Building a filament dry cupboard?

Ahh, and instead of getting on with CNC stuff, I figured out a way to have the spool that’s in use turn the one that isn’t, and wheels and gears can be fun.

Apparently melting filament is a thing in the Eibos Cyclopes.

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I think Adam Savage reads this forum!

In the first post on this thread I posed the idea of incorporating a small dehumidifier in a filament drying cupboard. I’ve not seen it done before or since, so I dropped the idea and spent a small fortune on ikea dryboxes and silica gel - which work to an extent, but one of my PLA boxes is presently at 45%!

This week though - IT’S BEEN DONE! Now if only I could get some information on just how well it works… fast forward to find the bits you want. (unless you want to build a cupboard)

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heh You can see the mornings it was cool enough to open the doors. :rofl:


My windows don’t open automatically, but I have home assistant scripts that notify me my wife to open and close them. It has extended the spring and fall months where we don’t use a heater or air conditioning.

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I have a home assistant too - she gets out of bed and opens the windows every morning, and closes them in the evening before the salt mist rolls in! :smiley:

That is me, I guess. But I needed assistance. So I guess Home Assistant is the home assistant assistant.

Man, I wish we could open and close the windows automatically.

… Someone should build a robot for that …

I dunno, an arduino, some stepper motors, a gear drive, temperature and rain sensors…

We have everything to do it. There are 3d printed linear actuators. Gearing etc. You just need windowa that open close somewhat easily!

Yea, that would not be this place. :rofl:

I’ve seen those windows that have little cranks to open them (they swing out). I bet you could attach a DC motor with a gear drive to that.

At some point, it is probably better to just use a vent fan or something.

There are lots of them available but while one of us can still operate them manually I’m happy not to spend the few hundred dollars on each window - having said that, this could be your next automation project Jeff.

One of the coolest iterations of those is a cabinet touch latch that’s electronically actuated. You press the cabinet to open it and it pops the door open just like a mechanical one does, but if you don’t open the door or just leave it ajar, it spring into action and closes it for you.

I have no need, would probably not even like the kind of person that does, but it’s still pretty cool.

A friend of mine said his house in Atlanta growing up had a whole house vent fan. It was in the attic and the intake looked like an AC air return in the upstairs hallway. It still required opening the windows on the first floor in order to work properly.

I’ve found that with the way our house faces, all I need to do is open one window on the back wall and open the front door (we have a screened door). This creates a nice wind tunnel effect and pulls the air from all the other rooms.

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Passive air movement feels like magic.

We have an evaporative cooler (swamp cooler) and the weird thing is that it is vented to 5 places. I keep a window cracked in each area.

They make little flap vents that close with gravity and open with air pressure. You are supposed to install them in the upper ceiling so they vent to the attic. The vents in the attic should make it so the inside air cools the attic too, which makes that upper floor a lot cooler.

I would be really happy with this system in CO. It is dry enough here that our cooler uses less electricity than our gas furnace (just the blower in the furnace uses more than the cooler).

But, the wildfire smoke has been really bad several times per year. When it gets that way, we turn off the cooler. I’d rather it be hot than smokey inside.

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Here’s a semi serious question - could you rig up an air particle monitor to shut it off? I imagine that’s been done commercially.

The swamp cooler is on the roof. The relays to control it are on the roof too. The control box in the house isn’t using a standard thermostat interface. If it did, I would definitely be controlling it with home assistant. And I do have two pm2.5 (basically smoke detectors) sensors using esp32s. They go very high when I cook bacon :slight_smile:. I also have a plugin to tell me the EPA value in “airq” which is a stupid non linear unit for the same thing.

Either way, I can manually turn it off when it is smokey. But it isn’t great when it was super smokey for 5 days and 90+F. We ended up using it at night (because it cooled off faster) and turning it off during the day. We didn’t like it.

That’s another discussion thread I would love to see… A bit off topic for this forum but still in line with a lot of us. I run it as well but no where near to the level you do. Its a lot harder to learn over there for me. Forum isn’t NEAR as nice as this one LOL

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It is hit and miss. But yeah, it is much more like the regular Internet there. I have one thread though about my power meter. I get a new person checking it out every few days and there is usually a nice response. It was a group effort to get them working.

The power meter is now on my home wifi and I can use curl to get the instant power usage and cumulative every few mins.

Cam you tell when we got back from vacation? What about when did I bake pizzas?

LOL… I cant get my power meter like that but I do have a sense…and I cant stand looking at it. I fell in the rabbit hole of home assistant when I got tired of everyone leaving all the lights on all the time. Go to work and not a single light gets turned off. So the biggest thing I have is motion sensors and smart switches. Which still don’t work right lol. I cant every seem to get them aimed at just the right spot LOL