Short and to the point: I don’t think the Polymaker PolyDryer desiccant compartment works well, at all. On the plus side there’s a very simple fix: don’t use it.
TL;DR:
Instead of loading color changing desiccant into the front window as the box is designed, just use a looser-fitting pack inside the center of the spool where it has better surface area exposed to air. As a bonus, you can fit more in that spot if you’ve got large sachets, like these ones I use with either silica or activated alumina.
You’ll miss out on the color indication, but 1) the hygrometer itself should tell you what you need to know – if it reads higher than 10, maybe recharge and 2) you can always toss a loose clear color-changing packet somewhere in there, just not inside the restrictive plastic compartment.
The Experiment
I’ve noticed that no matter how long I seem to leave a box on the dryer, the filament might get dry, but the desiccant never seems to recharge. I thought I had broken desiccant – it’s ALWAYS black, or close to it!
The problem is actually just that there is way too little airflow, and the desiccant is too densely packed in there, such that there’s really poor moisture exchange both for drying the in-box air, and for recharging the desiccant when the box is on the heater.
I tested this theory by emptying the desiccant into one of the sachets I linked above then putting it in my lab oven at 60C while drying some other spools. I then left a separate PolyDryer with its saturated desiccant on the OEM dryer on the maximum temperature setting for 24h.
After 24h on the PolyDryer, the desiccant went from this:
to this:
It’s slightly more orange, but nowhere near “dry.”
On the other hand, in under 16 hours, the desiccant in the lab oven was completely recharged. I’m guessing it was much less time than that, but I couldn’t get back to check it before that long had elapsed.
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