be very interesting for those wanting to invest in the exotic materials specifically for long term durability uses. Cheers
Eh, I saw a bit more visual differences than you did apparently. The side by sides went by pretty quick and the angles weren't always the same - I would have liked to see the sides of the inslogic PLA benchy. The Polyterra PLA (which I usually use) looks like the surface really smoothed out from the drying. Which is my experience as well - wet Polyterra PLA tends to look like it has a small amount of "fuzzy skin" applied to it. If I I'm making something where aesthetics is important, that kind of detail matters to me. I think I'll keep drying PLA if I really want the best look visually. I also noticed you had a lot of troubles below the hull line on the benchys. Curious why that is? Interesting test results - it does look like even within the same material, the exact blend of additives can make a big difference in how hygroscopic it is. I've long suspected one of the reasons why people are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to drying filament - comes down to what brands they buy, and the additives the brands use. Which can be a bit of a minefield when it comes to whether or not to recommend drying filament, because different people are legitimately having different experiences with similar materials.
Just the other day i bought a roll of PLA on deep discount, anonymous marketplace seller and... well it strung like an absolute pest. I dried it out (simply on 3D printer bed, filament's own box on top, a couple holes in the top) and... it's good now, prints beautifully. Once i get the material into a good state, i don't find that i need to re-dry PLA and HIPS for a number of years, while PETG doesn't fare so well. Keep in mind that your measurement error is going to have a relative and an absolute component, so when you're receiving 40% difference on that matte PLA that was measuring very low layer adhesion to begin with, it might not be saying much, since absolute error could dominate. Here's a more difficult question: well you're testing prints done with the same temperature, but what if effect of moisture in the filament on adhesion or cohesion can be calibrated out by higher temperature? Nobody has proven it one way or another so far! Also filament doesn't turn brittle from moisture alone... urban myth... it merely degrades more in the hot-end while printing or from other environmental factors. Afford yourself an experiment, take two loops of filament and ziploc them one dry (maybe with a bit of silica gel just in case) and one also dried but with a half teaspoon of water, put them in a dark place, and retrieve them a month later and you'll see that waterlogged filament is more supple rather than more brittle. You should also note the precise weight of those loops as you bag them to later confirm that one has absorbed moisture, and one hasn't.
This is absolutely awesome work. But there's a huge issue that makes this data not so useful: we don't know _how_ wet the filaments are. Obviously a filament soaked in water for 2 weeks isn't as wet as a filament that was left outside for 5 days. It's too late for this as you already dried the filaments but we definitely need this data to make informed decisions.
I resisted drying my filaments thinking it's not needed until I got some PLA that's wet straight from the bag. They're so brittle that it's hard to complete a print, and any print that manages to complete is as stringy as a black widow. I don't know if they're old stock from the seller or if it's a quality control issue by the manufacturer. I've since dried all filaments and store them in sealed containers with desiccant. It's just not worth my time troubleshooting print issues and finding out later it's just because of wet filament.
I buy discount filament from Amazon. When I tried to use it, it was literally bubbling at the nozzle tip and sizing. I bought from many different brands too. Latest one was sunlu petg and I could not tune out the stringing until I dried it for 10 hours at 55 degrees Celsius. After that the stringing magically stopped. I only print in pla and petg and so far I always put them in the drier for 10 hours before using them
I'm wondering, does drying a filament gets it back to the form it was when opened as new? so many times I had a filament print well new, didn't store it properly , dried it and results didn't go back to how it was in the first prints. I love the conclusion about drying , but can you do sone tests about the effectiveness of storing the filament in dry environment ?
Negating specific blends that differ by brand, it would be interesting to know from a materials perspective, how much moisture is considered detrimental to print results? Or asking the same question a different way; how dry do the hygroscopic materials need to be for good results? For example, does PETG stored in 30% humidity STP require drying? Do some materials exhibit cumulative hygroscopicity meaning that they can hold more moisture than the surrounding environment at STP? How 'wet' is too 'wet'? Is there such a thing as materials being too dry? I have no idea how this would be determined without expensive equipment and/or access to a chemical engineer/materials scientist.
I believe the word for the variance is sampling variance/variability. As noted the variability would decrease with more samples, but also note that the equation for variability is divided by the square root of the number of samples. This means that there are diminishing returns as you attempt to increase the sample size. There are theorems that say that 30 samples is enough for any sampling to be predictable, but I may be over generalizing CLT if anyone with proper knowledge can correct me.
I have never dried filament and gotten away with it just fine. I live in a humid climate but a drafty house so it tends to be dry inside. IDK if I'm missing anything but usually I'm worried about function not looks, so a little bit of strings or something - What is supposed to be the problem again?
I should note that I only ever print in PET-G and TPU [I almost forgot about TPU]. I tried ABS but the fumes affected me badly. And I just don't like PLA.
You're lucky. I can't leave PLA out, let alone PETG or TPU, without it crumbling within a few months. It seems brand doesnt play a factor either as it happens to them all.
So do these prints lose strength after they have been printed as soon as they soak up moisture? Seems like we would want filaments that hold their strength when wet, as once its in the final form or project, its going to absorb moisture.
Hi, brow!!! I made a test machine to use in my vídeos, but I lost my son in 2022, july, and since that day I couldn’t make vídeos. Now I’m backing to my printers and my videos. Look: you can change your little luggage scale for a charge cell for 500 kg. Similar to my test machine!
Being stuck on an island in the Atlantic will give you a very different perception of this issue haha. PLA lasts about a week here without dry storage, PETG like 2-3 days. 85-90% RH is typical here.
How have you defined wet? What level of humidity were they exposed to and for how long? How have you tested the moisture content of each sample? As I am in Singapore, our humidity lows are around 70% and highs of high 90s, so this info is entirely relevant and unfortunately without the background, this data is invalid for the filaments which do absorb moisture, but great for those that don't. Thanks for doing the testing, this is a great reference.
Yep. You’re absolutely right and a bunch of people have pointed out that I didn’t control for the starting condition being different of each spool. Big mistake. Thanks for the feedback.
Might be a stupid question, but if you have the prints in your usual environment without treating them later, won't those parta lose their strength nevertheless? I don't know how many people actually seal their prints later, but would that not make the only imortant difference the visual qualitys of the parts?
