Extruder keep clogging up????

Hi just wanted to give this little piece of advice have not heard too much about this so I thought I would share it.

I have had my printer for a long time now and I am very familiar with it and the associated problems with leveling and extruding etc but one issue that kept bugging me was after my move to the dual extruders and even somewhat on the single extruder my setup would seem to clog for no real reason I had the right temps it was clean etc but it would just slowly stop extruding and ruin a print. The most frustrating part is that could happen quite late in the print where it ws printing just fine for several hours and then just crap out.

Well I really got into it when I just replaced my EXT0 with a brand new setup and it did the same thing 15 minutes into a print.

The thing that was the cause in my opinion was moisture in the filament. As the moist filament enters the hot end it begins to expand that moisture at one point it would actually explode with little pops while being melted for extrusion but I have not heard that recently but it was still expanding and that expansion was also causing the filament to expand and it was enough to not allow the filament to flow smoothly. IT would slow down which would make it expand even more and eventually it would just stop.

Sound familiar....

This last time it happened I simply decided to try and dry my filament out by baking it at about 170F for 2 hours and I went from a print job that would never run to running that print at least 12 times and other larger prints all with no clogging at all all the same settings except baked filament which simply dried it out.

I really hope this helps because clogged extruders are not the most fun to deal with and this is an extremely easy fix

I moved from Los Angeles to Northern CA and teh problem became much worse here but just hadn't put all the pieces together yet.

Hopefully this is a Good fix for a lot of people

I would also try this if you are seeing clogs and you think your filament is dry it can't hurt

Also I did this temp and time using PLA so other material may vary but it just needs to be very warm and dry nothing near melting points or anything