Mastering Heat and Humidity Control for 3D Printing: A Cost-Effective Guide

When it comes to 3D printing, enthusiasts quickly understand the importance of temperature control, but there’s another crucial factor that often goes overlooked—humidity. While too-hot temperatures can negatively affect print quality and even cause issues with your printer, high humidity can affect your filament, leading to print failures and quality issues. 

Many enthusiasts resort to printing in their garages due to space constraints and concerns about air quality or ventilation. Garages can become a sauna in the summer, which can be detrimental to both your print quality and printer. However, insulating a garage door or installing an A/C unit in your garage might not be cost-effective—or even possible—especially if you’re renting. In general, 3D printing can significantly heat any room, making it uncomfortable, or even unbearable when running multiple printers. Cranking up the air conditioning and driving up your energy bill just won’t cut it, especially in the hotter summer months. 

Whether you’re battling the hot and humid summers of Florida, Arizona, or Brazil in a sweltering garage or dealing with a stuffy indoor space, there are a few cost-effective and simple steps you can take to control your printing environment and ensure high-quality prints.

The Importance of Controlling Your 3D Printing Environment

Maintaining the right temperature and humidity levels in your printing environment is crucial for both print quality and the longevity of your printer. High temperatures can lead to nozzle clogs, warping, and mechanical issues. High humidity can cause your filament to absorb moisture, resulting in poor layer adhesion, bubbling, and stringing.

Maintaining the right environmental factors does not only better your print quality—it also protects your printer from unnecessary wear and tear.

Maintaining Environmental Control Without Breaking the Bank

1. Isolate Your Printer: The first step is to isolate your printer or printers. An enclosure maintains a stable environment for your printers, making it easier to effectively control both the temperature and humidity, while also keeping dust and other contaminants out of the printing area. A store-bought enclosure is a convenient option. When we had one printer, we used this one. If you prefer a more custom solution and you’re up for a little DIY, consider building your own custom enclosure. We put together a scalable and modular enclosure for our print farm that you can check out here.

2. Control Humidity: Humidity control is especially important in regions with high moisture levels, like the tropics of South Florida, where we are located. Fortunately, combating humidity is relatively simple. There are two main approaches to reducing humidity. You can either dehumidify your space by investing in a reliable home dehumidifier—we use this Honeywell 4000sqft model—or place silica gel packs in your enclosures and filament storage. If the humidity is still out of hand, like in a garage or wood-frame home, we recommend doing both to keep moisture at bay. We print indoors and run our dehumidifier continuously, keeping humidity at 40% to 45%. During the humid summer months, this dehumidifier effectively keeps both our enclosures and our filaments dry, which are stored on their own shelves. For particularly absorbent filaments like PETG or ASA, consider using a filament dryer—we use this Sunlu model— before and sometimes during printing to ensure the material is moisture-free.

For those who prefer precise control, adding a hygrometer to each enclosure is a smart choice. The hygrometer provides real-time data on the humidity levels inside each enclosure, allowing you to make adjustments as needed. Overall you’ll want your humidity to remain below 45% for the best results. The dehumidifier we use has a built-in hygrometer that gives us an overview of the room’s humidity levels.

3. Manage Heat: Managing heat is crucial, especially in hot climates like Arizona or Texas. A simple and cost-effective solution is to use an oscillating fan. You can get a low-to-mid-price oscillating fan—like this Mainstays model—to blow air on the outside of your enclosure or enclosures. We found this helps evenly cool them without disturbing the prints inside while also keeping the room cooler as well. The enclosure doors ensure that the airflow doesn’t interfere with the print quality, preventing issues like warping or layer shifting.

Using enclosures also helps contain the heat generated by the printers, preventing your room from becoming uncomfortably hot. Using the oscillating fan will also help keep your room cooler during prints. This means you can rely less on air conditioning, keeping your prints—and your wallet—in better shape.

Small Changes, Big Impact

By implementing these simple yet effective changes to your 3D printing setup, you can significantly improve print quality while maintaining a controlled, cool, and moisture-free environment. Isolating your printer, managing humidity with gel silica and a dehumidifier, and controlling heat are all cost-effective steps that can prevent common issues and lead to better results.

Whether you’re printing in a garage or a dedicated workspace, taking the time to optimize your environment will pay off in smoother, more reliable prints and a more tolerable workspace.