PLA which i bought 8 years ago, all of my prints which were mechanically loaded, they were super amazingly strong at first but failed after about 2-3 years, with obvious changes, crazing, discolouration, brittleness. Something is happening to it, but i'm not convinced that it's from moisture. Besides no sealing is entirely moisture tight, water is a small molecule and can just diffuse through most other polymers. Since then i preferred not to use PLA for loaded prints any longer. PETG and PA outright gain strength from moisture, they do not become weaker. I have a box of PA zipties that spent years in a hot dry environment and they were super brittle, crumbly. After bagging them with a half teaspoon of water for a week, they became strong and supple like new. However you cannot print filament which has absorbed significant moisture. For one that water will boil and force the filament to foam up, it will also create voids filled with water vapour gas instead of plastic liquid along which the melt can separate in the meltzone and leak out, so retraction no longer works and you get oozing. For other it is said that the combination of moisture and high temperature will cleave the polymer by hydrolysis, but it probably doesn't really occur at room temperature on decade timescale. The escaping water vapour will also take away heat and make the melt lay down colder, making for a worse weld, and the loss of material to oozing and effective lower polymer extrusion amount (less polymer extruded per amount of length pushed) is also not good for strength.
There are 2 mechanisms that water absorption causes damage to prints - the one most people are concerned with is a mechanical issue, where the water vapour created when melting the filament in the print head physically moves the molten filament around, causing bubbles or stringing or other physical defects - and these aren't just visual, they can cause severe mechanical weakness or outright print failure. This only applies before printing, once the part is done then there's no more physical effects like this. The other is chemical breakdown of the polymer chains that make up the plastic - this takes a long, LONG time, like years, even for printed parts stored underwater (UV damage usually happens first). You could seal prints to defend against this, but it's probably not worth it, and it's definitely not why people dry their filament.
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Thanks for watching! This video was a TON of (not so fun) work, so I'd love to hear if you found it informative, or if it will help you going forward!
Great video as usual. Maybe a follow up could be the effectiveness of trying to restore a spool of old and brittle PLA filament by drying it for an extended time. It has been hit or miss for me, but I don't have anywhere near as many rolls as you.
Never dried any ever 8 years and, I use vacume bags.
Very informative! If you ever do something like this again, I would like to know:
- how long you dried each filament for
- what the humidity of the filament was after drying (and also before if possible)
- if you printed from a drybox or open air
- how much time has passed between drying, printing and then testing.
@@sandphotoNL I had some of the same thoughts. There was no information to quantify how wet each filament actually was. I think it could be shown by recording the weight of each filament before and after drying. Ideally also subtract the weight of an empty spool of the same type to isolate the weight of the filament. Could then be shown as a percentage. For example: 100 - (Wet Weight)/(Dry Weight) = % of water weight
As a newbie I really appreciate the info. I live in Florida so I chose to get an air dryer to hold my filament and now I’m concerned about over drying 😅 and wondering if I should take it out and re vacuum bag it while not in use or just let it be?
About the error you were asking about. Random errors are errors that occur from inconsistant outside influences that affect each measurement differently, while systematic errors come from every test being a set amount off due to the measuring equipment or other constants that cause inaccuracy. If you were talking about the actual values of how large you're error margins are you might mean the absolute error, which is the innacuracy that a given measuring device has (like it can only measure up to a certain amount of newtons, millimeters etc.), while percentage and fractional error are how large each absolute error is compared to the measurement you made (if you have a fractional uncertainty of 1 millimeter and measure a full meter with the tool, you would have a fractional unceratainty of 1/1000 and a percentage error of 0.1%)
One thing I have noticed that when my pla is left hooked up to the machine the filament that goes up to the extruder snaps on the loop curls.
Moved into a new house this winter with 50% indoor humidity and had this happen twice now on a MK4S. It prints fine visually but it will snap when I swap filament, etc.
The PLA micro-fractures and water moisture in the air is pulled into the fresh cracks(likely very similar to what a molecular sieve does), this happens to most of my PLA filament I bend and leave bent, it's a huge reason not to respool PLA if you don't have a means of annealing it afterwards. Some of my PLA has multi-fractured in 5+ spots while inside a PTFE tube, from being left there overnight. Granted it's white and likely has titanium dioxide, as it's from mid-2017. But still using it fine otherwise, just has to be checked at time of loading and unloaded promptly once finished. Then I have some "Ender Series" PLA that is notably more flexible than any other PLA filament I've encountered.. I can leave it in indefinitely just like PETG, and it has not broken itself a single time yet, great for AMS but I have no idea why it's different, that's not even a selling point it has, I bought it in bulk for prototyping in one color, then realized afterwards.
@Roobotics awesome reply, thank you!
Drying my PLA even 4 hours makes a huge visual difference.
i have some cc3d silk pla (various colors) that shows no impact either way, but the hatchbox black pla i have seems to need some drying. most of the petg i have seems to need drying as well, regardless.
i suspect its going to vary depending on brand and filment type within that brand, and perhaps even color.
@@kenabi Yup. Additives and colorants can make a difference. I noticed his PolyTerra smoothed out after drying.
Starts video acting like we are all fools for drying our filament, then immediately shifts into telling us our dryers are not good enough for engineering filaments and we need SUNLU's new offering.
Thanks for saving me time from watching this video.
@@ibnalfreak Well, that wasn't my intention.
@@T313COmun1s7 the thing is, he's right. Up until the sunlu e2s existence, none of these dryer boxes would actually be worth it for engineering materials
Yeah, this guy always gives me a used car salesman vibe. I want to like his content, but he's clearly a wheeler dealer.
Yep! I called my boyfriend to tell him about this but I followed it up with “but he was sponsored by a filament company for their new dryer so it means nothing”
If you do this again it would be interesting to weigh the spools before and after drying to know how much moisture was removed
You need very very good scales to measure it on anything that isn't nylon and other engineering plastics
Like four to five digit price tag good
@@BelviGER Not really because many times there are literally multiple ounces of weight removed from the water vapor. The problem actually is made more difficult by the spool.. you don't know how much of that water content was in the cardboard/abs/PC spools vs the filament itself unless you are unspooling the filament, measuring, drying, measuring, and then respooling the filament.
@@BelviGER You don't care about sub-1% absorptions, it's considered OK, and just about anything can reach 3-4%. Plastics which are notorious for water absorption are simply more eager to reach their absorption under more usual conditions within mere days, but if it's humid enough, you can force anything to take on a significant amount of water after a long enough time.
Also just buy medication scale for nearly single digit price tag and weigh a single 1ft loop that is stored alongside the spool that is experimented upon.
