Restoring & Drying out Filament

#1
I wanted to share an inexpensive and effective way to restoring filament turned bad.

Symptoms of filament gone bad due to moisture absorption include:

-Popping filament when extruding
-Small holes on print surface not caused by bad retraction settings
-Hard time, or impossible for the first layer to stick instead it drags
-Given the same printing parameters, now filament produces dull prints, when filament was new prints were shinier
-Filament has lost its initial elasticity. It is brittle and it brakes, or chips during extrusion

All the above can be symptoms of a filament that is moisture saturated.

A typical solution includes drying your filament for 4 hours in your household convection oven at 170F.

I tried that, but did not like to use the oven especially when I had to compete for oven space during dinner time...

There are devices on the market that will dry your filament, but they are expensive.

The solution for me was to go to Walmart and buy a $40 dehydrator, the one that you can make beef jerky with. I then cut out the internal part of the stack-able trays and I was ready to bring back to life all of my old filaments.

No more problems with moisture absorbed filaments, and best of all I do not have to compete for oven time during dinner time. Now I pop in the dehydrator the filament, put a 4 hour timer on it and walk away. The once stale filaments, now print crisp just as when I bought them brand new.