You don't have to be 3D printing long before experiencing firsthand what happens when filament gets left out in humid air: weird-looking prints with blobs and strings. Your 3D printer is chugging along just fine one minute and the next your prints look terrible:
Your printer isn't broken! What's happened is your filament has absorbed moisture through the air. The DIY approach to this problem is to place filament spools in plastic boxes or bags with desiccant when not in use. And if a roll does take on too much water, you can always dry it out using an oven.
But some people didn't want to put the plastic filament in their ovens because of the smell, and always placing filament in plastic bags is a hassle, and thus the external heated "dry box" was invented. It can work just like an oven, heating the filament for a few hours to dry it out, OR as in the case of nylon, print right from the box using the built-in spool holder.
You can find more information and reviews about this handy little box anywhere, but what you need to know here is how to use a dry box with an enclosed printer:
If you are using the dry box like an oven, you'd 3D print normally using your existing spool holder, so there are no compatibility issues.
If you want to print directly from the Sunlu Dry Box, all of our enclosures that use an external spool holder like the Prusa MK3 are easy: just replace the external spool holder with the Sunlu.
Other enclosures, however, use internal spool holders. We enlarged the Ender 5 Plus enclosure, for example, so there's enough room inside so you can store the Sunlu box inside while you're printing, but haven't tried that technique with every model yet. If you have a question about how you'd use the Sunlu dry box with your printer/enclosure pair, let us know.
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