@@SianaGearz Who considers 1% ok? PLA will just about reach saturation at 1%, but you want to get it down to below 0.2% at least. 1% of 1kg is 10g though, so you don't need that good a set of scales to see if there's any weight reduction when drying. You don't even need to calibrate, since all you do is weigh it every 2 hours or so and track the rate of weight change. Once it's stable for a few measurements you're done.
I agree, this is one key data point missing when comparing the wet vs dry print.
I dry my filament during the winter by leaving it in the printer or openly laying around. Currently barely 20% humidity in the printers room. I only ever really dried TPU and Nylon and print directly out of the dryer. No problem with PETG so far, but once the humidity rises, it just goes into the bag it came in.
Thanks for the amount of work you've put into it!
In my experience, living in an environment where the indoor humidity is typically >50%, ASA absolutely needs to be in a drybox and dried periodically. When it's really wet, the filament becomes so brittle it can snap easily from small bends. When it's only moderately wet it sizzles and pops like crazy in the nozzle, causing excessive oozing and pockmarks on the print surface. I've seen this in 4 different brands of ASA that I have used.
I have found ABS to be the same. But it does take a while , talking months not days/weeks . The glass filled is worse that 100% needs to be dried.
Same for me with ABS and ASA for sure. My print space runs a dehumidifier 24/7 and I need to dry it and keep it bagged for storage
Same here. Had a spool of ABS that's been left out for years and it printed like I had fuzzy skin enabled. Drying it made so much of a difference. Interestingly though, HIPS filament that's also been left out for years prints flawlessly without drying.
@silvrcel I find the quality of the ABS also impacts how well it dries. I had another roll of about the same age as the other but it was cheap no named crap and whist drying improved it to the point where i could get a few small parts out of it the results where no where near the results i got from drying the good quality verbatim ABS.
IMO, most any filament that can hold moisture, and needs to print above 220-230c, is usually where I see these issues. It's odd because water boils at 100c, but above a certain range it just seems to get way more violent about how it boils off in filament strands. Stuff like CHT inserts probably amplify this effect.
I live in South Georgia, US where summers can feel like swimming through the air. I have used FormFutura's Volcano PLA, and that stuff will absorb moisture to the point where feeding it through the nozzle, you can visibly see and hear bubbles popping in it.
We have found PLA+ works VERY VERY well for 3D Printed pew pews.. most designers model around its strengths and weaknesses. Layer Lines and Adhesion are paramount and we usually only use Nylons or ABS for where heat is a concern, for example barrel mounts.
PET-CF is supposed to be very good for that also fyi, and part of why it exists, not to be confused with PETG-CF, fyi.
@Roobotics 100% PET or PET CF is good stuff.. I just find anything with Carbon or Glass fibers tend to have more layer adhesion issues.
@TedyHere I've always had a feeling most filaments with those added are either a gimmick, or benefit mildly from the resistance to dimensional warping. From what I've gathered, PC and PET, seem to be the least impacted in the Z direction so stand to gain the benefits more. But if Z strength was already the shortcoming, it will still make it slightly worse. But also I have a vague notion that those filaments might actually be bonding with it, rather than just extruded together. PETG-GF makes sense, in that if you print PETG on a glass plate. It might permanently fuse.. by accident.. uncertain if that applies to PET as well. But it implies an actual cohesive bond of sorts.
Hoffman research is handy but not gospel.
I live on the east coast in a port town, so plenty of things need dehydrating. The wet filament thing has went from being a meme to a way to dismiss newbies. I always do my part and add other possible fixes to the issue.
Here in Brazil ALL filaments need drying 😅
I watched some videos related to filament moisture, seeing the 20% to 50% values in people's meters and then I finally got one to leave inside my cabinet and thought it was broken when the screen displayed 85%
I guess that's it really, Brasil is just insanely humid
Edit: to be fair it varies a lot as well, the peak was at 85% but right now for example it's at 59%
Same here in Florida, USA. I have to dry my PLA if it's out for more than a few days.
@brdevll I think humidity is the only problem. Even you buy a brand new filament, it needs to be dried, it's seems that the manufacturers don't have good quality control or the volume it's so small that the filament keeps months on stocking. Only Cliever was less humid in the national brands, but even do i have to dry a bit.
@@brdevllkinda why I love Canadian winter. Electric heating + overall low humidity makes my printing room literally under 10% humidity. Makes drying filament and storing it a breeze
Same in Houston.
Living in Lower Alabama, the days are 80% or more nearly every day of the year. Everything needs to be dried: filament, clothes, house, you name it.
This. Maybe you don't need to dry filament if you like in a place like Arizona, but everywhere else? Yeah, come tell me I don't need to dry it when the humidity here is between 60-95% almost year-round. Drying ABSOLUTELY makes a night and day difference for me.
One thing I really haven't noticed is people weighing the filament before and after drying-- that should give an idea of how much moisture was removed by drying (or, added by leaving it in a damp room for a week or two).
Nice video, and you've confirmed what I've suspected for years-- drying PLA is overrated. I have some PLA that's over 5 years old, and never been stored properly, never been dried, and it seems to work fine. I've got some other PLA filament that was brittle and snapping after a few weeks of use.
Your work is appreciated!
Agree totally, % weight change would be really informative.
I mainly print with PLA and PETG and whilst PETG absolutely needs to be in a dry box. PLA simply doesn't care. However almost all PLA+ filaments I've used required significant drying and proper storage. PLA+ usually makes a lot of popping noises if it's wet while printing.
Good point. I didn’t test PLA+. Should’ve.
That's really interesting, thx. I mainly use PLA+, this is really good to know
I wonder PLA plus what. Is it EVA? Is it Styroflex? Is it TPU?
What about silk PLA? that is what I use mainly ues
@@SianaGearz Yeah, that’s the hard part - “PLA+” can mean pretty much anything. It can have additives for handling higher temperatures or strength or whatever but there really aren’t any standards or definitions.
I see drastic improvements in my pla prints when i stick the rolls in my dehydrator at 105 degrees for 5 hours. I print on a A1 mini, P1S and i still used my ender 3. I just dryed 5 rolls of very brittle 6yo pla and it printed like new.
Thanks for all the work on this, and good timing for me. 6 months ago I unloaded a mix of PLA, ABS, and PETG from my AMS and lazily left it sitting out on the table. It's still there, and lately I've been dreading how much drying I'll have to do the next time I want to use it. Nice to know the PLA and ABS should be fine!
Margin of error is probably what you're looking for.
You're 11 hours late. He already confirmed a different comment that was the term.
