I love in Colorado, which is a pretty dry state, so while I had heard of “wet filament”, I never considered it to be a problem that I would have to worry about. I had seen people creating dry storage bins for their filament, but figured that must just be for people in humid climates.
When I first bought my 3D printer a few years ago, I did what most people probably do - I bought a 10 pack of different filament colors. Everything printed great for a while, but eventually, my prints just started to kind of suck. I made a few upgrades to my printer, but still couldn’t pinpoint what was going on. What was frustrating, is that some times my prints would be great - but other times I couldn’t even print the most simple prints without problems.
I eventually noticed that my great prints were from newer filament that I had recently purchased, but my bad prints were coming from spools I’ve had sitting out for a while. So I purchased a $40 filament dryer on Amazon and it instantly fixed all the problems I’d been having.
I feel dumb, because I had gone through three different extruders, new hot ends, new nozzles, tubing, and spent tons of time cleaning and tightening stuff on my printer. I had left my printer untouched for months because it was just so frustrating. Something as simple as old filament left out never occurred to me until much later.
TLDR; If your prints have started to suck after a while, you might want to try drying your filament.
I live in high humidity, so that’s a big part of my setup. I print from a custom dryer with 4 spools in it, which feed to the printer through PTFE bowden tubes. I have a wifi switch for the dryer that just turns on once in a while to keep the ones sitting there from getting wet by keeping the inside of the dryer, well, dry. I store all my filament in containers with a 3d printed silica containers that go into the spool. I use the “rechargeable” silica beads that change color when saturated. Once in a while, when I see that the beads are turning blue in the containers from opening and closing, I will do a drying session where I dry all the silica containers and the spools for a good while and put them all back into the containers. Can be a bit overkill, but it fully eliminates that factor for me!