Filament Dehumidifier

If you live in a swamp where the humidity frequently gets up to 70%, then you might know the struggle of keeping your filament dry. So I set out to turn an old, no longer working mini fridge into a filament storage chamber. Putting some silica beads inside themselves helped a bit, but I didn't buy a 3D printer to settle for helping 'a bit'. So, the fan dryer box was born.

The box is designed to print in place. The bottom box can be filled with silica beads, then the two pieces can be screwed together and mount onto the fan I've used (the beads and fan I used are linked below). The fit was very secure in my testing, and should work fine no matter what angle you point it (including upside down). The humidity pretty quickly dropped from 70% to as low as 10% inside the fridge. You of course do not need to use a mini fridge, any fairly sealed container that can hold some filament and a fan will work just fine too, including a printer enclosure.

You shouldn't need any particular setting changes when printing this. I did:

• 0.2mm Layer Height

• 10% Gyroid Infill

• 2 walls

• I opted to iron it just because I like the look of that and wanted to keep tinkering with my ironing (you won't see any ironed surfaces though)

I chose this fan because it was small, cheap, battery powered, USB chargeable, and flexible. So you can run it for a while on just battery power, hook up a USB battery pack to it for some extra juice, or just run a thin USB cable out and plug it into a wall adapter to keep it going as long as you need. I didn't see any need to run the fan on anything but the lowest setting. Humidity dropped quickly regardless.

I also chose these desiccant beads since they were fairly cheap and got the job done. You can use any that are a similar size though. Sometimes they do break when microwaving them to recharge, so I recommend filling the box over a bowl or something to catch any broken bits of desiccant bead. I also recommend printing this in a color that will make it obvious once your desiccant beads are getting full. I chose to print mine in orange since they start orange, but turn green.

There's room for improvement here for sure, but I just wanted to shake off some rust with doing CAD. And honestly, it works better than I expected already, so I don't think it's something I'll get to anytime soon.