11:55 is the place your referring to (for other readerS)
I prefer to err on the side of caution and dry everything, especially since I live in the UK near the seaside, where humidity is very high. Additionally, I use vacuum bags primarily to keep items dry, neat, tidy, and clean.
Same here. Summer the humidity only gets worse. I dry everything first and either bag it or put it into a container with desiccant
Totally agree, 60%+ indoors and worse 80%+ outside constantly living in UK, I do the same.
Thanks!
I keep
If you don't print around the clock, your 3D printer's bed can dry your spools as well.
@@SianaGearz True.
It's a great use for that.
Unfortunately all my printers are lacking this feature.They will "timeout" and turn off the bed after 30 min or so.
I do have an old Prusa i3 collecting dust in the corner.
I considered to scrap it for parts and use the bed for just that purpose, but haven't put my ass in gear.
Without a very expensive moisture balance or moisture analyser, you really do not know what saturation you have in the product before and after drying. Also you need to test elongation not just tensile strength. That being said your conclusions are correct in terms of the 3 materials being relatively unaffected by moisture. One last caveat, the additives used in the materials, PLA especially will also determine its susceptibility to moisture
perhaps a shortcut is to measure difference in weight over time.
I agree. I found cheap black PLA snaps easily when bent. but after hours of drying works fine, until that is, I leave it out on the printer too long.
@@robertkeyes258 Yes, My Tech Fun has been doing exactly this for years
Visually I get a HUGE difference in PETG. I print transparent for lenses. They're cloudy with tons of issues throughout if I don't dry. Dried they print perfect and transparent.
Which brand?
Awesome! Now do it again. Suggestion. First, test straight out of the shrink wrap. Second, leave the filament out a specific amount of time (1 week?) and print again. THEN dry it, and print it a 3rd time. Some filaments seem to degrade over time from drying.
Super bonus.... store the filament in a drybox with silica for a week/month, and then print with it again.
I'm really surprised by the ABS test, always understood that to be very hydroscopic. Finally, TY for the shout out to Igor of My Tech Fun, Stefan of CNC Kitchen and James of Clough42 all great channels I've followed for a while now.
Really enjoyed this. Sometimes people are “too” scientific when they should instead be more practical. A result might be statistically significant, yet still not particular relevant. I think you are especially good at blending the hard data with practical take-away advice.
For me, PETG seems to need drying or the surface quality suffers (stringing). PLA while needs drying less often I can tell when it does because the surface quality gets bad and mostly notice it if it's been sitting open for 6+ months. I use to print only ABS for years and if it can suffer from moisture though far less than others, I once was having issues and took some extrusion right from the nozzle and looked at it under a microscope and noticed many tiny potholes in the surface, turns out they were pockets of moisture that popped into steam as it exited the nozzle, dried the same filament and did the example under microscope again and it was perfectly smooth on the outside. Now this ABS had probably been sitting in 51% humidity for more than a year (likely 2 years) so was not affected right away. All filaments are hydroscopic just some are more prone to it than others and probably even some brands more than others.
I bought some cheap PLA that was so wet from the factory that I could see the lines exploding as they were being laid out. Stored it in a sealed vox with desiccant and heated it with a heating pad for a day and it solved the problem. Can I store it out of my dry box after drying? Maybe, but I already have it, so I keep it dry.
I live in South Africa at the coast in the Eastern Cape region, I'm less than 150 meters from the ocean. All filaments (well ones that I've used) need to be dried over here. There's a massive difference between the quality of prints regarding if they are dry or not. Seriously, we often have a humidity of 99% in the summer. And the typical humidity is above 85%. I'm gonna be moving up north soon so soon I'll be dealing with low humidity, which will be great for my printing.
Hey, thanks for testing this! It's been on my mind for quite a while now. I have noticed print quality issues with wet PETG and TPU, but rarely with PLA, except for some spools I got from someone who stored them unused in a very humid basement for one or two years. Some of those spools are extremely brittle and almost unusable. My method is to dry new PLA when I receive it and then store it in sealed food containers or vacuum bags with desiccant when not in use.
You don’t even need to do that.
With the variable we get where I live, and the humidity bouncing around from 20 in August to super saturated right now I've learned a few things. If it starts stringing when it didn't before, dry it. If it bubbles or hisses, dry it. If it is PETG or TPU, dry it. Some of my best prints have been PETG. But it was a struggle until I found Elegoo Rapid PETG, which isn't pure PETG. I always put it in the dryer for a while before printing though, because of my third rule. 😂
If you have any color change filament, you have to dry it or it won't change color when it cools back down to ambient. The appearance of the part is fine, but the moisture flash boiling out during extrusion destroys the temp sensitive pigment for the low temp state. This is consistent across PLA, TPU and ABS. Just another reason to dry your filament, even if you're not going for strength.
Interesting experiment. I have had very few issues with my mostly PLA 3D printing in a basement with about 30% humidity and wondered why I'd never noticed wet filament issues. Now I know to focus on keeping my PTU and PETG dry.
My biggest problem with PLA stored in the open is degradation. Some brands more than others. They print fine if they make it to the printhead, but causes issues with braking while printing getting stuck in the AMS. Drying only made it worse.
One major issue is that things can vary roll-to-roll, or rather batch-to-batch. I've had a Canadian brand of PETG I've used for years right out of the box without issue and had good results. However, I did a refill order recently and while the white filament printed fine out of the box, the black all needed to be dried for 8+ hours each due to surface defects while printing. I had never ran into this before, and it drove me nuts trying to figure out what was wrong, when it all turned out to be wet filament. So frustrating that all those Reddit people who ask about drying filament were right in this one case.
Thanks for this review. Just got my first filament printer, will be going over the data you collected again with note-taking. I'm starting with PETG-CF, but did buy a dryer too.
i have 3d printed a few days ago.
i always prim the filament into extruder... from old printing, there is always about 5 cm of filament from last printing.
It was ASA filament of 3DJake brand. That piece was about week there without drying. I have let it follow by dried ASA filament(Dried till the drier shows bellow 15% humidity) of the same brand. Extruding shows rough extrusion of undried ASA, followed by smooth one when dried filament comes through.
Home humidity is 55% these winter days
Yeah a lot of people are commenting about other brands of ASA doing that. I think it’s important to note that many companies blend, particularly Polymaker, which is really a material science and chemistry company at heart.
@@thenextlayer There are so many brands. I'm not sure polymaker is the best. I ahve seen test of ASA brands and Polymaker was between the worst. 3DO was best...
