Match the Material to the Machine: Storing and Drying Filament with a Dry Cabinet and an AMS

Let me be honest. My 3D printer is not running at the moment. Not at all.

The last time I switched it on was December 2025. Eight months have passed since, and I have not so much as turned on the power.

Even so, the material is ready to use today.
I can take a spool out of the cabinet, dry it, and start printing.

I bought the printer in January 2025, to make and sell jigs for handcraft work.

If you are only using a printer as a hobby, you do not need a dry cabinet. Buy filament when you want to print, and if it has taken on a little moisture, that is between you and your own standards.

But I bought the machine in order to sell.
That changes things. If I wait until I am out of stock to order material, it is already too late.

An order comes in, the stock runs out, I place an order for material, I wait for it to arrive, and only then do I print. Down that road, the customer waits.
To avoid that, the material has to sit here permanently in a state where I can use it at once.

There was a second reason, too.
Our house is an old, rickety place. It is simply not built in a way that lets you manage humidity.
So in my case the dry cabinet was never a nice-to-have. It was something I had to buy at the same time as the printer.

What I use is a HOKUTO dry cabinet, model HB-102EM. It is a 100 litre unit with a touch panel, an auto-dry function and a power-saving mode, a digital humidity readout, and an LED light inside.
It is really made for storing cameras and lenses, but it works just as well for filament. The interior stays at roughly 20 to 30 percent relative humidity.

For size, I chose one that holds up to around fifteen opened spools. That is about what fits, whether the filament is still on the spool or has been taken off it.

The sorting rule is simple.

Anything unopened stays in its cardboard box.
Unopened filament arrives sealed in a bag with desiccant, already protected. There is no reason to break that seal just to move it into the cabinet.

What goes in the cabinet is what has been used and what is about to be used.
Material whose seal is broken, and material whose turn is coming soon. Those two, and nothing else, get the limited space inside.

I open the cabinet only when taking material in or out. Open it and the room comes in with you.

Now, this may be the real subject of this piece.

Storage is only the entrance. What matters is what comes after it.

Once you break the seal, the material has to be dried.
Some materials are fine used straight out of the bag. But something like ABS has to be brought down below 20 percent, or the machine itself starts giving you trouble.

Feed damp material straight in and the moisture boils inside the nozzle. The surface roughens, it strings, and the layers do not bond properly. Ugly is one thing, but the strength drops, which makes the part useless as part of a tool.

So how do you get it below 20 percent?

At first I put a powerful desiccant into a Bambu Lab AMS and dried the filament as I printed. The desiccant was KING Ozo, the extra-fast type, a Japanese product.
The trouble was that the humidity would not hold steady. It came down, certainly, but it would not stay down.

I was stuck with that when the Bambu Lab AMS 2 Pro came out. I decided without hesitation that I should buy one, even if it meant taking on more debt than I already had.

Set it up and it ventilates on its own, so the humidity stays stable.
After that it is a matter of putting in KING Ozo, the standard fast type this time, and watching the readout. I went back down from the extra-fast desiccant to the standard one.

If you want to be more exact still, you can fit a part inside the AMS that lets you seat desiccant in it yourself.
And if your wallet allows, adding one or two Bambu Lab AMS HT units would make the work easier again. That is beyond my reach for now.

In the end, whether good work comes out depends on whether you can match the material to the state of the machine.
You fit the material to the machine, not the other way around.

I did not learn that with my head. I learned it by failing to match them, running fault after fault, and having it beaten into my body.
I have written all this about storage, but for me this is the part that matters most.

While I am being honest, one more thing.

I have not once had to worry about running out of stock.

I brought in the machine to make and sell a tool. I spent half a year building my own exhaust system for it. I spent a year turning the tool into a product. It did not sell the way I hoped, and the printer has been sitting still for eight months.

Even so, the material is alive.
If an order came in tomorrow, I could open the cabinet, dry a spool and start printing the same day. I would not have to buy material again.

That is what preparation is, I think.
You get ready to answer, even if the moment never comes. And if it never comes, that is all right too.

To anyone about to buy a 3D printer.

If it is only for a hobby, you do not need to go this far.
But if you intend to sell what you make, then alongside the price of the machine, work out where the material will live and how you will condition it before use.

The machine will not adjust itself to suit you.