If I only have one printer and just using a single spool of filament is going to take forever, but I happen to have 10 boxes of filament that are different colors/ actual types. So there’s a valid reason. Open them all. Is this something I should be wary about if I know I’m not going to use any one of these spools entirely for well over a year?
This is especially targeting filaments that are very expensive and you are purposely only saving them for special projects.
Note try to keep your comments Under the assumption, That a vacuum sealer is not available whatsoever, Beyond the cheap vacuum ones that are meant to compact clothes.
I have many spools which I have had open for a couple of years now, just make sure that you store it in the original bag with the desiccant packets still in the bag. Generally PLA will stay good for quite some time but some other materials like PETG and TPU will need to be dried out once they have been opened.
Yeah aside from some PLA, from the 3D printing Canada boxing Day sale, to just try out like wood, carbon fiber, transparent, a few different petg, and ABS I believe too.
Right now I have a 1kg box of fossil gray polyterra pla open, polymax pla open yellow, and a semi-transparent white polyflex TPU that’s open.
I would really like to try those other filaments just to see how they look and if my printer is tuned well enough to even run them, but I’m also scared of opening 20 kg worth of plastic at once
I would highly recommend getting set up to dry filament. Keeping it dry is of course best, but there will inevitably be rolls that eventually absorb too much moisture, or, as I have experienced, arrive in their sealed packaging already in need of being dried. I would recommend getting a decent food dehydrator. You can get dryers designed specifically for filament, but most are only lightly modified food dehydrators being sold for a higher price. I just made a different enclosure to go on my dehydrator out of a 3 gallon pail. My dehydrator has paid for itself many times over. I would recommend anyone doing any significant amount of FDM printing should invest in a way to dry filament. I bought mine for under $70 about 3 years back if my memory serves.
I have open filament from 2017. It prints fine. I rarely dry PLA I just keep it in a sealed bag, sometimes I put desiccant in it sometimes not. I think the sealed bag is the important part, PLA is forgiving of moisture it tolerates a fair bit before it has issues.