Our Snapmaker is in our Garage and I am wondering if anyone has tips and tricks for printing in that environment. It is struggling to print after moving it out there and is about 60-65% Humidity. I see people use sealed boxes with tubes going to the 3D printer. An help would be appreciated.
I suggest a good housing for the machine to avoid later warping if you print with something else than pla.
For machine calibration it would be good if you are able to have the same machine environment every time.
Oh boy, can I tell you about humid environments. Even in an enclosure, I had the filament swelling inside the extruder enough to jam it. 80-90% humidity during the summer down in my basement.
That problem is tamed, though. Here is what I did:
-
homebuilt enclosure (absolute must), with rechargeable silica dessicant packs inside during the really humid season. Keep in mind this does not have to be a perfect airtight climate-controlled environment - it just has to be a box that discourages airflow, like any enclosed space
-
filament in a dryer box (basically just a tall tupperware container) with a bowden tube going to the toolhead
-
inline filament dryer (Thorsden) in between the dryer box and the enclosure
Now, this is a bit pricey (especially the filament dryer) and might be a bit overkill, but it absolutely worked under what are probably the worst conditions short of being actually underwater. The big downside, aside from the price of the Thorsden, is the need to fabricate a connector for the bowden tube on top of the toolhead. I machined mine from steel on a lathe, because I do things like that, but I’m pretty sure there’s a 3D-printable version. See https://forum.snapmaker.com/t/my-enclosure-project/20013/31 for the discussion.
If I were to do this again, I would probably go with a bit less overkill. A decent dry box, such as https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BFQXHRV5/ (yowch, that ain’t cheap anymore either, but you get the idea), a $150-200 humidifier in the room (you probably want that anyways), and bowden tube going into the enclosure but not necessarily connected to the toolhead should suffice.
With 65% humidity you could probably get by with the tupperware-and-bowden approach, foregoing the electric drybox or the inline filament drier. Definitely get some silica packs such as https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SRDMNRC/ and a cheap food drier such as https://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Chef-CCD100W6-Dehydrator-Preservation/dp/B075ZB3V9S/, which you can use to recharge the silica and to dry the filament rolls before putting them into the tupperware.
1 Like
I live in Louisiana and my printer lives in the garage. I have a dual filament dryer box that I use. I do leave my filament out for days at atime and it isn’t a big deal; but after it’s been in a bag I dry it before use.
I live in Florida and I have my printer in the garage. I have mine in an enclosure and I put a couple of bags of desiccant (bought from Amazon) in the enclosure. I bought a watertight plastic container from BJ’s Warehouse that will easily hold 6 spools at a time. I printed out some roller assemblies from Thingiverse that allows the spools to sit upright and be used. I printed out four Bowden tube connectors and mounted them to the container. Using PTFE I connected the container to my enclosure, running the PTFE through the existing hole in the enclosure. I can pick any color/type of filament I want by switching the PTFE tubes inside my enclosure. With desiccant inside the container, it stays t 10% humidity all the time. I’ve had this setup for several months and haven’t had to reactivate the desiccant yet.
Curious, how are you measuring humidity in the storage box?
The 2 different humidistats I’m using aren’t getting below about 20%. The paper indicators suggest I’m lower but I’m not convinced.
I bought cheap humidity meters on Amazon. The meter is designed to pop into a hole, and it has an external sensor for humidity and temperature. I didn’t want to poke a hole in my box (kinda defeats the purpose, I think), so I hot-glued it to the inside of the box. It’s translucent, so I can easily read it from outside the box. I have three. One on the top of my enclosure was about 60% this weekend, the inside was about 30% (fan running, power supply is inside the enclosure so it adds some heat), and 10% in my enclosure.