I live amidst the great lakes. I took great care with bagging and sealing and drying when I was using Creality printers, because it really mattered. I’ve been lazy about it since ditching them, and my Centauri Carbon could not give a shit. I could leave filament on my lawn and this thing would just chew right through it.

You have to be careful with this. The humidity reported by the local weather station may not be the same as the humidity in your storage room.

I have just gotten an airtight box and a few packs of silica gel and store all my filament in there.

Dallas, I’ve never had an issue. Houston, I got all kinds of zits and pilling and was thinking about getting or making a filament dryer before we moved. Both can be pretty humid, but the difference between 60% and 90% is significant.

I just finished out some PLA spools I’ve had for a couple years now. They’ve sat in the open with no drying. Humidity sits in the mid 40s generally right now.

In northern Minnesota the humidity can vary greatly. Last weekend it was 90+% outside. While indoors the air conditioning had the house around 50%. And by winter time, the outdoor humidity can be as low 20% and indoors depending on heat source, around 30% to 40%.

I finally broke down and bought a dedicated filament dryer, Sunlu S2, because my trusty old food dehydrator died the week before. I do dry PETG when it tells me to, and I always dry TPU. But never PLA.

Just for fun, after I was done drying and printing some PETG, I dropped a mostly used spool of Sunlu white PLA into the dryer, (first time ever for PLA). That spool has been laying around in the open for at least 6 months now. The humidistat on the dryer showed 30%. I let it dry down to 20% and ran a test cube. No difference in print quality that I can see.

Southern Norway is quite good for keeping stuff in the open.
Around 35% now, peaked at mid 50s in summer and much lower in winter.

Never really need to dry PLA/PETG, but TPU does need it.

I do run both AMS every once in a while, mostly to regenerate the silica tubs a bit.

I did have stringing on PETG once, but drying while printing was enough to solve it.

I have humidity sensors in both my dryboxes and outside.

Where I live humidity in summer is 40-60% and the dryboxes will max out at 40% if left untouched.

In winter it’s 20-30%.

Petg starts having issues at 30 and you can hear the water boiling at 40

I live in a dry climate. I don’t bother with PLA, but I dry PETG. I printed some stuff from a roll of PETG that had been open longer than a year, and looking closely at the melted plastic coming out of the nozzle, there was noticeable bubbles and stringing during printing. Once dried, all went away. People who claim you don’t need to dry some filaments must not care much about quality.

@matlag My printers are in the basement. During the winter, it’s dry enough. During the summer, it measures at >80% humidity. I’ve got a dehumidifier but can only get it down to around 60%.

In this situation PETG can only sit out for maybe 3 days before it’s noticeably wet.

I’ve still never had a moisture problem with PLA. It tends to simply be an age thing. PLA gets brittle and snaps when under constant pressure, say where it loads into an extruder or AMS.

Outside, it usually sits around 65-70% humidity, over 80% during the summer. Hong Kong is like that unfortunately. Dunno about the room my printer sits in though, I don’t have a hydrometer in there, but I imagine it’s a little bit lower (maybe 60%? 70% in warmer months?). I don’t dry my PLA though and I’ve mostly had good printing experiences.

Too damn high

I’m of the general opinion that the hullabaloo about drying filament is largely not warranted in most cases. PLA is just not very hygroscopic and can sit out for months without any issues. Even PETG I don’t have any issues with it sitting out. The room I print in sits at about 50% humidity most of the time.

I keep most of my filaments in a box with dessicant that I bake maybe once a year, but I’m not convinced it is really doing much. The only reason I have a drier is that I started printing occasionally with materials that are much more hygroscopic (e.g. TPU).

25%. My dehumidifier doesn’t go lower than that.

The humidity here varies between 3% and 100%.

Things change from PLA being regenerated by being left open to it not lasting for two weeks before it needs drying.

Unless you live somewhere where it’s always close to that low in my interval, I do strongly recommend a drybox to anybody wondering if they need one. At 60% humidity, PLA already visibly degrades way faster than you will use in a hobby.

Also, in my experience, filament driers only help with close to dry filaments. The temperature you would need to really dry them is larger than the glass point of most plastics. Microwaves work better (I guess because they heat the water in an uneven way) but it’s still hard to regenerate very moist filaments.

I have about 50% humidity and don’t usually dry my filament and I start to have issues with the outer layer of the spool snapping repeatedly when feeding after a year or two of sitting out. I used to have a dryer for cases like this but it got left behind in a move so I currently try to only use my new spools until I can get another one because I don’t trust using the oven and using the heat bed is really slow.