I have the sunlu one it is fine. It heats and has bearings so the filament rolls well.
A friend has the creality box he likes it. I don’t really think it matters much .
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I have a food dryer too but I just cut the bottom out of a bucket to use. if it’s not PLA I dry every roll before I put it on a printer. Seems like I fiddle a lot less with small defects since doing that. for PLA I dry it once when it’s newly opened and store it in dollar store tupperware with desiccant inside. I’ll soon have 3 printers here going I know I can dry 2 rolls of PETG in this overnight and it comes out ok don’t know about 3 though.
That is perfect information. I’m going to follow your plan now.
You did! you just made it more elegant heh. There’s nothing wrong with having more elegant tools.
Yeah! I mean drying PLA when I get it not after a year of questionable storage, though I do use rubber sealed containers with 1/2Lb of desiccant in there.
Do you dry PETG/TPU before every use, or just on initial purchase?
I dry them every time even if I store them properly, I always know what the next thing to print is so it’s not a big deal to throw it on the dryer. Also sometimes the rolls are on the printer exposed for days and I don’t dry them into storage just out of storage and I don’t think desiccant can draw the water out of plastic as well as it can draw it out of air. It makes a difference in PETG the most I think from what I see… I swear rain doesn’t hit the ground anywhere near a roll of PETG. Also, I have desiccant packets a 5-gallon container from a feeder/inserter job I did years ago so. The client sent a pallet load for testing and this is what’s left I probably won’t buy any once they are gone. I dry them in the dryer too sometimes.
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OH! I forgot my sample PLA story. My printer came with about 50’ of some white silky/pearly kind of filament in a plastic bag. I printed a sample or 2 from it and it worked nice so I wound it on an empty core and forgot it. A few months later I went looking for it to print something for the house and it was so brittle I couldn’t unspool it without it breaking. Drying it for 12 hours in the dryer fixed it and I made a few things from it without trouble. That and the steam coming off the black CF PETG made me a drying believer.
Edit: replied to myself because I’m apparently talking too much to @mobiobi …
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I don’t know if I will need a dryer in the winter time here. Our house gets so dry you can feel the blood in your veins getting hard.
winter is generally dryer but plastics have such a strong bond with moisture I don’t think it can air dry enough at ambient temperatures. Filament, especially PETG in my experience, comes in wet sometimes right from where it’s made and the desiccant packed in didn’t really help. it really depends how much you print if it’ll be too much hassle to dry it. Just keep it in mind if you start seeing lumps and under extrusion. often it can just be water.
Did you mount the fan/heater in the pail? and what is that on the bottom of it?
Yeah, fan/heating element mounted in the top of the pail, aluminum flashing formed into a duct to get the air down to the bottom of the pail so it can percolate back up through the filament rolls then out.
Still tweaking the airflow, insulation, etc. If I restrict the air at all the temp goes up a bit, but then the bimetal safety kicks it off.
How big an opening is that on the top. By your statement I gather size is important.
110x65mm. If I close that flapper and let air pressure force it’s way out, it overheats.
I’m going to insulate more, open up the bottom of the duct some for more flow there, tweak the position of the coils on the heater. Temp reading right below the coils is 53C, just gotta get it further into the filament rolls.