But... So many things depend on the printer, temperatures, speeds... Hard to say how much mechanical qualities and printability depends on the brand, and how much it depends on other factors.
Definitely a fan of this type of video! I can slowly learn lots of tips on my own, but this kind of rigorous testing I wouldnt be able to/wouldnt do on my own. Thanks!
Where you live has an effect on all of this. I can say in the deep south that it does not take long for my filament to go to crap if I do not keep it in the S4 unit. I just got the S4 it has been great. Before I was using a re-purpsed dehydrator and it worked ok but was inconsistent with results. Better nozzles has also helped me a lot and building my own printer.
Well, I got a 3 years old roll of ABS producing perfect prints on my SV08, so if it comes to ABS, I'd say that more than hydration, it's more important to have a reliable, enclosed printer.
I used to dry all spools, then I stopped drying PLA, I still dry PETG at least once, and refresh if it’s been sitting for more than a month or two. I always dry everything more exotic.
We print alot of Polymaker Polylite PETG professionally and we never dry the filament and it works even if left out months on end.
Did you measure the weight of filament before and after drying to determine the moisture content?
Friendly reminder: the number behind the PA stands for the number of hydrophobic (methylene) groups in a chain. That's why Pa12 is LESS hydroscopic, lower h2o saturation and less affected by moisture overall than PA6. I don't know why your pa12 was so much weeker in your test, but the material is better suited for humid applications and is being used for exactly those (compared to pa6)
Also I don't see any difference in wet VS dry for my elegoo Petg (visually and close to none for the tensile test), so that might be something for anyone annoyed with petg humidity problems (beige and Grey elegoo petg(plus))
Speed can play a huge role as well. I suspect that's the reason.
This was very useful for me, many thanks for the effort. As a next step you could concentrate more on "How dry is dry enough" only for the filaments affected by moisture. That is, weigh the sample before and after drying for different lengths of time. Then you could put together a chart of strength/appearance vs. the level of dryness.
Also, a better test of strength would be to print solid samples to eliminate the variability of wall layers and infill. The downside is this would require more robust equipment to test to failure.
I live in Far North Queensland, I routinely see steam coming from the plastic leaving the nozzle during wet season.
PLA will go brittle and have issues after about a week. ABS, I've never had a major issue. PETG and TPU absolutely need drying before printing.
I often wonder how soon the printed parts will lose their mechanical properties from moisture absorption.
Usually moisture affects the printing process more than the printed parts, as you're creating steam in the nozzle. The one filament I'm concerned about with printed parts is PLA, as it actually becomes brittle on the spool. I think the moisture is going deeper into PLA, but on other materials I've tried I think it's more surface level. But that's mostly conjecture, as I'm not a materials scientist.
@logicalfundy me either, and my grandiose plans around long term stress testing never seem to get off the back burner!
I typically only dry my filament if it's been outside of a plastic baggie for a few weeks or if it's been several months (like more than 6) between uses.
Important data points would be how much moisture was removed total and how much was removed in the final hours of drying (multiple samples to see the change in rate of water removal). This would give us an idea of how wet they were initially and how wet they still were
Yeah, I didn’t even think of that. Very good feedback thanks.
PETG won't print for me until I let it dry for many hours in a dryer. Then it prints without hissing and bubbling. Humidity here is usually 25% to 35%, but PETG is just a dang moist jerk. Other filaments benefit from drying if they're very old. Drying has resuscitated disastrously brittle 6-year-old PLA. That's a big help for me, because I bought a huge amount of PLA in 2018 when the price was too low to pass it up. I still have a bunch left, and a dryer box stint has become necessary to use it, after which it prints like new
"So I know some of you will have skipped to the conclusion of the video"... Now I feel caught!
But I watched most of it and I have to agree. I have been doing this for about 8 years now and I still have PLA and PETG spools from back then. Most of them don't give me issues, but I see a lot of modern printer users (read Bambu) complaining about moisture. Apparently my PETG was just higher quality but I also think that the higher print speeds need higher temperatures and therefore result in more bubbliness of the moisture. I both have a Bambu and my trusty old Dutchy (I designed) and the Bambu seems to give more filament related trouble (over/under extrusion and moisture artefacts) than the old workhorse. I had the assumption that Bambu was set and forget but it looks like that speed comes at a cost where it creates headaches instead of taking them away (filament calibration, input shaper that sometimes makes things worse, drying ALL your filament before EVERY use, asking for monthly maintenance, etc...)
You noted Tel Aviv's humidity, but what's the humidity in your space? Do you use AC? That will SIGNIFICANTLY reduce your humidity indoors.
I live in Hawai'i with no AC indoors and in a particularly wet zone at that. I have no desire to take chances with avoidable issues, so I use the dryer as often as is practical.
I live in Houston Texas and have started noticing the same conclusions you've come to. I print primarily with ASA and PLA and find myself leaving the dryer unplugged. I'm still working on being able to utilize PETG and TPU. Once I get to Nylon printing I'll definitely have to look at a better drying setup.
Something worth adding here, for TPU specifically. Try lowering the temps between the dry/wet samples. Some TPU I never dry prints like hot garbage at 240c, but then is totally fine at 230c. I think the important bit is if it starts foaming up from boiling hydrolysis, then you are leaking filament where not intended(stringing), and what you do lay down ends up with air bubbles(voids and weak bonds). Lowering temperature sometimes means you just have to print a bit slower, which isn't a bad tradeoff for never needing to faf with baking filament, and it always being ready. That said, you still will manage better surface specifications with less moisture in your filament, so depends how far you want to chase perfection and money spent doing so.
Sometimes I've wondered if this is why I had so much success with PA6 on my Ender 3--I was forced to print slow and at 250 C. I haven't achieved better plain PA6 prints on my modern Bambu and Qidi machines, regardless of enclosure and heated chamber.
@mattbirt114 that might be part of it, nylon is also absurdly hygroscopic and if not dried properly will still print as though it was never dried at all. Usually requires a good active dryer while being printed that can hit the right temps. You also might have gotten away with some things fresh out of the bag if the manufacturer sealed it as it rolled off the line. But yes, going slower and at lower temperatures, might yield better results there as well.
