Yeah, it is good value for money…there’s also just a lot of other things I want that the money could go to.
I am also close to the beach and humidity gets high. Drying one roll at a time then sealing in a vacuum zip lock isn’t too much effort, set filament drying in the morning before work and its ready to use once I get home. Normally stays good for a couple of weeks except when it is really humid. If your oven can maintain 65-70c without issue then you can dry a lot of spools at once before storage in tubs or bags.. Unfortunately my oven on low probably hits 90c which will be a bit too much.
I’m honestly not sure it matters that much. I have no problem holding stuff at ~10-15% with the ‘heaps of silica gel’ approach. The molecular sieve material has higher performance at lower RH for a given volume, but it’s less common, more expensive and harder to regenerate. For a given cost and ‘hassle’, volume ignored, I think Silica gel still works plenty fine enough.
I’ve just been regenerating mine in the filament dryer…
Yeah, the more I’ve looked at Peltier based units, the less I like the idea of them. For a unit at 20 degrees C, to get it to 10% RH you have a dew point of -12.5C, so a ~30C delta across the unit as well as below freezing point so it won’t drip off, it will frost.. Considering the speed at which a cold plate removes moisture and how much power you need to put into them, I wouldn’t bother, personally. Much better to use a brief amount of power to regenerate a solid state desiccant as mentioned above.
I suspect the compressor option is likely just a more efficient version of a not particularly ideal approach. Using dew point for drying to the low RH we need means a pretty significant temperature delta, which is going to be a decent amount of energy input with any active means.
Give activated alumina a try sometime instead of silica. It’s initially a little more expensive, but preforms better and is easier to regenerate and keeps performance after many regenerations.
I’ve been reading a bit again of late - trying to get my head around the molecular sieve thing, and it seems that silica is great in high humidity, no so good in the lower range.
There’s a case in industry for using both in a staged setup, I might try a mix (in two containers) once I have finished fiddling with the new box.
This is all just chasing rabbits of course while I don’t do more important things!
That will be an interesting experiment to see results of.
On the front range of the Colorado rockies, my typical inside humidity is lower than a dry box would be in humid locations.
So, I’m spoiled by that- at least for printing and personally handling the summer heat.
In my environment the performance difference is very noticeable between the two with alumina being the clear winner.
I’ll now go down a rabbit hole to compare total absorption capabilities for alumina vs silica.
I imagine that depends on whether they have a big pool of orders ready to go and fully functional, -or- instead they trickle out not-quite-finished initial builds while frantically trying to get the product working as advertised while delaying the builds to a trickle.
My boxes are so inconsistent that I’m wondering how to improve the seal of them! They are simple IKEA food boxes and are obviously not intended for keeping stuff in perpetuity.
Yeah, I have to concur after having had the USS Dryboxes for a week: IKEA boxes have a lot of air in it compared to the USS Dryboxes. My IKEA boxes are pretty quickly back to 30-40%, whereas the USS are around 15%.
Yes, absolutely. Well worth the price, though I was skeptical at first. What one needs to do is print signs in white and black, the paper tags are hardly readable through the dark tint of the boxes. Prusa said on Reddit that they are blackish to prevent UV damage that also happens often. The drawback is that you really need to get close to see what filament is inside and to see the humidity.