You should test multiple samples for each variant/wetness to get a variance within each category and then you also have a better idea whether the windows defined by the wet and dry variant overlap (and hence aren't significant) or don't overlap and hence ARE significant. Just putting a vague X% threshold on that says very little. Also, that's for your climate. Other people's experience may differ: maybe they are in a salty ocean environment or in a tropical forest, so ...
thanks for the doing the testing. Living in a humid environment like i do, this really helped me not stress about PLA!
if you hate PETG you haven't done it right, it was finicky on the textured pei. I use it in my p1s, elegoo or jayo has been great so far, I haven't tested many others. I did buy a dark moon g10 plate and since then I've had no issues running PETG. I have even upped all the speeds by 50-100mm/s and am printing with petg right now at 250C and a bed temp of 75C. Put a g10 plate in your x1c and run the stock profile for petg, if you have issues I like to increase the first layer thickness and run hilbert curve bottom surfaced to reduce warping, and I usually run 5-10 degree warmer on the build plate.
I love in the UK and PETG absolutely needs drying. PLA depends on brand, Bambulab is ok but most others most definitely need drying, especially silk, you can dry it and see immediate improvement printing the same file.
I made the experience that moisture can impact dimensional accuracy of PLA. I experienced this within 1-2 mm which made a huge difference with pcb alignment holders etc. also for gardenhose equipment i noticed the impact as the part where the sealant ring sits will fit tightly or just not engough to seal the whole thing
While PLA prints fine unless it's absolutely soaked, the real trouble is embrittlement. A spool of completely embrittled PLA can be rejuvenated by a hotbox and, for reasons I can't quite work out, keeping them in a drybox seems to keep them from becoming embrittled in the first place. Drying without heat does not seem to bring the filament back to it's springy self.
To me, I still keep PLA dry, as i dont always go through it very quickly, and I have had many of them get brittle on me. So it may not cause an issue in print quality, but over time it certainly damages the filament.
Here's a question from a newbie... Filaments have temperature ranges not only from the extruder but also for the bed. What do you recommend on the scale of that range you use for the first time? For example a 230 to a 250° c range do you set it at 240? Same with the bed.
Am I reading the graphs right that later line adhesion is impacted more in general by the filament being wet?
could you please do one part made of pla with no infill, completely solid, 10 walls or something.. thanks!
I recently got into 3d printing and bought a Bambu A1 mini then 2 Bambu P1S. I was also made aware of keeping my filaments dry and was worried about it. I bought a couple of hydrometers and was shocked to see that my natural humidity was 10% throughout the house! lol I live in Las Vegas (for those that don't know it's in the middle of a desert) so I guess it was to be expected but I had no clue before I checked. The previous videos I had watched had humidities of around 60% naturally and they were using dryers to get their filaments down to 20% range. So being naturally at 10%, I'm guessing I don't have to worry about drying for stored filaments.
I'll still monitor with hydrometers just in case. Probably smart hydrometers that I can tie into my home-assistant for alerts.
And those of us in the south are jealous of that fact.. as we struggle to get our homes below 60% most of the time without a dehumidifier in addition to constantly running the AC. I cant keep a spool of anything out in the open air more than a day without needing to dry it, regardless if PLA, petg, or anything else or I get visible bubbles in my layers. While your filament literally would get dryer than it arrives from the factory most of the time just sitting out at home.
@@MattWeber 🤭 That makes me feel bad!! You're right that my filaments actually get dryer when I open them out of the sealed desiccant bags 😋. I'm sorry that it's such a pain for you to deal with. I'm originally from southern Mississippi so I totally understand about the humidity and sweating just walking outside to your car 😩. Living in the desert has its cons but I guess this is one of the few pros...
These digital hygrometers their bottom of the measurement range is 10%. If you have 3% humidity, they'll still show 10%, they can't measure any lower. You do live in a desert. This is why it keeps showing 10% and doesn't keep fluctuating 9% 11% :D
@@SianaGearz Ahhhhhh that's a great piece of knowledge to know!!!! Thank you for sharing. They do indeed always show 10% on multiple different ones so the actually humidity must be something below that! Awesome.
@@jocelyn-n-tech One more random fact about hygrometers is that they need some care, it's a ceramic substrate with some gold traces and a salted paper on top... i don't really understand it... but apparently twice a year you should put them into about 80% or higher humidity (wrap in a damp towel) to regenerate them so they don't become permanently stuck on low readings. If they don't recover and don't show high humidity during this treatment well time to replace the sensor.
I def would like more of this type of content, since its hard to get info on this stuff if you dont have it yourself like this.
But I would like it if there could be 'cliff note' segments of the charts before getting into the more detailed 'breakdown'.
Just for people like me that arent very knowledgeable on this stuff yet to not get drowned in the details, before we build some sort of 'on the fly' understanding of what it means.
You probably would have benefited from *weighing* the rolls before and after drying to see just how much water they had removed by drying… and perhaps try repeated weighs to ensure that all the absorbed water is removed
Hey Jonathan, thanks for the video, that looks like massive work! TBH I'm not sure how much it can serve the community since variables like regional humidity and print settings (i.e. speed) or printer type could well override your results. And for really accurate results you should be able to do this tests like 20 pieces each filament at least. What I would really be interested in, is a (scientifical) test of filament DRYERS/methods including how much they are able to dry a certain filament and also, how much energy the consumpt do a full drying cycle (not just max energy draw or "when it's heated up, it's not using much", I would like to see the numbers for 6 hours of drying PETG). Since I mostly use PLA or ASA at the moment I just use the great EIBOS vacuum system with a bag of desiccant in it. If I leave even PLA out in the open for longer times (couple of weeks) it gets brittle (even breaks inside the bowden tube) and produced bad prints, so much for "does not need drying"... ;)
I think the test for PLA needs to be done with multiple brands rather than saying you don't really need to dry it. You can see that the easy PLA was horrible compared to other more expensive PLA's. I personally have to dry ALL of my PLA because just leaving it in the AMS for a week or two results in very brittle filament that just snaps in multiple places leaving it useless sometimes. That has happened the most with filament from Sunlu, Jayo, Esun, and certain colors from Freemover. I also experience a lot of layer inconsistencies and artifacts when my filament is wet. After drying, the print quality is back to being perfect. I'm not sure what has changed in some of the PLA pellets these companies are using but when I first got into 3D printing back in 2017, I would leave filament out for 1-2 years without ever needing to dry them. Now I dry all my filament as soon as I get them and put them in a sealed bag. I will say that I just opened up one of the filaments that was dried and tightly sealed with desiccant packs and it was very brittle too. Not sure how any moisture could get into the bag at that point so maybe something other than moisture is causing the problem here. After drying it for 12 hours, it prints fine though.
I think you missed a quality test: transparency. I print quite a bit with recycled PET bottle filament which is almost always very transparent. The amount of water in the filament has a MAJOR effect on transparency vs cloudiness. Never mind the layer bonding issues of general brittleness the amount of clarity I can get with colourless filament when dry vs undried is night and day. I find the same thing with regular transparent PETG. If you're ever going to try for that glass look you had BETTER dry the living daylights out of the PETG or else just don't even bother trying. I see similar, albeit not as severe, effects with transparent PLA.
Good job and really good point that drying is not only helping with wet but also helps to correct structal of filament (renew ??). So it is a good practice to dry filaments that need to be dryout ( PA, TPU, and filaments with CF) but also filaments that have waits for long time open for external conditions. Jonathan really really good job and thank you for another great video :D
It would also be nice to have a comparison to the desiccant. I live in a dry climate with about 20% humidity. Would it be sufficient to store all filament in airtight bag with desiccant?
There can be some real brand variance as well, my Bambu ASA gets visible surface beading if I have it out in the open for more than a day...
I think the results could vary quite a bit depending on how wet the filament is before drying. Not all manufacturers produce the same level of dryness in their filament directly from the factory for a specific type of filament. I would even think that it would even vary from batch to batch. It has been shown in multiple testing vids that even color of a filament can make a difference in strength. Overall I think the data is worthy of showing that drying does make a difference most of the time. I have found that not all PETG is create equal and I do dry my PETG before printing. Certain PETG manufacturers like Overture and Newmakers prints like total crap on my Bambu X1C while Naga PETG, Sunlu PETG and Sunlu PETG-G print really well.
Everyone talks about drying but no one talks about the ambient temp best for the room of the printer. My printer sits in my unheated garage and can get quite cold and/or hot. Have there been any studies of the temperature range of the room best for printing?
Just a chance me t on the testing procedure. Since you can't tell how damp the filament is out of the package, it probably makes sense to dry the filament first, run a test, then let all the filament sit together for a set amount of time, and then run the wet test. That way they are all starting at relatively the same place.
depends on where you live and where your printers are... I'm on the coast and print in a basement. with the dehumidifier running 24 7 is still 45rh at best year round. I have to dry my filament and keep it in dry boxes if I'm not running through a spill in at most 3 days. luckily making dispenser dry boxes is pretty easy with a 3d printer.
I have worked with ABS for a long time. Whist i do agree that its somewhat overblown how dry you need to keep it, it is 100% a consideration. I have had 5 year old ABS that was completely unusable work flawlessly after a good drying. So whist ABS wont absorb water in a few days or even a few weeks it 100% will over months and years and WILL need to be dried. EDIT: Side note, you are right that modern PLA is way stronger than its given credit for, but say 5-10 years ago PLA was very different than modern PLA.
Yeah. My assumption is most people don’t have 300kg sitting around and therefore turnover filament in less than a year. But maybe not.
I dry it often when I use it, because I live in crazy moist land, and also because I heard it reduces warping and fumes.
@@thenextlayerI still have a spool of silk pla I bought with my first Ender 3 back in 2018 as well as a few other spools. However, there are a select few materials I'm constantly turning over, so it really does depend regardless on the volume one might go thru.
I have 8 year old PLA and my experience is that it produces prints that are initially spectacularly strong, but change and fail within 2 years if mechanically loaded.
Anything with CF or GF in it besides PLA needs to be dried. You can feel the carbon strands going in and out of the filament. This allows more air which allows more moisture. The main reason you don't need to on pla is people like the matte finish it's actually makes it more brittle.
Nylons need to be dried as well as other filaments to get the best results per your tests. PLA can sit in a humid garage for 2 years and still print almost 100 percent the same if not the same.
This is a great video! What would be the cherry on top is if you did a followup video only for the most hydroscopic filaments - dried them and measured the deterioration of strength over time ( days weeks and months). This is of course very time consuming but would be very interesting for those wanting to invest in the exotic materials specifically for long term durability uses. Cheers
2:03 hahaha “that $h1t stinks, why does this print smell like poop?”
Jonathon, The differences when close are what is termed within "Statistical Tolerances" or "Samples limited"
Eh, I saw a bit more visual differences than you did apparently. The side by sides went by pretty quick and the angles weren't always the same - I would have liked to see the sides of the inslogic PLA benchy. The Polyterra PLA (which I usually use) looks like the surface really smoothed out from the drying. Which is my experience as well - wet Polyterra PLA tends to look like it has a small amount of "fuzzy skin" applied to it. If I I'm making something where aesthetics is important, that kind of detail matters to me. I think I'll keep drying PLA if I really want the best look visually.
I also noticed you had a lot of troubles below the hull line on the benchys. Curious why that is?
Interesting test results - it does look like even within the same material, the exact blend of additives can make a big difference in how hygroscopic it is. I've long suspected one of the reasons why people are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to drying filament - comes down to what brands they buy, and the additives the brands use. Which can be a bit of a minefield when it comes to whether or not to recommend drying filament, because different people are legitimately having different experiences with similar materials.
I've got a red PLA which needs drying. Same brand in blue worked like a charm, even after a month in the open...
I think you didn’t watch the video. PLA barely needs drying unless we are talking years exposed.
@@thenextlayer I watched the video (up until the stress test) and yes, my red PLA needs drying. But only the red, the blue was a dream to print with.
Just the other day i bought a roll of PLA on deep discount, anonymous marketplace seller and... well it strung like an absolute pest. I dried it out (simply on 3D printer bed, filament's own box on top, a couple holes in the top) and... it's good now, prints beautifully. Once i get the material into a good state, i don't find that i need to re-dry PLA and HIPS for a number of years, while PETG doesn't fare so well.
Keep in mind that your measurement error is going to have a relative and an absolute component, so when you're receiving 40% difference on that matte PLA that was measuring very low layer adhesion to begin with, it might not be saying much, since absolute error could dominate.
Here's a more difficult question: well you're testing prints done with the same temperature, but what if effect of moisture in the filament on adhesion or cohesion can be calibrated out by higher temperature? Nobody has proven it one way or another so far!
Also filament doesn't turn brittle from moisture alone... urban myth... it merely degrades more in the hot-end while printing or from other environmental factors. Afford yourself an experiment, take two loops of filament and ziploc them one dry (maybe with a bit of silica gel just in case) and one also dried but with a half teaspoon of water, put them in a dark place, and retrieve them a month later and you'll see that waterlogged filament is more supple rather than more brittle. You should also note the precise weight of those loops as you bag them to later confirm that one has absorbed moisture, and one hasn't.
This is absolutely awesome work.
But there's a huge issue that makes this data not so useful: we don't know _how_ wet the filaments are. Obviously a filament soaked in water for 2 weeks isn't as wet as a filament that was left outside for 5 days. It's too late for this as you already dried the filaments but we definitely need this data to make informed decisions.
I resisted drying my filaments thinking it's not needed until I got some PLA that's wet straight from the bag. They're so brittle that it's hard to complete a print, and any print that manages to complete is as stringy as a black widow. I don't know if they're old stock from the seller or if it's a quality control issue by the manufacturer. I've since dried all filaments and store them in sealed containers with desiccant. It's just not worth my time troubleshooting print issues and finding out later it's just because of wet filament.
A lot of the PETG out there isn't pure PETG, pretty much anything that is PETG high flow or PETG+ or PETG "easy print" is PETG + PLA.
I buy discount filament from Amazon. When I tried to use it, it was literally bubbling at the nozzle tip and sizing. I bought from many different brands too. Latest one was sunlu petg and I could not tune out the stringing until I dried it for 10 hours at 55 degrees Celsius. After that the stringing magically stopped. I only print in pla and petg and so far I always put them in the drier for 10 hours before using them
This goes in my Evernote notebook of 3-D printing information that I want to keep handy. Thanks!
I'm wondering, does drying a filament gets it back to the form it was when opened as new? so many times I had a filament print well new, didn't store it properly , dried it and results didn't go back to how it was in the first prints. I love the conclusion about drying , but can you do sone tests about the effectiveness of storing the filament in dry environment ?
Negating specific blends that differ by brand, it would be interesting to know from a materials perspective, how much moisture is considered detrimental to print results? Or asking the same question a different way; how dry do the hygroscopic materials need to be for good results? For example, does PETG stored in 30% humidity STP require drying? Do some materials exhibit cumulative hygroscopicity meaning that they can hold more moisture than the surrounding environment at STP? How 'wet' is too 'wet'? Is there such a thing as materials being too dry?
I have no idea how this would be determined without expensive equipment and/or access to a chemical engineer/materials scientist.
I believe the word for the variance is sampling variance/variability. As noted the variability would decrease with more samples, but also note that the equation for variability is divided by the square root of the number of samples. This means that there are diminishing returns as you attempt to increase the sample size.
There are theorems that say that 30 samples is enough for any sampling to be predictable, but I may be over generalizing CLT if anyone with proper knowledge can correct me.
I think you need 30+ for a P distribution if memory serves from over a decade ago in stats class
I have never dried filament and gotten away with it just fine. I live in a humid climate but a drafty house so it tends to be dry inside.
IDK if I'm missing anything but usually I'm worried about function not looks, so a little bit of strings or something - What is supposed to be the problem again?
I should note that I only ever print in PET-G and TPU [I almost forgot about TPU]. I tried ABS but the fumes affected me badly. And I just don't like PLA.
You're lucky. I can't leave PLA out, let alone PETG or TPU, without it crumbling within a few months. It seems brand doesnt play a factor either as it happens to them all.
So do these prints lose strength after they have been printed as soon as they soak up moisture? Seems like we would want filaments that hold their strength when wet, as once its in the final form or project, its going to absorb moisture.
Hi, brow!!!
I made a test machine to use in my vídeos, but I lost my son in 2022, july, and since that day I couldn’t make vídeos.
Now I’m backing to my printers and my videos.
Look: you can change your little luggage scale for a charge cell for 500 kg. Similar to my test machine!
Being stuck on an island in the Atlantic will give you a very different perception of this issue haha. PLA lasts about a week here without dry storage, PETG like 2-3 days. 85-90% RH is typical here.
Thanks for the tests! “Statistical (in)significance” is the term you are looking for 🥳
I would be interested in Silk PLA. I know it is still PLA, but I’ve read that the silks (which I use a lot due to colors) are more hygroscopic.
Yep. And soooo weak.
How have you defined wet? What level of humidity were they exposed to and for how long? How have you tested the moisture content of each sample?
As I am in Singapore, our humidity lows are around 70% and highs of high 90s, so this info is entirely relevant and unfortunately without the background, this data is invalid for the filaments which do absorb moisture, but great for those that don't.
Thanks for doing the testing, this is a great reference.
Yep. You’re absolutely right and a bunch of people have pointed out that I didn’t control for the starting condition being different of each spool. Big mistake. Thanks for the feedback.
Curious if weighing filament before and after drying might give some more data points that might be useful.
Might be a stupid question, but if you have the prints in your usual environment without treating them later, won't those parta lose their strength nevertheless? I don't know how many people actually seal their prints later, but would that not make the only imortant difference the visual qualitys of the parts?
PLA which i bought 8 years ago, all of my prints which were mechanically loaded, they were super amazingly strong at first but failed after about 2-3 years, with obvious changes, crazing, discolouration, brittleness. Something is happening to it, but i'm not convinced that it's from moisture. Besides no sealing is entirely moisture tight, water is a small molecule and can just diffuse through most other polymers. Since then i preferred not to use PLA for loaded prints any longer.
PETG and PA outright gain strength from moisture, they do not become weaker. I have a box of PA zipties that spent years in a hot dry environment and they were super brittle, crumbly. After bagging them with a half teaspoon of water for a week, they became strong and supple like new.
However you cannot print filament which has absorbed significant moisture. For one that water will boil and force the filament to foam up, it will also create voids filled with water vapour gas instead of plastic liquid along which the melt can separate in the meltzone and leak out, so retraction no longer works and you get oozing. For other it is said that the combination of moisture and high temperature will cleave the polymer by hydrolysis, but it probably doesn't really occur at room temperature on decade timescale. The escaping water vapour will also take away heat and make the melt lay down colder, making for a worse weld, and the loss of material to oozing and effective lower polymer extrusion amount (less polymer extruded per amount of length pushed) is also not good for strength.
There are 2 mechanisms that water absorption causes damage to prints - the one most people are concerned with is a mechanical issue, where the water vapour created when melting the filament in the print head physically moves the molten filament around, causing bubbles or stringing or other physical defects - and these aren't just visual, they can cause severe mechanical weakness or outright print failure. This only applies before printing, once the part is done then there's no more physical effects like this. The other is chemical breakdown of the polymer chains that make up the plastic - this takes a long, LONG time, like years, even for printed parts stored underwater (UV damage usually happens first). You could seal prints to defend against this, but it's probably not worth it, and it's definitely not why people dry their filament.